- >YouTube now lets you turn off Shorts
No it doesn't. If you were hoping it would mean you don't see shorts when you visit the Youtube home page, that's not what this is. I just tried the thing mentioned in the article-- set my Shorts time limit to 0 minutes. What it does is make it so if you click a short from somewhere the short plays, but then if you try to swipe to the next one it hits you with the "You reached your short limit". If you then return to the home page you still see Shorts.
- It really amazes how how Youtube refuses to let me hide stuff I don't want to see on my homepage. I still long for the ability to tell them to not give me mix playlists, I do not want them, and often they annoy me when the first song is one I'd click on but I don't want to have to pay attention enough to kill it before the next song plays (since you cannot disable play next in playlists...)
- It's not a product where you are the user. Your attention is the product being sold to advertisers and the videos are a harvesting/production mechanism.
It is not in the interests of either YT or the advertisers to allow you to opt out of features that are proven to be lucrative for eyeballs.
- I’m a Premium subscriber. I don’t see ads, and YouTube added a feature so I can easily skip in-video sponsored sections.
It seems like the incentive for Premium subscribers should be to keep them happy, so they keep paying, and minimize how much they watch, as they’ll be a cheaper user using less bandwidth.
Am I missing something?
- > YouTube added a feature so I can easily skip in-video sponsored sections
That feature benefits YouTube, too. Maybe even more than its value as a Premium feature. It makes it so that viewers can skip the ads the creator was paid to make without YouTube getting a cut of the proceeds, pushing down the value of those ads.
- It’s crazy to me YouTube is okay with hosting ads they get no cut from in the first place.
- This line of argument would make sense if they did allow paying customers who don't see ads to disable these anti-features. They don't.
- joke's on them, I have not consciously experienced a youtube advertisement in ten years
- YouTube has multiple different products. YouTube as a company do not call your attention a product. There isn't a product team that is in charge of people's attention as a product.
- If you have uBlock Origin installed, the subreddit wiki for it has lots of options for blocking stuff on YouTube.
https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/wiki/solutions/youtube
- You see, you think you don't want all those things, but the algorithm knows better. Trust the algorithm!
- I so hate the videos YouTube shows me that I wrote a plugin to place a white box over videos called TubeGate [0], which I open-sourced [1]. It does keyword-based filtering so you can tell it to hide "sports", "politics", etc.
[0]: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/tubegate/aokfpmegea...
- Damn, yeah that's what I was hoping for.
Honestly, the only thing really keeping me from watching shorts is the perplexing UX decision to not show the channel name as part of the preview tile. As basic Internet hygiene it just feels real bad to click on a video without the tiniest bit of idea about its provenance. For that reason I never do and have always just wanted to hide Shorts altogether.
- I use the control panel for youtube plugin - there is an option that any short plays in the traditional player. It also has lets you customize the thumbnail grid sizes. it is a little over aggressive with its defaults but you can turn them off. it has a lot of options
- I don't watch shorts because of the type of content it encourages - short clickbait content for the attention deficit.
I want long form, well researched, well put together content. These types of content takes a long time to produce, unfortunately, and the youtube algorithm doesn't favour it.
- These types of content takes a long time to produce
Unless they're AI slop, of course. Between shorts and AI slop, worthwhile content on YouTube will soon become almost impossible to find...
- That's where off-platform, trust worthy sources are important.
Over the years, i've curated a lot of subscriptions on youtube of such long form content (talking about things like Primitive Technology, Smarter Everyday, etc).
It simply sucks that youtube has gutted the UI for subscriptions - the layout is horrible, i can't scan it as they removed the list view, etc. And sometimes subscribed channel's videos don't even show up there - you have to visit the channel page directly to see the new videos.
it's almost as if they want people to rely only on the home page and the recommended videos from their algo.
- If TikTok does it that way (I have no idea if it does actually), YouTube obviously has to copy that! If a fishy channel name stops you from clicking on a short, that hurts your engagement, and that's the last thing social media companies want.
