This Safari Extension Gives You More Control Over Your Reddit Feed
Whenever I open Reddit now, I feel like I just want to see outrage bait. This means posts from AITA , posts from AIO (I’m overreacting) and posts about political turmoil. As a writer, I need to check Reddit to keep up with interesting new app launches, common problems people are facing in technology (so I can write about solutions), and sometimes to solve a niche problem I’m facing with my own technology. But if I accidentally open the default Reddit home page, my mental health will start to deteriorate and my thoughts will become angrier too.
Yes, there are a lot of bad things happening in the world right now, but I don’t want to hear about them all the time . My brain needs a break from all this from time to time. Unfortunately, Reddit doesn’t offer easy tools for filtering unwanted posts in your feed, but a few months ago I discovered Protego ($1) , a Safari extension that offers this feature. Protego allows you to create a personalized blacklist to hide all kinds of outrage on Reddit. You can block keywords, links to specific domains, social media sites, and be automatically redirected to Reddit’s legacy UI (which has far fewer distracting widgets that try to boost engagement).
Create Reddit filters with Protego
First, open Protego on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac, then go to the Filters tab and select Keywords . Click the + button and select Add Keyword List . This allows you to add multiple keyword filters to Reddit at once. You need to add a comma between keywords, for example: AITA, AIO, Elon Musk, etc. Protego also supports wildcards, which allows you to block multiple variations of an offensive word. For example, if you want to block the term AITA and related terms like AITAH, simply add AITA to the blacklist and it will block any words starting with AITA.
Once you’re done adding keywords, you can share your blacklist with others if you want. Protego allows you to export blacklists to a JSON file, which it easily imports. To use this feature, open the app and select Filter > Manage List .
Block posts that link to specific websites
In its latest update, Protego added the ability to block specific domains. You can enable this by going to Filter > Social in the app and turning on the toggles next to the social media platforms you’d rather avoid. I found it easy to block posts that linked to X, Instagram, Threads, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Other options include YouTube, Snapchat, Pinterest, Bluesky, Mastodon and a few more social networks. You can also block custom domains by going to Filter > Domains . Click the + button here and select Add Domain List . Just like you added multiple keywords earlier, you can use this form to blacklist multiple domains at once. There are several well-known sites that thrive on fake news, sensationalism, and low-quality content, and creating your own blacklist will protect these sites from Reddit in Safari.
While this feature is great, Protego still needs the ability to filter subreddits from your feed. With this feature, I can easily hide posts from subreddits that post fake anger bait stories, as well as those that contain political propaganda that I would rather not see. The developer is working on this feature and we hope to have it available in the near future.
A few more quality of life improvements
Finally, Protego has some nice Reddit tweaks that make browsing the site much easier. These features are found in the Settings tab of the app. You can ask the app to automatically switch you to the legacy Reddit UI, which looks much more spartan but doesn’t have the annoying content suggestions and auto-playing videos. The extension also lets you hide Reddit’s promoted posts and ads, and on mobile Safari, it hides Reddit’s annoying “Open this in the app” banner. You can also ask it to automatically hide or collapse automoderator comments on all topics.
All this makes Protego a must-have for anyone using Reddit in Safari for iPhone, iPad or Mac. One purchase unlocks the app on all platforms, and the extension syncs your settings and keyword filters across all devices. After setting up the app, opening r/popular or r/all no longer ruins my day. I’m seeing more content about sports, nature, dogs and cats, video games, and even heartfelt posts from niche subreddits like r/quilting. This has reduced the dominance of some of Reddit’s largest communities in my view of the popular feed, and I now see more of the posts that drew me to the site in the first place . It’s still far from ideal, given that Reddit discussions are still dominated by the posts I’ve hidden, but at least I can now easily distance myself from them.