Thursday, February 13, 2025
Whenever I open Reddit these days, it feels like I'm just asking to see outrage bait. That means posts from AITA, posts from AIO (Am I Overreacting), and posts about political turmoil. As a writer, I need to check Reddit to keep a tab on interesting new app launches, common problems people face with technology (so that I can write about the solutions), and sometimes, to solve a niche problem that I face with my own tech. But if I accidentally open Reddit's default home page, my mental health starts tanking, and my thoughts become angrier, too.
Yes, a lot of bad things are going on in the world right now, but I don't want to hear about them all the time. My brain needs a break from all of that once in a while. Unfortunately, Reddit doesn't offer easy tools to filter out unwanted posts from your feed, but a few months ago, I discovered Protego ($1), a Safari extension that offers this functionality. Protego lets you create a personalized blocklist to hide all kinds of outrage fuel on Reddit. You can block keywords, links to specific domains, social media sites, and automatically get redirected to Reddit's legacy UI (which has far fewer distracting widgets that try to increase engagement).
Create Reddit filters using Protego
First, open Protego on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac, then go to the Filters tab and select Keywords. Hit the + button and select Add Keyword List. This lets you add multiple keyword filters to Reddit in one go. You need to add a comma between keywords, eg: AITA, AIO, Elon Musk, etc. Protego also supports wildcards, which lets you block multiple variations of an offending word. For instance, if you want to block the term AITA and related terms such as AITAH, then simply add AITA to the blocklist, and it'll block any words that start with AITA.
When you're done adding keywords, you can share your blocklist with others if you like. Protego lets you export blocklists in a JSON file, which it imports seamlessly. To use this feature, open the app and go to Filter > List Management.
Block posts that link to specific websites
In its most recent update, Protego added the ability to block specific domains. You can enable this by going to Filter > Social Media in the app and turning on the switches next to social media platforms you'd rather avoid. For me, it was a no-brainer to block posts that link to X, Instagram, Threads, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Other options include YouTube, Snapchat, Pinterest, Bluesky, Mastodon, and a few more social media sites. You can also block custom domains by going to Filter > Domains. Hit the + button here and select Add Domain List. Just as you added multiple keywords earlier, you can use this form to add many domains to the blocklist in one go. There are several well-known sites that thrive on fake news, sensationalism, and low-quality content, and making your own block list will keep these sites off Reddit in Safari.
While this feature is great, Protego still needs the ability to filter out subreddits from your feed. With this feature, I can easily hide posts from subreddits known to post fake rage bait stories and those that contain political propaganda that I'd rather not see. The developer is working on this feature, and it'll hopefully be available in the near future.
A few more quality-of-life improvements
Finally, Protego has a few nice Reddit tweaks that make the site a lot easier to browse. These features are in the app's Settings tab. You can ask the app to automatically switch you to Reddit's legacy UI, which looks a lot more spartan but doesn't have annoying suggested content and autoplaying videos. The extension also allows you to hide promoted posts and Reddit ads, and on mobile Safari, it hides Reddit's annoying open-this-in-the-app banner. You can also ask it to automatically hide or collapse automoderator comments in all threads.
All of these things make Protego a must-have for anyone who uses Reddit on Safari for iPhone, iPad, or Mac. A single purchase unlocks the app on all platforms, and the extension syncs your settings and keyword filters across devices. After setting up the app, opening r/popular or r/all no longer ruins my day. I see more content around sports, nature, dogs and cats, video games, and even heartwarming posts from niche subreddits like r/quilting. This has reduced the dominance of some of Reddit's largest communities in my view of the popular feed, and I'm now seeing more of the kinds of posts that drew me to this site in the first place. It's still far from ideal, given that the discourse on Reddit continues to be dominated by the kinds of posts I've hidden, but hey, at least I can easily distance myself from them now.
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