- Classic "self regulation" of an addictive product. "You look like you might have a problem with self-control, here are tools for managing yourself better" while admitting no fault and continuing with all of the hooks and barbs, design and advertising built to addict as many people as possible.
- Real name? No? We'll ask again later
- You sure you don't want to add your phone number? I makes verification easier next time you want to upload a video.
- Well played. I don't think many remember this. The product was completely forgettable but the introduction of this user hostile pattern was a turning point.
- What was this referencing?
- Technically I think it's for parents to regulate their kids.
- Yeah, it's pretty broad consensus that the Chinese opium epidemic was really on the parents. 19th century Chinese parents really dropped the ball there, and no further considerations or blame should be placed.
- I'm confused why you're bringing up parents and kids. Are you implying only children might have problems with self-control wrt media consumption?
- No, I'm implying Google faces liability after that court case and is using this as a fig leaf to blame parents.
- > The feature was expanded in January to give parents some control over how long their kids spend scrolling through Shorts,
- My parents are retired. How exactly do they come into play?
I'm actively avoiding Shorts, Reels, and whatever else with those mechanics precisely because they pull you in and snap an hour is gone with nothing of value to show for it. It's so totally different from regular long form videos.
We regulate addictive substances too, even for adults and without relying on parents. The amount of productivity and quality of life lost to these platforms must be staggering in aggregation.
- Correct, based on the text when you change the setting mentions that.
> scrolling is paused but you may still see individual Shorts
It prevents doomscrolling, not what you see in your feed or homepage.
- The nuclear option is to disallow it to store your watch history. You get only a search bar and your subscriptions.
I switched to this. It is less fun, but also less of a timewaste.
- If you want to completely eschew shorts, consider adding https://www.youtube.com/shorts to your adblocker blocklist, and maybe use an extension like Stylus to hide the "Shorts" links on YT pages.
I would rather keep the ability to see a short if I need it.
- Note that you don't need YouTube's permission to remove shorts from the homepage; there's a Firefox extension for that.
- ROFL because there is no danger that I'm going to spend any time watching shorts. If they put some limit on other videos now that might be relevant... but shorts are just taking up real estate on the screen which could be filled with content I might engagement. I want to say it is like picking their shareholder's pockets except nobody profits from the existence of shorts in any way.
- I actually set the time limit to 0 minutes , then I restarted the app in iOS and right now I do not see any shorts. Let’s see how long it would take for them to reappear again
- It turns out, the tiger can't change its shorts
- An ad blocker handles this use case just fine, however. It's easy to create a rule to remove the div containing shorts. Also works on many Use AI buttons.
- Youtube would be cooked if there was an alternative that actually eorked (incentives for people uploading, spread well etc).
- dammit. I got so excited about that headline.
now I'm just angry again.
- Ditto
- In my case, once I set the limit to 0 minutes and refreshed the home tab I don't see Shorts recommendations at all. There is still a Shorts tab at the bottom that tells me I have no remaining time (and allows me to trivially override it, sigh). But otherwise this seems to have cleaned up the "feed" that I see in the app of anything Shorts related (for now, at least).
- It’s still working for me tho. Could it be a different app version?
- Wow, WTF. What an inept implementation.
- Same.They just did the minimum to look like they care about restricting addiction practices but in reality still continuing with business as usual
- Swipe. Not a problem with mouse control and generally full computer, seems like even such a dumb move as swiping can become addictive and be done subconsiously. Never understood why people complain here so much about shorts since they never go beyond the one video played that I opened myself I guess that explains it.
Tablets/touchscreens/phones are not the best way to experience online stuff, rather the worst. ublock origin in firefox makes internet usable in other dimension for me, since I am allergic to ads but thats another story
- My shorts are on.
- "Shorts" is the #1 reason I switched to the SmartTube app on my Chromecast.
No more Shorts.
It also has other great features that are well beyond what the Youtube app lets you do to customize the expernience.
