In addition to the unhook addon that others also recommended and is great, I would also suggest, as an alternative, setting a redirection rule from "www.youtube.com/shorts/XYWZ" to "www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYWZ". This will play the short but in the classical youtube video (landscape) format, with no infinite scrolling, or replay or autoplay (assuming these are in general disabled), which takes away a big part of the addictive aspect of shorts.
```
// ==UserScript==
// @name YouTube Shorts → Normal Player
// @match ://www.youtube.com/
// @run-at document-start
// ==/UserScript==
function redirectShorts() {
const match = location.pathname.match(/^\/shorts\/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/);
if (match) {
location.replace(`/watch?v=${match[1]}`);
}
}
// Catch initial page load
redirectShorts();
// Catch SPA navigation early (fires before page renders)
document.addEventListener('yt-navigate-start', redirectShorts);
Same here with FreeTube. YT has become a toxic experience on any browser and recently it has stopped working on my laptop with Firefox and uBlock Origin, no matter if I surf it as logged in in my main google account or not. The same arrangement works on my main desktop, but i mostly use FreeTube there as well.
Instead of directly clicking the short to play it, open the menu at the bottom right and click add to playlist. This will play out in the classic player without having to configure ublock rules. And if the rest of the playlist is playing at more than 1x, this will also apply to the short.
I have a userscript that does this, but one downside is that it refreshes the page, so if I go back in history (eg I misclicked), it resets the recommendation page
A nuclear option that's worked extremely well for me is going into Youtube's settings and disabling history.
I no longer am even able to see shorts, they don't get suggested to me.
However, this is an extreme nuclear option and also disables the entire 'Home' and for-you type content. You can search and watch videos, but it flips it so it is 100% intention driven. Which means discoverability and browsing is non-existent. You're still able to see your existing subscriptions but that's it.
It's REALLY helped me disconnect from the addictive dopamine of the infinite, short type formats. YMMV
This is exactly what I’ve done for my Google settings after feeling more and more upset with what the Youtube homepage was showing me. Not so much in that it was necessarily contrary to what I may have wanted to watch, but more-so me thinking “My god.. is this what I’ve become?”
I now much prefer to open Youtube (quasi)tabula rasa. I still have subscriptions set up so I can follow “vetted” accounts, but for other things I now rely on that intentionality.
The one minor bummer is that Youtube won’t remember your spot in a video, say if you’re watching in your phone and want to continue on your desktop (or vice-versa). Not the biggest hassle to manually check the time and sync it up, though.
Yea - the not remembering a spot in a video IS a slight inconvenience, but for me it's a small price to pay in order to not get sucked into HOURS thrown away chasing the next 'hit' of dopamine from shorts.
I think this is the best way of using Youtube if you're trying to avoid brain rot and doomscrolling. This way helped me alot and gives you full control over what you consume.
For an older Internet user, it feels baffling that returning a website to a state where it shows you what you search for, and what you subscribe to, is considered an extreme nuclear option.
I'm also an older Internet user, but I assumed that it was a nuclear option to so dramatically change the expected behavior that without warning people they would be quite shocked. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I have been happy with the serendipity of YouTube’s algorithm generally. I followed an external link to a YouTube video about an exotic piano, and played a few related videos afterwards. These were videos about other unusual musical instruments, such as very high-pitched and very low-pitched wind instruments. And somehow that was part of a process leading to Japanese metal bands.
Dopamine-driven behavior in ourselves is certainly to be watched for.
I DO miss the discoverability. I really do. But my self control for watching shorts ends up being incredibly self sabotaging. I truly wish I could permanently disable shorts in some way. I wish I could use my DNS to block shorts, but alas they're not distinct.
Here is another one I found in my personal userscripts. I believe this script is more effective than my previous one because it prevents recommendations for Shorts or other videos from being shown.
