Why blockers stop working

What people on r/NoFap and r/pornfree say about blockers

Every quote on this page is from a public post on r/NoFap or r/pornfree, two of the places people go to write about this. The names are left off and the words are as they were written. None of them were writing about this app.

Read those and notice what none of them say, because none of them says the blocker failed to block: it blocked perfectly well right up until it was switched off, and the person who switched it off was the same person who had gone to the trouble of installing it a few weeks before. That first writer says the blockers somehow end up disabled, and the word is doing real work: it describes something that happened rather than something that was decided, which is exactly how it feels from the inside.

The day you set it up, and the evening you take it off

You set up a blocker on a good day. Something has become clear to you, and the decision feels settled. Setting it up takes a minute and asks little of you, because right then you want what it does.

You take it off on a different sort of day. In these posts that day has a time, “at night or in the late evening”, and it has a place, which is home with nobody else there. The person tapping the switch has one thing in mind and knows where the switch is, because they put it there. Most blockers meet that person with a toggle and a box asking if you are sure, which is a question that assumes you have not thought about it yet. You have thought about it, and for longer than the box takes to answer, so it was never going to be the thing that held you.

That is why a blocker can work for weeks and then stop working, without anything about the blocker itself having changed in the meantime: you changed, for an evening, and it had no way of knowing that you had. One person lists “many digital restrictions” and then names what undid them, and it was not the restrictions: “stress and depression are the main reasons I'm going back”.

Can you block a website so you can't access it?

Not completely, and be careful of anything that promises you can. A blocker that runs on your own phone can be removed by you, because it is your phone. Anyone who sets out to get round one will manage it.

People know this, and you can see what they do about it. They ask for a blocker that cannot be uninstalled, or they build the lock by hand, with passwords chosen so they could not be remembered. B-Simple will not build an uninstall lock, and why there is no uninstall lock is written for anyone who arrived wanting one.

That sounds like a reason to give up. It isn't, because the person who sets out to defeat a blocker, with effort and on purpose, is not who you are on most evenings. On most evenings it is a hand reaching for a switch before the rest of you has been consulted, and a reach like that is a habit rather than a decision, which matters because a habit can be interrupted by something as ordinary as being made to wait.

Yes, you can block a website from yourself. What you cannot do is make the hard way impossible, and anyone offering you that is offering something they do not have. What you can do is make the easy way slow, and since the easy way is the one that catches most people on most evenings, slowing it down is most of the work.

What makes a block hold

Four things, and not one of them is a stronger lock, because a lock is not what was missing.

Your own reason, shown back to you. The first time you open B-Simple it asks one question: what brought you here? When you block a site it asks why. Try to lift the block and the first thing on the screen is your reason, as you wrote it. A box asking if you are sure is a stranger holding a form, and a stranger can be answered without much thought. Your own sentence, written on the day you set this up, is not a stranger, and it asks you something a form has no way of asking.

A wait you chose in advance. Ten minutes to an hour, chosen on the good day rather than in the moment you want it gone. The waiting screen is deliberately plain, because giving someone something absorbing to look at makes time pass faster, and that would quietly refund most of the wait you had just asked for. The app will not tell you when the wait ends, either. A notification saying you can unblock now would be a prompt to do the thing you were trying not to do, so there is none. In the app's words: nothing will notify you when it finishes. If you still want it then, come back.

Something to type at the end. Not a password and not a secret. A short phrase, in plain view, that takes long enough to be a decision.

A block that puts itself back. A block you have to remember to restore is a block that stays off. Unblock a site in B-Simple and it opens for fifteen minutes, then locks again by itself.

If you have failed at this before

Then you already know the install is the easy part, and you are right to be wary of anything that promises the problem away.

Two things are worth knowing. In the posts these quotes come from, one in five uses the word shame, guilt or disgust. People who study relapse keep finding the same thing: shame predicts more of it, and kindness towards yourself predicts less. That is why B-Simple does not keep score. There are no streaks to break and no reports to anyone. Nobody is notified of anything, and the only person who reads your reasons is you.

The other is smaller. When you sit through the wait and tap Keep it blocked, the app stays quiet. No congratulations and no badge. You made a decision, and the app got out of the way.

That is what B-Simple is: a blocker built for the evening you try to undo it. Free, on Android, made for adults, and the blocking has no paid tier.

What no blocker can do

B-Simple blocks by domain name, so it cannot block a single page or a site reached by a raw IP address. A browser using its own secure DNS will bypass it, and Android allows one VPN at a time, so it cannot run alongside another. No list catches everything, and new sites appear faster than any list is updated.

In these posts the other way a blocker fails is quieter. It holds, and the content comes in through a feed that was not on the list. A blocker can only hold what you told it to.

Any blocker can be uninstalled, and this one does not stop you.

Ten minutes

Ten minutes is not a cure. It is a gentle space, long enough for the thing you were about to do to stop being the only thing in the room.

How it works shows the blocking running, on video, and says what the app can see and what it cannot.