Full removal
Shorts shelves, autoplay sidebars, recommendation rails, deleted from the DOM, not hidden with CSS. They never render.
YouTube
decaf
Beta coming soon · all platforms
Decaf, for
social media.
A browser extension that strips the addictive mechanics from the platforms you keep open all day. The good stays. The slot machine leaves.
Coming soon on Firefox · Chrome · iOS · Android
01, The problem
Your apps are designed
Short-form feeds, autoplay queues, infinite scroll, these aren’t features. They’re retention mechanics. The point isn’t the content. The point is that you don’t close the tab.
2:21 / day
Average daily time on social media, globally. That’s over 35 full days a year. (DataReportal, 2025)
205×
Times the average American checks their phone per day, once every 5 waking minutes. (Reviews.org, 2024)
81%
Of users check their phone within 10 minutes of waking up. Before they’re even out of bed. (Reviews.org, 2024)
02, How it works
Soft stop
The bottomless feed quietly runs out. After a while it stops handing you new posts, so the doom-scroll has a natural end instead of pulling you on, and it happens right inside the page with nothing to dismiss. You can still read what's there, open comments, search, or jump to a profile.
Instagram · X · Reddit
Theater mode
Every video opens full-width. Combined with the nuked sidebar, you get a clean focused viewer, closer to a film than a feed.
YouTube
Anti-tamper
Opt in once. The slowdown re-applies itself if you try to strip it out via DevTools, and the blocking comes right back if you delete a rule. You signed up for this. We hold the line.
All platforms · optional
03, Before & after
This is YouTube,
decaffeinated.
Same browser, same account, same videos. Two captures, the watch page and the home feed, with Decaf off, then on. No retouching.
Watch page
The video,
no chaperones.
Default YouTube hands you a video and a sidebar of three more, plus a live chat panel, plus end cards, plus comments below the fold. Decaf strips that down to the thing you came for. You watch it, then you decide what’s next, instead of the algorithm deciding for you.
- Suggested-videos sidebar removed
- Live chat panel hidden
- End-card overlays disabled
Home feed
No Shorts.
No bait. Still YouTube.
The home feed is YouTube’s most engineered surface, a Shorts shelf pinned in the middle, recommendation cards tuned to your watch history, ads dressed up as videos. Decaf removes the shelf entirely and quiets the rails, leaving a feed of regular videos you can scan instead of being scanned by.
- Shorts shelf nuked from the DOM
- “For you” recommendation rails muted
- Promoted-content cards filtered out
The same model applies to TikTok, Instagram, X, and Reddit—different surfaces, same surgical removal.
04, The science
This isn’t a vibe.
It’s a slot machine.
The mechanics that keep you scrolling aren’t a coincidence and they aren’t your lack of willpower. They draw on the same intermittent-reward principles B.F. Skinner documented in the 1950s, ported to your phone and tuned by teams of behavioral scientists. Decaf removes the levers. Here’s what the research says.
Variable rewards hijack dopamine
Scrolling under uncertainty taps the brain’s reward system. Dopamine responds less to the good thing itself than to the anticipation of it, and that anticipation is strongest when the reward is unpredictable, the same mechanism that makes slot machines compulsive. Infinite scroll, autoplay, and pull-to-refresh are textbook variable-ratio reinforcement.
Attention spans collapsed
Dr. Gloria Mark at UC Irvine has measured how long people stay on a single screen since 2004 using objective computer logging. The average then was 2½ minutes. Since around 2016 it has held near 47 seconds, with a median of 40 seconds, meaning half of all observations were shorter than that.
Mark, UC Irvine · 20+ years of logging data
Designed to be hard to leave
Internal platform metrics optimize for session length and daily return rate — not for whether you’re glad you opened the app. Autoplay, pull-to-refresh, and algorithmic resurfacing exist because they move those numbers. Decaf doesn’t fight your willpower; it removes the mechanics that were built to defeat it.
Short-form is its own category
Short-form feeds (TikTok, Reels, Shorts) are tuned for rapid, unpredictable reward on a loop measured in seconds. Research on heavy users consistently finds the format engages attention and impulse-control differently from long-form video — faster switching, harder disengagement. The 6-second loop isn’t neutral.
Attention research on heavy short-form users
47 sec
Average time on a single screen since around 2016, down from 2½ minutes in 2004. (Mark, UC Irvine)
205×
The average American checked their phone 205 times a day in 2024, once every 5 waking minutes.
35 days
What 2:21 of social media a day adds up to over a year. (DataReportal, 2025)
None of this is news to the platforms. They have the same data, plus a great deal more. The slot machine is the product. Decaf takes it out.
05, FAQ
Frequently asked.
Honestly answered.
On desktop and laptop, yes, completely free, no accounts, no ads, no upsells. Mobile (iOS and Android) is a paid subscription when it ships, that’s what keeps the lights on so the desktop version can stay free forever.
Screen-time apps wait until you’ve already spent the time, then tell you about it. Decaf takes the addictive parts out of the page before you ever see them, so there’s less to resist in the first place.
Yes. You decide what changes. Some platforms can be cleaned up entirely, others can have a short cooldown after a few posts, and you can leave any of them alone if you want.
No. On Reddit, X, and Instagram the cooldown just stops the feed from handing you new posts, with no popup or countdown sitting on top of the page. The page stays usable, you can scroll what’s already there, open a comment thread, follow a search, visit a profile. We don’t take the site away, we just close the tap on new content. Decaf is a wall, not a cage.
A mobile version is coming soon. Join the list and we’ll send you an invite when we open it up. Mobile will be a paid subscription, you can try it free for the first two weeks.
You might. That’s why there’s an optional lock, once you turn it on, the cooldown sticks and you can’t wriggle out of it early. Think of it as a promise you make to yourself when you’re thinking clearly, that gets honored when you’re not.
No. Pages load just as fast, often faster, since there’s less to render.
Ready to decaffeinate?
Decaf’s public beta is coming soon. Desktop and laptop will be free; iOS and Android will be a paid subscription. No account required to start.