And then I realized, it also blocks all the ads. I was a Youtube subscriber, but they alienated me with their "Shorts", so I switched apps, and then I cancelled my subscription.
Most of big tech is too big. It's ridiculous how bad these monoliths have gotten.
- Yep, SmartTube is great.
- Upvoting because Shorts are terrible. Flagging because the submission title - which is 100% faithful to the friendly article - is a complete lie!
Plug: I added a bunch of features to Control Panel for YouTube [1] which let you either hide Shorts completely, everywhere (which is the default) or take more control of how you use them if you do (e.g. redirecting to the normal video player)
- Great addon thank you
- Before I quit YouTube, this was my setup.
Brave Shields[1] - Adblock
SponsorBlock[2] - Crowd-sourced skip sponsored segments
DeArrow[3] - Make thumbnails not clickbait
UnTrap[4] - Remove shorts and make UI amazing.
Return Youtube Dislike[5]
I deleted my Google account and now occasionally use Invidious with LibRedirect[6] to watch YT videos. Importing subscriptions into Invidious was a helpful stepping stone.
[1] https://brave.com [2] https://sponsor.ajay.app [3] https://dearrow.ajay.app [4] https://untrap.app [5] https://www.returnyoutubedislike.com [6] https://libredirect.github.io/
- Very cool, thanks! I've been using SponsorBlock for a long time. This is the first time I'm hearing about DeArrow and I paid for it. That guy is doing incredible work.
- This stuff can help a lot too:
https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/wiki/solutions/youtube
- need a network level dearrow for all the other devices and tvs on the network.
- When you say "quit YouTube", do you mean you replaced it with a different service? Or do you simply mean you deleted your account?
I've been hoping for more competition on alternative platforms, but everything that I've tried has failed to reach any kind of reasonable user base.
Lots of bot videos. A few schizo uploads. Stolen movies, etc. It feels like the earliest versions of YouTube and it's been a struggle to put up with. Most of them went under at some point or another, too.
- I watch probably 95% less videos than before I "quit youtube". I never visit youtube.com and I deleted all my google accounts. I still have my subscriptions saved in a few Invidious instances and I occasionally check them.
I haven't really looked into any alt platforms besides interacting a little. This peertube instance[1] has a good experience but it only has a few channels. I might look more into peertube now that you mention it.
I like videos for entertainment, but for information it is a timesuck.
[1] neat.tube
- I removed the YT app from my phone because of all the addicting/simulating UX and hooking content. It was eating up my quiet/thinking time, and led to brainfog and brainrot. And then, the blame is being put on me as the user who has self control issues. I found that very twisted. Some responsiblity is mine, sure. But having an army of PMs and engineers whose only job is to keep users on the platform, longer and more "engaged", is a loosing battle for one person to fight.
Maybe the app can be given a retry if they have gotten away from the hooking/baiting at the product level.
IG/Tiktok already exist out there and I stay away from them. YT was a platform for me to learn and engage deeply. Shorts just ruined that experience for me.
- I've deleted the app from my phone. When I want to watch YT I open Brave, which blocks shorts and promoted videos in search. As an added benefit watching videos feels like a slight chore and is not frictionless.
On my Mac I also use Brave and have allowlisted only the YouTube domain and Google auth. No shorts, no search spam, and just slightly inconvenient.
- I just wish I could pretend shorts were regular videos that happened to have a weird aspect ratio. There are extensions that switch the player automatically (and you can do it by editing the url) but that doesn't change how they appear in the subscriptions feed (i.e. an annoying carousel that hides all the information you need to decide whether you want to click or not)
- I have no affiliation with Shorts Blocker, but I installed it a long time ago and immediately forgot that shorts existed. Worth whatever I paid for it.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/shorts-blocker-for-youtube/id6...
- Paying for an app that is a single CSS filter is top notch Apple.
- why pay for something like that when you can just write an extremely simple addon that removes the shorts section from the homepage and anywhere on the site?
- Maybe you place a value on your time higher than $1.99 divided by the time it would take you to create it. Maybe you don't care to learn how to create an addon.
