I Built a Chrome Extension That Makes Me Pause Before I Doomscroll
A Chrome extension that tracks your scrolling and makes you pause for a few seconds before every infinite feed
It's 11:40 at night. I open YouTube to watch one lecture, and somehow I'm forty Shorts deep with no memory of deciding to scroll. If that sounds familiar, this one is for you.
Rotmeter is my attempt at fixing that, at least for myself. It has two parts that kind of argue with each other: a website that dives into internet brainrot culture, and a Chrome extension that steps in right when you're about to fall into an infinite feed.
How it started
Rotmeter began as BrainROT, a website my teammates and I built as our final project for the PESU I/O course. It was a multi page React site about the weird corners of internet culture: Deep Shower Thoughts, a Meme Machine, Fandom Frenzy and Strange Phobias. Under all the memes, it was really an essay about how algorithms eat our attention.
After the course ended, I kept thinking about that. The site talked about the problem, but it didn't do anything about it. So I took the idea further on my own and built the Brainrot Meter extension on top of it.
What the extension does
It makes you pause. Before an infinite feed opens, you get a short countdown. Then you either click once to continue or close the tab with one tap. It's not a wall, just enough friction to break the automatic reach.
It knows the difference between scrolling and watching. Classification happens per URL, not per website. A YouTube lecture is fine, a YouTube Short is not. A subreddit you chose to open is fine, Reddit's front page is not.
It reminds you what you're giving up. You can set a goal like "learn guitar", and the pause screen says "You said you wanted to learn guitar." That hits a lot harder than a generic number.
It shows you the numbers. The popup has today's total, a breakdown by platform and a 7 day trend. A small timer badge on the toolbar icon keeps counting too.
It checks in. After a set number of feed minutes in a day, it gives you a gentle nudge.
It's honest. If you walk away from the keyboard, that time isn't counted.
It's private. Everything stays in your browser's local storage. No account, no server, not a single network call. You can export your data as JSON or wipe it with one tap.
It works on YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, X, Reddit, Facebook, Snapchat Spotlight, Threads, Bluesky, Tumblr, Pinterest, Quora, 9GAG, ShareChat and Likee.
Why a pause and not just a tracker
Most screen time apps follow the same pattern. You install one, a number makes you feel guilty, and you uninstall it a week later. Knowing you spent four hours on reels doesn't really stop you from opening reels.
What actually helps is breaking the habit loop right at the moment you reach for the feed. A 2023 study on the app "one sec" found that a short forced pause cut app opens by about a third. That's the idea Rotmeter is built on. The pause is the real product, and the dashboard is just there to back it up.
The stack
Website: React, Vite and Tailwind CSS
Extension: plain JavaScript on Chrome's Manifest V3, with a background service worker, a content script for the pause screen, and a popup and options page. No build step at all.
Try it
You can download the extension, unzip it, open chrome://extensions, turn on Developer mode and drag the folder in. It works on Chrome, Edge, Brave and other Chromium browsers.
👉 github.com/guru-bharadwaj20/Rotmeter
I've been using it myself and it's honestly a little annoying, which I think means it's working. Let me know how much time it catches you losing.
