A Chrome extension that makes social media boring on purpose.
Reravel applies visual and behavioral friction to sites you choose: grayscale, reduced contrast, dimmed opacity, a vignette overlay, and typography flattening. When you navigate to a monitored site, you hit a pause screen with a random quote before you can scroll. The goal isn't to block anything. It's to make the experience just unpleasant enough that you stop and ask yourself if this is what you actually want to be doing.
- Degrades the visual experience with layered CSS filters (grayscale, contrast, opacity, vignette) that make sites feel flat and lifeless
- Interrupts auto-pilot browsing with a timed interstitial showing a rotating quote from Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Cal Newport, and others
- Flattens typography by optionally overriding fonts to monospace, removing bold text, and tightening line spacing
- Bizarro mode for when grayscale isn't enough: inverted colors, hue-rotated, over-saturated
- Snooze for 1 or 5 minutes when you actually need to use a site
- Keyboard shortcut (Alt+Shift+G) to toggle without opening the popup
Every effect has its own slider. The site list is fully configurable.
- Clone this repo
- Go to
chrome://extensionsand enable Developer Mode - Click "Load unpacked" and select the repo directory
No build step. No dependencies.
Reravel injects a <style> tag into monitored sites at document_start, before the page renders. All visual effects are pure CSS, which means they work under strict Content Security Policies (Discord, etc.) and apply instantly with no flash of unstyled content.
The interstitial is a full-screen overlay that blocks the page for a configurable number of seconds (default 12). It shows a random quote and your custom message, then fades away. It fires once per page load, so refreshing triggers it again.
SPA navigation is handled for YouTube (yt-navigate-finish event) and Discord (#app-mount polling).
- Chrome Extension Manifest V3
- Vanilla JS, CSS
chrome.storage.syncfor settings,chrome.storage.localfor ephemeral statechrome.scripting.registerContentScriptsfor dynamic site targetingchrome.alarmsfor snooze timers
Social media sites are designed by very smart people to be as visually engaging as possible. Color, typography, layout, and motion are all tuned to keep you scrolling. Reravel turns those dials in the other direction. It doesn't block you from going to Reddit. It just makes Reddit feel like a government website from 2004.
The interstitial adds a second layer of friction: a forced pause that gives your prefrontal cortex a chance to catch up with the habit loop your basal ganglia already started.
MIT