// ==UserScript==
// @name No YT Sidebar and Shorts
// @match https://www.youtube.com/*
// ==/UserScript==
function noYTSidebar () {
const element = document.getElementById('secondary')
if (element === null) {
window.setTimeout(noYTSidebar, 1000)
return
}
element.getElementById('secondary').style.display = 'none'
}
function noYTShorts () {
const elements = document.querySelectorAll('ytd-rich-shelf-renderer')
if (elements.length === 0) {
window.setTimeout(noYTShorts, 1000)
return
}
for (e of document.querySelectorAll('ytd-rich-shelf-renderer')) {
e.style.display = 'none'
}
}
noYTSidebar()
noYTShorts()
Oh this is amazing, thank you! I tried to make my own but youtube's CSS is so complex, I gave up. I have no idea why they push shorts to me when I'm on my computer. But then again, I really cannot stand them, even on my phone.
I also just discovered a way[1] to just get real videos from my youtube RSS feeds, free from shorts. Honestly it's been a joy to not have my RSS reader notify me for a old video republished as vertical.
The CSS is complex indeed. Moreover, the page renders the Shorts widgets after the page has completed loading, so JavaScript-based solutions need to exercise a little care in ensuring that it can hide the distracting elements after the page has loaded. Despite the complexity, I've found that just hiding all elements with the 'ytd-rich-shelf-renderer' class just works fine. For example:
.ytd-rich-shelf-renderer { display: none }
This single line of CSS seems to just work fine for me.
I keep Control Panel for YouTube [1] up to date with the latest YouTube shenanigans. Most recently: restoring the Related sidebar layout with the giant thumbs, if you're not hiding them.
Shorts are hidden and redirected if you land on one externally by default, and it _was_ also restoring the sort by Upload date filter UI, until YouTube went and killed that in the API ;_;
Unhook is solid. I’m building Maxxmod [1] (shameless plug). The goal is similar in spirit, but with more granular control, a structured admin panel with live previews.
Still in development, but feedback from the HN crowd is very welcome. The site includes interactive prototypes and screenshots that give a clear picture of what it’s aiming to become.
For anyone whose Unhook has stopped working, I cannot recommend Youtube Redux enough. I originally installed it because I hate the new layout, but it is amazing in all the options it allows, including disabling infinite scroll and removing shorts altogether.
Some of the Unhook options are broken nowadays I think. Its that or one of my other 10 YouTube extensions I now have to deshittify that damn page. Disable translate, SponsorBlock, Disable AutoPlay, some better thumbnail thing..
Does it still work for you? Unhook hasn't been updated in years and doesn't work for shorts anymore, on Firefox. It's still worth it to get rid of the suggested videos though.
It works fine for me, I have not noticed degradation
> doesn't work for shorts anymore, on Firefox
I do get shorts in search results, but if I click they do not load (the audio plays but no video). For the purposes it fills, that blocks them enough for me.
I’ve noticed this behavior for all Google properties. Every time I click “not interested” “don’t show me this again” or anything similar, it seems to have no effect as the best case. The worst case I’ve seen is when clicking these options seems to acts as a positive signal to show me more of that content. I’ve noticed this over years.
As such, I’ve simply stopped interacting with googles recommendation systems and most of googles content delivery systems. Including using YouTube as minimally as possible.
It's the same in tiktok: there's literally a button that says “I'm not interested in any live videos”, but it keeps inserting livestreams into the feed anyway.
I'm 100% convinced that these 'show fewer' options are there for dark-pattern reasons. They are sprinkled throughout Facebook and LinkedIn as well. My hypothesis is that companies put them there to give consumers the idea that they have any control at all over their "feed." But if they actually try to use them, they discover the options don't actually do anything, and resign themselves to whatever the algorithm feeds them.
I clicked the "show fewer shorts" button on youtube for a while--they'd come back every 2-3 weeks, but then I'd click it again. Then I tried a different tactic: as soon as I saw a short in my "recommendations" I closed youtube and didn't return for at least 24 hours. I only had to do that about three times and I haven't seen shorts in my recommendations for at least 6 months now.
It's purely there to provide a signal to the oxygen waster product manager who is pushing the obnoxious "feature" in the first place. Their KPIs are not only "positive" engagement with the feature but also lack of "negative" engagement such as clicking the "show fewer" button. It otherwise has zero user-facing impact.
The phrasing alone proves it's a dark pattern. At this point, I think we need some good-guy-AI to fight the algorithms, dark patters, and bad-guy-AI. It should also do everything it can to discourage the bad guys from even trying to implement them...
