The Parasite

The Backstory

My kids were watching 200+ YouTube Shorts a day. I tried every blocking app on the market — all paid, all easily circumvented. Turn off the blocker, open an incognito tab, done. So I decided to build something myself.

The idea: don’t block Shorts. Make the habit visible and add friction that gets worse the more you scroll. Every 10 Shorts triggers a lockout that doubles each time — 30 seconds, then a minute, then two, all the way up to 4 hours at 100 Shorts. I added a tamagotchi that evolves when you watch less and devolves when you binge — because nobody wants to watch their dragon turn back into an egg.

I named it “The Parasite” because that’s exactly what it does: it latches onto the browser and fights back against mindless scrolling.

Key Features

• Tamagotchi evolution — 6 levels from Egg to Dragon King. Maintain a streak of low usage to evolve; binge and it devolves
• 9 achievements — Unlock milestones like “First Blood”, “Iron Will”, “Quick Escape”, and “Dragon King”
• Weekly report popup — Bar chart of daily Shorts count, week-over-week comparison, time tracking
• Progressive lockdown — Every 10 Shorts triggers a lockout that doubles each time (30s → 4h16m)
• Persistent lockdown — Refreshing the page won’t save you. Lock state survives page reloads
• Cross-tab sync — Open YouTube in 5 tabs? The Parasite sees all of them

Technical Architecture

Built with pure TypeScript, bundled with esbuild into a Manifest V3 Chrome Extension. The background service worker acts as a centralized state manager — all storage writes go through a serialization queue to prevent race conditions across multiple tabs. Content scripts only detect events and render UI, communicating via chrome.runtime.sendMessage. Shared types, constants, and storage helpers live in a single-source-of-truth module. Schema versioning handles data migration across updates.

Design Philosophy

Privacy-first. Zero external dependencies. No server, no tracking, no account. All data stays on your machine in chrome.storage.local. The entire extension is under 25KB bundled.

Why I Built This

YouTube Shorts was eating hours of my family’s time. Instead of blocking it (which gets circumvented), I built something that adds friction progressively — painful enough to break the habit, not painful enough to uninstall. The tamagotchi mechanic adds a reason to care: nobody wants to watch their creature devolve back to an egg.