Media Battery Autor: Milo

Nobody plans to lose an hour to a feed. You open it to check one thing, and the tab
is still there at midnight. The usual fix is a blocker, and the usual end of that
story is turning the blocker off on day three because it got in the way of something
real.

Media Battery is a battery instead of a wall. Time on the sites you pick drains it,
time away refills it, and when it runs empty those sites go dark for ten minutes.
Nothing is ever forbidden. It just stops being free, and the charge ticking down on
the toolbar makes the spending visible while it happens instead of after. It only
counts time you're actually there: background tabs, minimized windows, and muted
autoplay never drain it, while a video playing with sound does.

You can cheat, but not on autopilot. Getting back in early means retyping a random
phrase with pasting disabled, clearing a few small tasks that change on every
attempt, and writing a line on why you're back. Wrong answer, fresh set. Come back
again the same day and the gate grows by one question each time, up to five, then
resets overnight. Once, it's a minor toll. The fifth time it's genuinely tedious,
and that's the design: a habit can't survive having to do arithmetic first.
Loosening the rules in settings runs the same gate, so there's no side door either.

It comes with YouTube, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, X, Facebook, Twitch, and LinkedIn
built in, and you can add any site by domain. One optional code shares a single
battery across your devices, end to end encrypted, no account, and the lower charge
always wins, so a second device can never refill what the first one spent.

And the honest limit: it can't stop someone who has decided to get around it. The
extension can be switched off in two clicks and its saved data edited, like any
extension. What it does stop is the version of you that never decided anything, the
one that opens a feed out of muscle memory and looks up an hour later.