- Instagram needs to do this for Reels, too. I got quite addicted to these short-form videos during the pandemic and after I finished college things went immediately downhill once a lot of my mental activity could be somewhat "deferred". I could make up for the productivity hit by crunching but my life would be better without them. I remove things from my phone or put services into Pi-Hole but eventually I capitulate. Something about having the option to remove the most addicting parts of a service but not cutting yourself off completely has more success.
Edit: also to be somewhat objective, Instagram also offers a time limit. However, I've found that just by exiting the app (or it getting killed in the background), it basically clears the lockout so you don't even have to make the effort to click the "ignore" button.
- I use the "Unhook" Firefox extension to customize the YouTube page. You can hide shorts, comments, recommendations, the home page feed, and more.
- Open youtube through a browser with uBlock origin, with this line in the filter:
m.youtube.com##.rich-section-content
This blocks the shorts bar. I also block the other algorithmic surfaces and have only the search bar available.
- I think it's funny that nearly all videos on Youtube used to be short. Then Youtube pressured creators to make longer and longer content for ad revenue purposes.
Now they're forcing creators to pump out shorts.
- Approximately one in every hundred shorts consist of something good that isn't also in a video somewhere. Is there a script to force shorts to be presented in the same way as videos, so that the recommendation algorithm can be forced to appropriately and natively mix in the one or two shorts that I'd appreciate seeing with the video recommendations?
- I wish there was a whitelist and blacklist (keywords or checklist or something) that could mostly faithfully be followed with some backend AI.
Whitelist (skew algorithm this way please):
-bicyles
-diy clothing
-python programming
-snakes
-art how-to
-tornadoes
Blacklist (skew algorithm away from this please):
-pranks
-anything with kids
-fake DIY
-ai produced content
-only-fans people
- Weirdly enough I feel like this is how the Vision Pro Youtube app works. I'm not sure why.
- The funny thing here, and I'm sure YT was counting on this, is that I wouldn't really be open to hiding/disabling Shorts anymore. Because despite most of my subscriptions being channels which publish long-form content, I also have begun to follow some channels which exclusively publish in the Shorts format, and as you know, it's not strictly necessary to subscribe to a channel in order to follow it. So sometimes I let the suggestions do the work, and surface new/old content in the form of Shorts.
The thing about Shorts that irks me is their completely separate classification, which suppresses useful info like the channel name, date of publication, until you go in and play them. Also, the player interface being totally different: why, just why?
- I know what you mean, but I am willing to lose that content, in that form. Similar to the way I have used Instagram for a decade but have no idea what a reel is and ignore them.
- I agree. Shorts aren't inherently bad but the way they're sort of half as integrated in the UI just feels clunky and weird.
They should allow you to treat shorts like normal videos and have them ranked directly against them in e.g. search results. Or, they should let you completely separate them so you have essentially a totally different app.
- Is there a way to do it at network level.
There are too many devices with different accounts and apps and guest access ... like YouTube app on Smart TVs.
- I am still trying to figure out why YouTube/Google is willing to die on this hill ? Surely they’ve gotten feedback or seen it in their analytics that there is a significant group of people who don’t like these “shorts”.
Them implementing this “zero minutes” thing already tells you that they have realized there is some pushback.
Why not just add an on/off toggle?
This short form , TikTok style endless scroll stuff has a junk food feeling to it , as a paying customer why can’t you just give me the option to turn this off ?
- Pirates get the best service, gabe newell was right.all along. Paying for youtube premium makes no sense, I'd rather donate that 15 bucks a month to my favorite creators, while using uBlock/sponsorblock/unhook and grayjay on mobile. No shorts in my homepage, no ads ever
- If they were actually serious, they would add an option in the Family Link app to set time limit for shorts for children.
- They did add it, it explicitly says "Scrolling is paused after time's up but they may still see individual Shorts"
I added 15 min timer for my kids today, not as good as blocking them entirely from even being seen .. but at least it's something.