I do the same, and after a day of doing it- they seem to go away for a time depending on the platform, but they always come back and sometimes they come back a lot.
The web-browser is the least aggressive and I think I haven’t even seen them on Apple TV.
The iPhone App is the most egregious offender of not respecting the request though, it seems to almost not care at all, and now the thumbnails on the home screen have started autoplaying (with audio) and I can’t find how to disable it (older instructions seem to be invalid).
They have all the content though; so I have no choice but to deal with this, until a good enough competitor comes along and my favourite youtube channels upload to both places.
Auto play with audio needs to be controllable for accessibility. May be a regulatory requirement depending where you live. So it’s gotta be there somewhere.
They'll also record the press and probably use it as part of their "KPIs". "The number of suckers trying to have control has decreased 5% this month, well done all".
It's amazing that the algorithms are so universal rather than personalized.
You'd think they'd want to notice that I _absolutely never_ watch shorts, and stop showing them to me, instead recommending something else.
I understand why FB/IG do it; I _occasionally_ give in and get sucked into a couple. But that NEVER happens to me with YT.
As someone that pays for YouTube premium (and isn’t served ads), I don’t understand why they push Shorts to me too. Presumably they should want me to spend the bare minimum amount of time on YouTube necessary to keep me subscribed, as any further use just contributes to higher infrastructure and bandwidth costs.
I have done the same and it seems to have no consequence. I suspect YouTube only wants to track the opposition to shorts, not to provide a personal preference for their users. This uBlock filter is therefore much appreciated
For me, it does result in no shorts on the main recommendations list. They still appear on the recommendations shown while a video is playing (and there they don't have the "show fewer" option) but they eventually (maybe 7-10 days or so) reappear on the main list as well.
this is all in the iOS YouTube app, which is the only place I watch YouTube.
Door close button is supposed to cancel the door dwell time. But due to some disability codes in some regions all major manufactures allow it to be disabled (as required by some codes). i.e. The owners/managers/technicians can disable it.
I "Provide Feedback" every time anything annoys me, repeatedly. And I'm annoyed really easily. I have family premium, so I make sure to mention that.
- Hide all shorts, everywhere on the site, not just on my PC. uBO filters are amazing, but limited.
- The root page to show my Subscriptions instead of "Your History Is Turned Off..."
- I want links to go directly to the video and fill the window. I'll use the back button to go back where I came from, and native "Full Screen" if I want it to fill my screen.
All of it could be non-default settings available with Premium only.
Seriously though, do any of our German / French compatriots here on HN have different experience of corporations, versus the USA's "maximizing profit" purpose, given the "corporate social responsibility" mandate of those countries?
Greed (opportunism) is human and I wonder if that's "better" in the Germany or French corporate-world?
Many stuff are addictive, some legal (smoking, gambling), some legal with prescription (drugs) and some illigal (opioids). Infinite scrolling, either video only (yt shorts) or mixed content lies in the first category. This is a war one fights by himself as law doesn't helps with gatekeeping. Any weapon that helps me is welcome. Filtering the content that whould otherwise polute my screen space and distract me from the useful content is desirable. In Homer Iliad, Ulysses ordered his sailors to tie him up in order to withstand the voice of Sirens, while they were wearing earplugs. Today we have uBlock.
Haha, I take it as a compliment for now. Being not a native English speaker and managing to tie an LLM is a little flattering. Besides, Sirens are mentioned in Odyssey.
I’m paying over 40 dollars a month for YouTube but it doesn’t allow me to choose almost anything of what I see, despite trying hard to fine-tune my recommendations.
I can’t permanently turn off shorts - and this I find personally insulting. It really feels like encountering a drug dealer outside my house every time I come home, always expecting me to cave and try some of that good smack.
But apart from ignoring me when I say I’m not interested in whole genres of ‘fun’ videos, it also resets the streaming quality to the lowest setting every single day and then hides the quality setting deep inside a menu with several fiddly clicks.
And this isn’t for my benefit of course: I can easily stream 4K video to my screens. It’s to shave a few cents off each stream and max the gouging.
YT is desperate for me to engage with rage bait news, and I’m not biting.
It’s so god damn annoying, regardless of how often I choose to ignore channels or don’t suggest feedback.
All they care about is vote time…give me content I want to view!
