BaitBlocker underlines the sales tactics and clickbait on a web page, so you can see them while you read. Hover over an underline and it tells you what the tactic is called and how it works.
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.
Countdown timers, “only 3 left”, “was £89, now £49”, pre-ticked boxes, auto-renewal in small print.
Solid underline“Join 40,000 customers”, “doctor recommended”, “for people who care about…”.
Dotted underline“You won’t believe what happened next”, “wait for the end”, “comment below if you agree”.
Dashed underline“Shocking”, “proves that”, “experts say”, “everyone knows”.
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 works by matching phrases these mechanisms tend to produce. That means it will miss things, and it will sometimes underline something harmless. It cannot tell you what anyone intended.
Nothing. BaitBlocker makes no network requests at all. The rules, the fonts and the explanations are all inside the extension, and page text is read in the page and never copied off your machine.
It stores two things in your browser: your settings, and a count of how many pages have been scanned and how many patterns were found. No URLs, no page text, no account. The full policy runs to about a page.