BaitBlocker reads the page you are already reading and marks the moments where the writing is doing something to you rather than telling you something. Hover a mark and it names the mechanism.
Only 3 left at this price. Over 40,000 readers have already switched, and the offer ends tonight.
A shocking result that nobody is talking about.
Urgency, scarcity, price anchoring, preselected options, renewals mentioned in small type.
Solid underlineSocial proof, authority cues, identity appeals — the levers aimed at you directly.
Dotted underlineHeadlines built to withhold their own point, search bait, and copy that asks for a reaction as part of the pitch.
Dashed underlineCharged words placed before the evidence, claims framed as settled, sources left unnamed.
Wavy underlinePersuasion in an interface is a documented craft. Thaler and Sunstein called the arrangement around a decision its choice architecture — which option is preselected, what sits in front of you, what is buried. Nothing is taken from you and the outcome still moves.
Cialdini catalogued the levers aimed at you directly: scarcity, social proof, authority, commitment, reciprocity, liking. Tversky and Kahneman showed that two identical descriptions of a fact produce different decisions. Loewenstein's information gap explains the withheld headline — open a gap and closing it starts to feel urgent.
Harry Brignull named the applied version dark patterns in 2010. Mathur and colleagues found them on roughly one in nine of 11,000 shopping sites, and the FTC and the EU's Digital Services Act now write rules against parts of the practice.
BaitBlocker matches phrasings these mechanisms tend to produce: a rough instrument pointed at a real thing. It is rule-based, so it cannot establish intent, judge ideology, or catch what only emerges across a multi-step checkout.
BaitBlocker makes no network requests. The rules, the fonts and the explanations all ship inside the extension. Page text is read in the page and never copied off your machine.
It stores two things locally: your own settings, and a count of how many pages have been scanned and how many patterns were marked. No URLs, no page text, no account. The full policy runs to about a page.