Also, in the evenings, my timeline gets weirdly paranoid phobia centric, like deep insecurities people live with that are triggering and keep you up late. It’s so obvious YT is doing this to try and bait me into watching these deeply emotional and personal content, and again, ignoring it and providing feedback seems to do nothing to my feed. I hate it.
I kept having issues like this, with a different kinds of videos, until I scrubbed my history of any of the kinds of videos I did not want.
If I click on something I thought I would want to watch and it is the kind of video I do not want recommended to me I immediately delete it from my watch history, block the channel, and some times block that profile from viewing my youtube channel.
~2 years ago I never had to delete anything from my watch history and my feed/recommendations were ok, now I have to if I do not want my feed/recommendations to occasionally be flooded with something I do not want.
I only use YouTube with my watch history set to off. So there is no feed, and I only see updates from channels I actually subscribed to. If I want to see some random crap I go search for it but it’s a clean slate next time I open the app. I have found this method of using YouTube to be extremely useful.
Do not give them the satisfaction. Dont like videos and never comment on anything. The videos are the bait. The comments sections are the trap. Use youtube as a multi-channel TV. Keep it a one-way stream of data. Give them nothing beyond the unavoidable knowledge of what you watch.
I just use two browsers. On one my recommendations are truly well curated but I can’t watch a single out of place video or my feed is corrupted. The other browser is for brain rot time and it’s the Wild West.
I used to have an account for my kids. I thought I would be smart by seeding the history with educational content. I clicked on a lot of videos, let them play etc. I was there when my kids would watch videos - and slowly but surely YouTube started recommending junk AI generated videos.
It is my opinion their algorithms are tuned to push this kind of engagement no matter what.
YouTube is social media first, even if it also happens to be a repository of useful content. Social media does not want you to navigate with agency. They want to choose what you see because it lets them keep you on the platform longer, which is the entire goal.
You should see me or my wife sometimes scrolling down this nine miles long single column list on the Roku to find a particular channel. It's in there, it just could be anywhere in there...
They didn't happen to post any new videos lately so they aren't on the main subscriptions page of latest videos, you have to go to the menu on the left to the list of all subscribed channels and just arrow down forever, back up, down again... Why in the ever loving world isn't that list at least alphabetical?
Why are you still paying for Youtube? I run uBlock and haven't seen ads in years, don't see any cellphone format crap now thanks to this list, and VacuumTube on my TV defaults to 4K.
I pay mainly because a really like being able to play the videos in iOS pip background mode. I do find it crazy that Apple allows that OS level feature to be paywalled by apps.
I use ReVanced on Android and it allows me to hide shorts. A 'pirated' version of the app offers a much better experience than even the paid option of it.
> We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.
Since the beginning of Youtube, it has always struck my as reeking of such desperation to keep you hooked. Just the idea that you're watching a video, and there is simultaneously a list of 10 OTHER videos right next to the view. Most have become so numbed to that, but if you step back you should find it just such a sign of desperation to hook you (is the best way I can put it).
Before a video is even over, they have to plaster the video window with MORE VIDEOS. "Here try this, what about this other thing, here have you considered this?"
My mind is always "I haven't even digested this one video and you're already PUSHING MORE!"
When my kids are over my shoulder on YouTube I'm constantly zooming in w/ Mac zoom to obscure the other videos, the other spam, etc.
Just learn to absorb and soak in one thing. And digest it for a moment.
It's all so obnoxious and it's now the norm.
FWIW, I only ever login in a fresh private window.
First I will say that clearly all these attention hooks must work or they wouldn't keep doing them but, for me, it just doesn't match how I use YT.
Specifically, I am almost always going to YT with the intention of watching something specific. It could be because I need to solve a problem (eg installing a smoke detector). I also for some reason use it to play music despite having Spotify. I honestly don't know why.
But I almost never go to YT to look for something to watch. I do sometimes watch a related video after I'm done but this wouldn't happen more than 10-15% of the time. I think I'm in the minority here as people seem to go on YT and just keep chaining videos.
But I find YT's interface to be a confusing mess of "me too" products that are half-assed and various likely fiefdoms that force UX onto things that don't make sense.
