Time you spend on purpose

What Noise Guard actually does

On pages with a detectable feed, a subtle hint appears after a while, asking whether you really want to keep scrolling, without ever blocking the page. Autoplay videos get automatically muted, one click brings the sound back at any time. For YouTube ads that technically can't be hidden without endangering the actual video, Noise Guard automatically skips as soon as a skip button appears.

A time budget per domain can additionally be set freely: once today's time is up, a hint appears, nothing gets locked.

Why stopping is harder than continuing

Every app and every website with an endless feed has made a deliberate design decision: there is no end at which you automatically stop. Without a visible endpoint, stopping relies entirely on willpower, in the exact moment when the next interesting piece of content appears. That's psychologically one of the hardest situations to make a conscious decision in.

Autoplay works similarly: the default option is always "keep watching", not "stop". To stop, you have to actively intervene, while continuing to watch simply happens.

What Noise Guard can't guarantee here

Noise Guard can't stop you from continuing to scroll if that's what you want, and it shouldn't. The hint is a reminder, not a lock. On very new or unfamiliar platforms, Noise Guard might not yet detect a feed reliably.

The actual default values

The doomscroll hint appears by default after 20 minutes straight on a detected feed, or after 30 loaded elements, whichever comes first. Both values are deliberately set as a time and a quantity threshold, because some feeds load many small elements quickly, others few large ones over longer periods.

Anyone who'd rather have a hard limit than just a hint can additionally enable the "infinite scroll brake": instead of just reminding you, Noise Guard then actually holds back new loading until you actively click "load more". Both mechanisms can be changed independently of each other.