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- No, it doesn't the easiest way is to always use it in Firefox and use the following uBlock filters
- More similar ones here:
https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/wiki/solutions/youtube
- This seems like progress but it doesn’t practically solve anything. It doesn’t solve that every kid in the US has largely unrestricted school accounts that parents have no control over. It doesn’t really prevent a kid from creating a new account or simply logging out and bypassing it. Shorts would need to be disabled for unauthenticated accounts or educational accounts by default.
- I use Newsfeed Eradicator[0] to block shorts and many more things.
- This is the way. The biggest issue is that it's easy to disable if you have no self control, but I guess an official setting would be the same way.
- Amazing! I can finally redownload the youtube app instead of using a userscript in my mobile browser
- Same, I removed the YT app from my phone because of all the addicting/simulating UX and hooking content. It was eating up my quiet/thinking time, and led to brainfog and brainrot.
Maybe the app can be given a retry if they have gotten away from the hooking/baiting at the product level.
IG/Tiktok already exist out there and I stay away from them. YT was a platform for me to learn and engage deeply. Shorts just ruined that experience for me.
- I don’t mind shorts. Especially when I have a few minutes to kill or just want something playing on a side Monitor. Just wish it would auto scroll to the next one without requiring an extension.
- What I want to get rid of is all the "Mix" videos. I never look at them, I have zero interest in watching a stream of stuff chained together by an algorithm or whatever. But, unlike single videos, under the three dots there's no option "Not interested" or "Don't recommend". I can't get rid of them.
- Hasn't rolled out everywhere yet, for the record.
- Yeah, I only see 15 minutes in my settings.
For those who want to see and tinker with it: Settings > Time Management
- That means you need an account?
- I think there used to be a ublock filter to hide ytshorts but I haven't used youtube in a while at this so I can't be sure I'm not imagining it.
This is obviously not helpful if you use a smartTV or the app, in which case I would recommend using one of the third party apps like newpipe or whatever the smarttv 3p app is called
- The only reason they would do this is because some kind of research determined it would yield higher revenue.
- I find short form content really addictive. It’s so easy for me to lose half an hour to it, and at the end just feel like I’ve wasted my time.
Lacking better options I’ve turned on parental controls on my phone to block YouTube, and installed an extension to remove shorts from the site on my laptop.
I wish sites provided more real options.
- If you ever want to go more hardcore into keeping distracting apps off your phone I recommend checking out MDM for your device.
At least on iOS you could connect a mac and then use Apple Configurator to block installing new apps. This made it so you would have to use your Mac to enable installing new apps, creating a large amount of friction.
When I used iOS I used this method to create a "smart dumbhone" because you could have smart apps like mapping, without a browser or the ability to install distracting apps.
- You already could by disabling watch history. I know that also disables the non-Shorts recommendations, but you know, if you're asking YT to recommend you stuff then of course it'll do it the way it wants.
- I had to write a Chrome extensions to hide Shorts. it has been working great for me. https://github.com/mcotton/remove_yt_shorts
- Vibe coded?
- does that matter?
- This feature is ONLY available in the app for mobile - - it is NOT available for Desktop
- Nice! I wonder if it has anything to do with the lawsuit where the verdict was that meta and google designed addictive products.
- It would be so cruel had the feature been only made available on premium accounts. But good it’s not (I guess so).
- No, it's not like that at all. This thread is misleading and should be flagged.
- Wait, this is only in the mobile app? You can't do it on a desktop?
Typical Google junk. So we get to continue seeing idiotic door-shaped videos on our desktops.
- I hope this doesn’t get lost in the sea of comments
I just set shorts to 0 minutes
Tried to watch a short Got the message saying I’ve reached my limit and when I press X in the top right
I CAN WATCH SHORTS AGAIN
That is the most half assed attempt to limit my scrolling I could think of
Wow!