For example, YT's Live streams are, well, ass. The player is terrible. The UX is terrible. And you still have that right panel showing related videos. But watching Live videos is a vastly different UX than watching VODs. So why is it there? I suspect because whatever team owns that recommendation panel has a lot of power. And it probably drives metrics still so it's still there.
And bringing this back to YT Shorts. Ugh, I too would like to never see them. It's a "me too" Tiktok. And it's worse. Tiktok's UI/UX is just a step above Shorts (and Reels). And I spend 98% of my Tiktok time on my fyp.
But yes the "please watch another video" UI is everywhere. The end of a video, your home page, the right panel and in-video prompts/
As the other guy said, it's like having a drug dealer wait outside your house and try to push you some smack. This must be illegal, the fact that it's not illegal must be illegal.
I can sympathize a bit with YouTube trying to boost engagement to increase ad views, like, love it or hate it, thats the game they have to play hosting and serving petabytes of video.
But all of that shit should disappear the moment I start paying for it out of pocket. Like, I'm already paying, getting me to watch more videos costs them more money that it would to leave me the fuck alone!
We have such powerful AI tools these days. Every media recommendation service should have a slider you can set to indicate how much you want to be "challenged."
High challenge = CS papers explained
Medium challenge = bridge engineering videos
Low challenge = some guy playing video games for you on YouTube
This is exactly the only reason why I don’t pay for YouTube. Why would I pay money to make it even more addictive, when what I want is to make it less addictive.
Turn off your watch history. It stops all shorts except from your subscriptions.
If they remove this, I will surely be done with YouTube. I was so desperate to disable shorts and ready to be done with the app, but then I learned that disabling watch history pretty much perfectly allows me to use the app how I want to.
> I can’t permanently turn off shorts - and this I find personally insulting. It really feels like encountering a drug dealer outside my house every time I come home, always expecting me to cave and try some of that good smack.
YouTube's hostility is truly remarkable, by far the most egregious that the Subscriptions page in the TV app having a dedicated row for "recommendations" and "shorts" before you can proceed.
Not only I cannot turn off shorts, recently the iOS YouTube app auto plays random short the millisecond I start the app. That is against my user desires in three different ways - and there's no way I can find to stop it.
And Google whines when people install ad-blockers. It's pathetic.
I was willing to watch ads. But then Google introduced NEVER-ENDING ads, when the program is interrupted frequently and will never return unless you herd it along periodically by clicking Skip. Screw you, Google. I'm cooking, with my hands covered with who knows what, and now I can't watch the program.
This is not true. You can in fact block specific channels. From YouTube support[1]:
> On certain pages, such as your Home and Watch Next pages, find a video from a channel that you don’t want recommended to you.
And the community posts and polls from random communities you have no interest in and don’t give you the same “don’t show me content from this channel”
this is a filter im using that blocks a channel from showing in the search results. just add a channel name after "title"
www.youtube.com##ytd-search ytd-video-renderer:has(#text.ytd-channel-name:is([title*="add ai slop channel name here"], [title*="more ai slop here"]))
youll have to have to repeat the same name with other filters to also hide them on the homepage or the suggestions sidebar.
freetube is another option that works on desktop and it lets you block a channel by name by adding it in the "distraction free" section of the settings. if youre on android theres also a version of freetube in the f-droid store that works ok enough, even thought the freetube UI is not really designed for mobile
obviously this only gets you so far. at some point there could be more slop than non-slop so it wont be possible to block them all, but so far im finding this useful for the few repeat offenders that keep showing up in the search results*
Youtube is far too significant a video collection to risk losing it. Yes there is insane anounts of garbage and yes their history is getting spottier by the day, but nothing else comes close to all of the good stuff that is still on it.
Google needs to get its shit together and give users power tools. YT hasn't improved materially for many years now. I hope they can snap out of whatever governance dysfunction they're in. Not sure whether increasing financial pressure (above what must, no doubt, build up on its own) is the right answer here. It will probably only lead to more enshittification, and a long, slow death and I'm pretty saddened by that thought.
A Tapermonkey script which redirects a short to the classic YT experience is somewhat more helpful, because sometimes there are interesting snippets in the Shorts. This lets you see the video but breaks you out of doomscrolling.
What bothers me most about YT is that it constantly plays videos with an AI-generated voice.
