Reddit Is a Reflex, Not a Session

The visits are short, which is what makes this one hard to notice and hard to measure. It is rarely an hour lost in a single sitting. It is ninety seconds in the gap between finishing one thing and starting the next, thirty or forty times a day, and no individual visit is long enough to trip a time limit.

Blocking the name is a blunter instrument, and blunt is what fits. The tab does not load, so the reflex meets a wall instead of a feed, and there is nothing on screen to negotiate with.

It also explains why a browser extension tends to disappoint here. The check happens wherever you happen to be: the browser you have open, a client sitting in the Dock, a link somebody pasted into chat. A block that lives inside one browser only catches a share of that.

The Two Names

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  reddit.com: the site, and every host underneath it. That includes old.reddit.com and www.reddit.com, so the older design is not a way back in

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  redd.it: the short-link domain. Shared links use it, and the image and video hosts sit underneath it, so one rule on redd.it covers i.redd.it and v.redd.it as well

Two separate domains, two separate rules. Coverage runs downward from the name you enter and never sideways, which is exactly why redd.it needs its own entry despite belonging to the same service.

Add Them

The App-Shaped Hole

The failure mode of a browser-only block is that Reddit is not only a browser thing. Third-party clients on the Mac reach the same names by a different road, and so does anything that unfurls a link preview inside a chat window. An extension in one browser sees none of that, and neither does a second browser you keep for work.

SplitTunnel handles your Mac's DNS lookups, so a rule applies at the DNS layer, below the individual apps and browsers. Add a hostname under Domain Rules and the name stops resolving for the whole machine: every app, every browser, every background helper, no matter whether that app's traffic goes out through a VPN or straight over your normal connection.

So the client, the link preview, the second browser, and the private window all meet the same wall as the tab you had open. There is nothing to configure per app, and nothing to redo when you install something new.

Go Narrower, Never Broader

If something still loads after both rules, do not go hunting upward for a broader name to swat it with. Open Activity, load the thing that still works, and read the domain your Mac actually asked for. Adding the specific name you saw is precise, takes ten seconds, and costs you nothing else you use.

What You See When It Works

The name stops resolving. A browser shows its ordinary cannot-find-the-server page rather than a blocked-by-something warning, and a client that expected the site behaves the way it does with no network at all. There is no countdown, no lecture screen, and nothing announcing that a rule was involved. Domains you have not blocked keep resolving normally, so nothing else about the day changes.

The absence of ceremony is the useful part. A block page is something to argue with, and the argument is the exact thing you were trying to skip.

The Honest Limits

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  Software on encrypted DNS: a browser or app that sends lookups over DNS over HTTPS to its own provider bypasses DNS-layer blocking. Turn on Block Encrypted DNS in the Strict Mode section of Settings and it falls back to the system resolver, where your rules apply. It is a curated list of resolvers, so software that pins its own resolver by IP address stays out of reach

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  Cached names and open connections: after you add a rule, restart the browser or client so the block applies cleanly

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  It is not a lockout. Every rule has an Unblock next to it. What a rule changes is reach and upkeep, not how hard the decision is to reverse

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  The Mac only. A phone on the same network is not covered by a rule that lives here

What It Is Actually Worth

Modest and real. The automatic hand movement stops paying off, in every browser and every app on the machine, and it keeps not paying off tomorrow: rules persist, they survive a restart of the Mac, and blocking resumes automatically with nothing to switch back on.

If what you need is a block that cannot be lifted at eleven at night, that is a different category of product and worth saying out loud. A commitment tool with scheduled lockouts is built for that job. A domain rule is built for reach: this name does not resolve on this machine until you decide otherwise.