Why regular porn blockers are useless

I used every blocker there is. Cold Turkey. Covenant Eyes. Canopy. Qustodio. The router-level stuff. The DNS filters. I set them up carefully, felt genuinely hopeful for a few days to a week, and then bypassed every single one of them.

Not because they were badly built. Most of them worked fine at the job they were designed to do. They failed because that job was never the whole problem. Every blocker out there misses at least one of three things:

1. Bypassing it is possible and free. Uninstalling costs you ninety seconds and nothing else.
2. It only guards one door. Porn isn't confined to the websites on a blocklist.
3. The real consequences arrive years too late. Nothing bad happens tonight if you relapse, so nothing stops you tonight.

Miss any one of those and the whole thing eventually collapses at the first urge. Here's each in turn, and what actually fixed it for me.

Bypassing it costs nothing

Think about what actually happens at 1am when the urge shows up.

You know the blocker is there. You also know that removing it takes about ninety seconds. Regardless of the blocker (even Cold Turkey), it can always be uninstalled with some digging because you own the device. There is an uninstall button, a brute force uninstaller, or a DNS entry you can change back. So the urge doesn't have to beat your commitment to quitting — it only has to beat ninety seconds of mild inconvenience.

Lust always wins that fight. Not because you're weak, but because the two things aren't remotely the same size. On one side there's an immediate, physical, insistent urge. On the other there's a vague future benefit and a small amount of clicking.

Every blocker I tried was betting that I would be as motivated at 1am as I was when I installed it. I never was. Nobody is. That's the entire nature of the problem.

There are multiple ways to watch porn on your device

Blocking a list of websites assumes porn only lives on websites. It doesn't, not anymore. It can be on Twitter, Telegram, etc. It can even be downloaded from a WhatsApp DM and watched offline later on. When the urge hits and we want to bypass the router blocks, we go for any kind of porn which is available. We even access our favorite porn websites through proxies or unprotected browsers (been there, done that).

The consequences arrive far too late

Porn, as with most addictions, is hard to fight because of one particular reason: the damage is genuinely real but almost entirely delayed and invisible.

Nobody's liver fails. You don't get pulled over. There's no hangover the next morning that forces the issue. The costs are things like a slow erosion of your attention, your relationships, and how you feel about yourself. All these consequences arrive over months and years, not minutes (for a comprehensive account of those effects, read Your Brain on Porn: Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction by Gary Wilson).

Meanwhile the reward is instant.

That mismatch is the whole trap. Your brain is comparing something happening now against something abstract and distant, and it will pick now essentially every time. You can know all of this consciously, like I did, for over a decade, and it changes nothing, because the knowing happens in a different part of your brain than the deciding.

So the honest framing isn't "I need more willpower." It's: the feedback loop is broken, and no amount of trying harder repairs it.

What changes when relapsing costs something today

The idea of bringing porn-watching costs to the present came from a barbershop in São Paulo in 2021. My barber Tom — also a high school social sciences teacher — had a theory on why there were so many success stories of people overcoming drug addictions through Brazilian churches: when a man's family donates a car to the church praying for his recovery — he said — he'd better get his sh*t together, because otherwise they or their loved ones lost a car for nothing. That thought stuck with me for years, and it turned out to be the whole principle behind what I eventually built.

If I told you that relapsing tonight would cost you $150 right now, that's a completely different decision than the one you normally make. It's no longer "urge versus distant regret." It's "urge versus losing $150 tonight." And that second comparison is one your brain is actually equipped to make, because both sides are concrete and both sides are now.

There's a well-established idea behind this, called a commitment device: you deliberately restrict your own future choices while you're thinking clearly, because you know your future self will not be. Ulysses tying himself to the mast is the classic example. Behavioural economists have studied this for decades. The finding that people fight roughly twice as hard to avoid a loss as to secure the same gain is one of the most replicated results in the field.

Applied here, it means: don't rely on wanting to quit badly enough at 1am. Arrange things in advance so that 1am you is dealing with a cost that has already been made real.

What to actually do

You don't need my product for this. If you can make it painful or hard enough for you to watch porn at the moment of deciding and browsing it, it will work just as well. You can choose to live in jail, or a shelter with a shared toilet that gives you no privacy, so that the embarassment of enjoying yourself will outweigh the pleasure of it. Sure, that works, but you don't want to trade your personal freedom to get rid of porn, do you? You can also work the whole day at the office with a corporate computer and use a dumb phone that only allows you to use banking, text messaging apps and no browser. There are solutions available to achieve that. However, we all want to google something during the day, right? Browse a link sent to us on Whatsapp, and what not. It is just part of modern society. So you also probably don't want to go the dumb phone and corporate computer-only route.

A third option which is a lot more feasible and doesn't tap on your personal freedom is Staked. With Staked, the consequences are monetary, and money talks. As far as I know, Staked is the only blocker to cover every single one of the aspects that traditional porn blockers overlook:

1. Bypassing it costs you. Uninstall, tamper with protections, or try to cheat: we can't technically stop you, but it will hurt you dearly (as much as you want).
2. It guards all doors. If you bypass standard DNS protections, we capture NSFW content on any platform (Twitter, telegram, proxies, VMs, DMs, even offline) — all privately in your device, without compromising your privacy.
3. The real consequences arrive now. If you relapse/cheat today, the money is set to be forfeited at the same time and is donated to charity (with a 72h delay to allow for evidence-based appeal).

If that makes sense to you — and as a long-term addict myself I know it does — try Staked out today for a couple of weeks and regain your life for once — you only have one. It is free to try (just not free to relapse :) ).