In general, I like AI features and use AI daily to build prototypes, but this feature looks so stupid to me and feels so wrong. I have no problem with it being an option, but by default I just want to watch the videos with their original soundtracks. But instead YT decides that I should watch the videos with some mediocre AI translation...
Maybe I could disable it using an account, but I still prefer not to have one when it's not necessary.
Daily reminder that these tools are made possible by the power of general purpose computing, and corporate interests want to take it away. In a hypothetical future not too far from us where your devices become "trusted", you will have to view whatever they want you to see, with no recourse like blocking ads or undesirable content.
Then I shall not look at it at all. Some months ago Facebook gave me the "ads vs payment" ultimatum. I closed the tab and didn't log into Facebook since.
That's good, but everyone has only a limited amount of social capital to refuse popular things. School teachers, which are essentially agents of the government, often make your children watch Youtube videos, for example.
Oh, it's a list you can add to your uBO. I thought it was a descriptive headline: "(The) uBlock filter list (is going) to hide ..."
I only watch Youtube via browser now for both adblocking and my own custom userscripts, both on my laptop and my phone. A couple creators I watch mostly do shorts so I tolerate them but I wrote a userscript that changes all /shorts/<videoid> URLs into normal /watch?v=<videoid> to lessen the temptation to doomscroll.
I've been using invidious for a while now but I remember I had blocked all recommends and suggestions on YT so I never saw shorts anyways (I know the recommend block was thru ublock but I can't remember if I'd blocked suggestions through YT options or if that was also a ublock filter).
Also a great way to avoid mindless feed-surfing. I only watched videos from subs or that I have specifically searched for rather than getting sucked into the algo vortex.
That takes care of the browser. Now I just need a way to filter out short videos in NewPipe (and ideally a way to specify that I only want very long ones)
This is one of the several reasons I always react almost violently whenever someone tries to be smarmy in any threads about adblockers on youtube, trying to say that paying for youtube makes everything good the honest way.
I do in fact pay for youtube and have for like 15 years or more, and it still sucks for a variety of reasons.
"why pay then?" for the same reason I would pay to have 8 of my fingernails pulled out instead of all 10.
and that seems to block all viewing of shorts. It doesn't stop their inclusion in playlists/recommendations or on a given channel's page(s). Works for me.
Another technique is to turn off watch history. As soon as you do that, you get a blank page on YouTube. It puts the decision making on the user to choose what to watch. I rarely get into the rage bait or shorts. It’s shown in search results and the sidebar. But at least, it’s not in the face when you open the website.
I switched from using YouTube to invidious mainly because they don't support shorts and blocked YouTube on the DNS level, it's a bit slower, but I know I won't be sucked into doom-scrolling
I'm curious if anyone knows of something like SponsorBlock or a UBlock list, that can flag tje onslaught of AI videos that are appearing. I find those crappy videos worse than the ads and the shorts.
I got an idea. We could use some kind of voting system where user can upvote or downvote YouTube videos, and it shows the rating when someone click on it.
It could be as simple as 2 buttons and a percentage bar right under the video, on the right, close to the dislike button that does nothing lol.
This is basically what Sponsorsblock does - it takes crowdsourced inputs to update the info for each video, then automatically skips the parts of the video that we want to avoid. "AIblock" could simply add some indicator of videos to ignore, or maybe just hide them from me.
After dealing with lists like this for far too long, Google will find ways to block it.
The best solution up to date is Brave Browser.
They do provide their own "lists", you do not have access to it :)
That is the beauty of it, you cannot, neither can big techs so it lasts longer.
So far, Brave filter is the only one able to block Shorts and a lot of crappy from YT. No filter will do that, or will get blocked very soon until a new one is released.
i can't even get youtube to load with ublock.. theres a years old thread with hundreds of comments on the github -- what are people actually using today to preserve their sanity on youtube?
edit: the issue with ublock is the black screen - sometimes the video loads after 10 or so seconds, sometimes it doesnt. i dont consider hiding the ad while still having to wait around for it to finsish playing behind an overlay the same as "blocking" :|
Using ublock and umatrix both on firefox with full tracking protection enabled. Don't recall ever having any issues with youtube. Sometimes an alert will pop up "see why you're experiencing playback interruptions" and it clicks through to a page about how this is due to my adblocking extension but the joke is on them because I don't recall it ever actually being interrupted. It's just this erroneous alert that occasionally pops up.
