Scroll Scold

What it does

Scroll Scold is a GNOME Shell extension that keeps an eye on how much active time you spend on social media. YouTube, X (Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Reddit are preconfigured out of the box, and you can tune the list to suit you.

When you pass your daily limit — 15 minutes by default — it scolds you: a notification pops up, a chime rings, and the top-bar bell gets angry. You can snooze it for a couple of minutes, or take the hint and close the tab.

Because it reads focused window titles straight from GNOME Shell, it works across every browser and every profile with zero setup — no per-browser add-ons, no accounts, nothing leaves your machine.

See it in action

Scroll Scold notification saying: You've hit 1 minutes on YouTube. The feed is infinite. Your day is not. With Snooze 2 min and Got it buttons — The scolding itself: *“The feed is infinite. Your day is not.”* Snooze it, or admit defeat with “Got it”.

Scroll Scold panel menu showing daily usage per platform, with monitoring and mute toggles — The panel menu tracks each platform's usage for the day, with quick toggles for monitoring and muting alerts.

Scroll Scold preferences window with settings for time limit, snooze duration, grace period, idle pause, alerts including custom sound, and detection options — Everything is tunable in Preferences — limits, grace periods, detection, and even the scold itself: swap the built-in chime for **any custom sound of your choosing**.

Features

Six-state indicator

The top-bar bell shows normal, approaching-limit, limit-reached, muted, paused and error states at a glance.
Active-use timing

The clock only runs while the tab is focused, with a configurable 60-second grace period when you switch away.
Idle-aware

Walked away from the machine? Time stops. Watching a video counts as activity, though — no loopholes.
Snooze or reset

Notification actions let you snooze for 2 minutes or acknowledge with “Got it” for a full threshold reset.
Scold chime

A built-in chime accompanies each scolding — or bring your own audio file for a personal touch.
Zero setup

Works across all browsers and profiles by watching window titles. Install it, and it just works.

Install

Scroll Scold supports GNOME Shell 46–50 (Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and newer).

The easiest route is the GNOME Extensions page. Prefer to build from source? It's two commands:

git clone https://github.com/BlackEyedHatMan/scroll-scold.git
cd scroll-scold && make install

Then enable it:

gnome-extensions enable scroll-scold@blackeyedhatman.com

What it does

See it in action

Features

Six-state indicator

Active-use timing

Idle-aware

Snooze or reset

Scold chime

Zero setup

Install