The most distracting websites to block, for developers

Which websites should developers block?

Block the sites you open out of reflex, not the ones you need to do the work. For most developers that means video (YouTube, Twitch, Netflix), social feeds (X, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok), news and aggregators (Hacker News and your usual news sites), shopping, and sports. Leave documentation, GitHub, Stack Overflow, package registries, and your company's tools open.

1. Start with the five sites you open most when you're stuck or waiting. Your browser history will tell you.
2. Add the extra hostnames for each one. youtu.be isn't youtube.com. news.ycombinator.com isn't ycombinator.com.
3. Block them during work hours, not all day.
4. Test in every browser you use.

The lists below are a starting point. A short list you keep beats a long one you switch off by Wednesday.

Domains vs. hostnames: why lists leak

Most "sites to block for productivity" lists give you names like "YouTube" and "Reddit". A blocker needs hostnames, and one site often uses several.

How a blocker treats subdomains varies, so check yours. Cactus for Mac, the scheduled blocker I make, blocks each domain you add plus its www. version. It adds a few extras automatically: m.youtube.com for youtube.com, and twitter.com and www.twitter.com for x.com. Every other hostname, such as youtu.be, old.reddit.com, or music.youtube.com, needs its own entry. Cactus blocks whole sites only, so youtube.com/shorts blocks all of YouTube.

The lists below assume a blocker that works like that. If yours blocks every subdomain of a domain, you can skip the subdomain entries, but keep separate domains like youtu.be.

Video and streaming

Video is the biggest risk because one clip leads into the next one on its own.

• youtube.com, plus youtu.be for shortened links. Add music.youtube.com only if music at work is a problem for you. You may want it to keep working.
• twitch.tv and m.twitch.tv
• netflix.com
• tiktok.com

If you learn from conference talks on YouTube, don't keep YouTube open all day for them. Watch talks outside your blocked hours, or block YouTube only during the hours you write code. The YouTube blocking guide covers embedded players and other edge cases.

Social media

• x.com. Cactus adds twitter.com for you. Add mobile.x.com if you've used mobile links.
• reddit.com, plus old.reddit.com, which serves its own pages. new.reddit.com and redd.it short links redirect to www.reddit.com, so they are optional.
• instagram.com
• facebook.com and m.facebook.com
• threads.com and threads.net
• bsky.app

Think before you add linkedin.com. For many developers it's recruiting and work messages. If you mostly scroll the feed there, add it.

Reddit is a judgment call. Search results send you to Reddit threads with real answers to programming questions. A scheduled block is the middle ground: the thread is still there at 18:00. See how to block Reddit on Mac and how to block X on Mac for site-specific details.

News and aggregators

This group is sneaky for developers, because it feels like work.

• news.ycombinator.com. This is the Hacker News host. Adding ycombinator.com only blocks Y Combinator's company site, so add news.ycombinator.com explicitly.
• lobste.rs, if you use it the way you use HN.
• techmeme.com and producthunt.com
• Your general news sites, for example nytimes.com, cnn.com, or theverge.com.

Hacker News is sometimes useful at work. A release announcement or a postmortem can matter to what you're building. That's the argument for blocking it on a schedule instead of forever. The articles HN links to live on other domains, so if a colleague sends you one, it still opens.

Shopping

• amazon.com
• ebay.com
• etsy.com
• aliexpress.com and temu.com

If you work on AWS, test the console after you add amazon.com. Cactus only blocks amazon.com and www.amazon.com by name, so AWS hostnames aren't on the list, but you should confirm your own setup still works.

Sports

• espn.com
• bleacherreport.com
• League sites you check for scores, for example nba.com, nfl.com, or mlb.com.

Live scores pull you back every few minutes, which is exactly the rhythm of waiting on a build or a coding agent.

The starter blocklist to copy

One hostname per line. Add each entry to your blocker's site list, and delete the ones you never visit. If your blocker doesn't add www. on its own, add those versions too.

youtube.com
youtu.be
twitch.tv
m.twitch.tv
netflix.com
tiktok.com
x.com
reddit.com
old.reddit.com
new.reddit.com
redd.it
instagram.com
facebook.com
m.facebook.com
threads.com
threads.net
bsky.app
news.ycombinator.com
techmeme.com
producthunt.com
amazon.com
ebay.com
etsy.com
aliexpress.com
temu.com
espn.com
bleacherreport.com

That's 27 lines covering 20 sites. A smaller list is fine. Start with the five you open most, add their extra hostnames, and grow it when you catch yourself on something new.

What not to block

The fastest way to abandon a blocker is to block something you need, hit it during a deadline, and switch the whole thing off. Keep these open:

• Documentation. Language and framework docs such as developer.mozilla.org, docs.python.org, or your framework's site, plus your cloud provider's docs.
• Code hosting. github.com, gitlab.com, or whatever your team uses.
• Q&A. stackoverflow.com and the Stack Exchange sites.
• Package registries. npmjs.com, pypi.org, crates.io, pkg.go.dev, rubygems.org. Your package manager also needs these from the command line, and a blocker that works at the Mac level affects CLI tools too.
• Your company's tools. Chat, issue tracker, CI, error tracking, and internal dashboards.
• Your AI tools. If you use Claude, ChatGPT, or a coding agent's web dashboard for work, leave it open.

Before you block a big platform, check what else lives on it. Blocking a domain blocks every page under it, including the one useful page.

Common mistakes with distracting-site blocklists

Copying a 200-domain list. Big lists break things you didn't expect and are hard to debug. Large sites can share CDN addresses, so a blocker that also filters by IP address may occasionally affect an unrelated site during blocked hours. If a work site breaks, remove entries one at a time until you find the cause.

Forgetting short links and alternate hosts. youtu.be and old.reddit.com are the usual leaks.

Blocking all day. If the block covers your evenings, you'll start looking for ways around it. Block the hours you code.

Not testing. Open each site in every browser you use. Chrome's Secure DNS, Firefox's DNS over HTTPS, iCloud Private Relay, proxies, and some VPNs can bypass hosts-based blocking. If one browser still loads a blocked site, check those settings first.

Put the list on a schedule

A blocklist works best when it switches on by itself, so you don't have to decide each morning. In Cactus:

1. Set the days and the time range, for example weekdays from 9:00 to 18:00.
2. Add the hostnames from the list above.
3. Turn it on. The block applies in Safari, Chrome, Arc, Firefox, and other browsers at once, with no extension.

During an active block there's no button to end it early. Cactus has one schedule with one site list, so you can't run a different list on weekends. It blocks websites, not desktop apps, and a Mac administrator can still remove it. Cold Turkey Pro and Freedom can block apps and run more than one schedule, and both run on Windows. Freedom also runs on iPhone. SelfControl is free and open source, though you start each block by hand. How Cactus blocks websites explains the mechanism and its limits.

I built Cactus because a 20-second wait for a coding agent kept turning into 20 minutes on YouTube or X. If that's your pattern too, see what to do while Claude Code is working and the coding agents page.