- I’ve never once told YouTube I wanted Playables and declined, yet tracked every time I was asked for over a year:
March 19, 2025 - 8:31 PM
April 9 - 4:09 PM
April 24 - 8 AM
May 9 - 5:33 PM
May 20 - 2:07 PM
June 8 - 5:10 PM
July 9 - 6:59 PM
August 9 - 5:14 PM
September 8 - 8:45 PM
November 9 - 8:47 PM
December 9 - 8:48 PM
Jan 8, 2026 - 9:28 PM
Feb 7 — 11:11 PM
March 10 - 9:18 PM
April 10 - 1:10 AM
I’ve also noticed “Auto play next video” once a year or so automatically enabled. Shorts also come up regardless of dismissal though less so than Playables.
- Thanks for pointing out, but I'm little bit sceptical about this feature because this will directly impact the revenue model around shorts. Maybe it's only for kids account?
- Can we just get an option to turn it off? This is an insanely dumb workaround.
- As a parent of 4 kids, I find Shorts to be morally reprehensible. I think the people working on them should honestly question their decision framework. Youtube is an international treasure. One of the greatest learning resources of all time. I want my children to have as broad of access to youtube as possible. I can't do that though, because they can go from watching a very interesting documentary or something fun like a Mark Rober video, to being zombified unwittingly in to watching videos of a woman putting on makeup and making pronouncements in to the video camera.
It's not just annoying. It's not just inconvenient. It is harmful.
- It’s so incredibly frustrating the effort required to keep the site/app from funnelling my kids into low effort slop.
I like to use it with my kids (under age of 6) to search and find interesting videos with them. The algorithm combined with the TV apps’s UX makes it such a frustrating experience.
There is so much potential there, but searching for things like space videos inevitably funnels me into AI generated slop and conspiracies. Searching for upcoming movie trailers funnels me into completely fake trailers. It’s clear the platform is an engagement engine first and a knowledge base second.
- Not related to many prior posts on HN, The Verge is not to be trusted with technical FAANG editorial content. They're either ignorant, stupid, or "playing stupid" due to prior "pay for play", under the table, and/or blatant advertiser-conflicting arrangements.
Also not related to prior YT posts. The secret to sanity with YT content is to never consume it on YT. FreeTube, yt-dlp, etc. are your friends.
- >Not related to many prior posts on HN, The Verge is not to be trusted with technical FAANG editorial content. They're either ignorant, stupid, or "playing stupid" due to prior "pay for play", under the table, and/or blatant advertiser-conflicting arrangements.
Do you have any links that could give me more info on this?
- We wish. But it's not true.
- Isn't this more for parents at the end of the day?
- I think Youtube needs to be disentangled from Google.
- I wouldn't have a a problem with shorts, in fact I definitely want to watch any videos from people I'm subscribed to be it short or otherwise. But core features are missing from shorts, like it doesnt even say what channel each short is from. So I've had a ublock filter for them forever.
- Now make it easy to block a channel like you used to too. Before you could just go to the channel, click on some menu to block one entirely, now the hoops one has to go through to hide a channel are insane, I do not understand these companies, it's like they want to force me to watch some crap I have no interest in...
Glad, these companies are starting to get held legally responsible for the content they serve in civil courts...
- Now hopefully we'll see it in YouTube music as well.
- finally.
- Just use uBlock origin and this filter: https://github.com/i5heu/ublock-hide-yt-shorts
- Gladly. How do I do that on my roku?
- If you're using a native YouTube app, you've already lost the battle.
- Obviously. Which belies your "just do this...". You may as well say "just watch dvds". An exactly equally effective solution.
- iSponsorBlockTV running in docker on a system on the network can remote skip ads for all yt apps that it have been added to its monitoring. works great for appletv. But nothing is as good as SmartTube on androidtv.
- Also annoying is how if you hover your mouse over a thumbnail on the homepage, it autoplays and then counts as part of your history.
- Right. Just like they let you turn off those stupid games that keep popping up no matter how many times you tell them you're not interested.
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286 points by pentagrama 11 hours ago | 133 comments