Auto video playback in Twitter/X isn’t much better especially on the mobile app. I realised this can be remedied by switching to the webapp. It’s a subpar user experience due to constraints of mobile web (and lack of investment by X) but it’s also likely why auto video playback rarely works, so it evens out.
Is frustrating I have no control over it s as a paying user, same with hiding the blue checkmark
I've noticed other junk like 'games' and ads for paid 'premium' content getting through uBlock's filter list. Hope those are added to the list too.
I used uBlock's element zapper feature to block the youtube logo on top left, because it's often animated and always distracting (I desperately need fewer distractions when using youtube, not more, even if minor).
It's just the most horrible thing. The whole idea of YouTube for me was to control what you watch in comparison to traditional TV where they fed you what they wanted. I know people say that you should not click on it but we all how low times in our day that we have exhausted our brain.
As a user that doesn't use uBlock, I was also kind of sick of youtube shorts shoving into my eyes. I just made my own firefox plugins forcibly remove them as well. It is good to see the filter list here. Looks like I missed out on the mobile ones.
I swear I didn't even know one COULD pay for YouTube!!
Why would you want to?
They're are so many good front ends that block ALL that toxic garbage. Revamped still works, so does pipepipe, youpipe, noutube, etc.
I know this won't help much, however, FreeTube can help with this. Yes, it is a standalone app, however...
Also, if you a Google/Youtube employee, rubbing your hands together, making fun of folks, and generally thinking negative thoughts, take it from a former veteran software engineer/manager (never had the desire to move up the ladder, and I am disabled now thanks to a tragic accident): There are a ton of negative comments about your UX, even from paid users. Nobody likes your shit. They only tolerate it because you currently have a monopoly. That will not always be the case. You are failing yourself, your job, and your users. Learn to put those users first. If Google had stuck to that early on, uBlock Origin wouldn't exist.
I know everyone at Google is tone deaf, so let me put this another way: Someone is ALWAYS left holding the bag. It could be you, the lowly programmer, or it could be you, the lowly manager. It could also be anyone in C-Suite. Once the numbers don't align with what investors want to see, someone will be blamed. As we reach the top of an AI bubble, those at the top are going to want to find a way to blame others down below, that means you will likely take the hit.
I would pay any money for ability to block for my kids chosen channels on youtube. For some reason this is not possible and worthless crap keeps being promoted there.
anything that blocks the doom-scrolling mode on twitter videos?
I dont see youtube shorts, have no login to instagram or tiktok, and stopped using facebook years ago; only social media i frequent is twitter -- and once i view a video in the feed, it hijacks my attention by auto scrolling to a new video.
I burned a couple of evenings this way -- and I need to be more careful about this.
I can't even stand to visit YT without the combo of Blocktube/Unhook/uBlock Origin/SponsorBlock/Return YouTube Dislike. (Some people may also find Clickbait Remover useful.)
Blocktube is a godsend; it adds a context menu for blocking videos/channels, and you can block vids/channels/comments based on a regex or keywords (e.g. transparently remove every 'minecraft' or 'roblox' vid, or remove every comment with 'Telegram' in it). It even removes vids before the DOM rendering, so blocked vids don't show up as empty title cards or blank spaces.
Unhook lets you independently toggle visibility of the home feed, the rec sidebar, endscreen recs, comments, shorts, and the unrelated BS they ad to search results. (The latest YT update lets endscreen recs slip through again; be sure to add
youtube.com##.html5-video-player.ended-mode .ytp-fullscreen-grid to your ublock filter to get rid of them again.)
Surprisingly YouTube still generates a feed for every channel's video page, so I just add channels to my RSS reader for updates instead of bothering with the increasingly flaky subscriptions page. (If they ever break this or yt-dlp I'm not even going to bother with YT in the future.)
Remember when Google exec Prabhakar Raghavan (the man who previously ran Yahoo search into the ground) made Google Search worse so they could serve more ads?
This is the YouTube philosophy; make the platform worse to drive 'engagement', completely ignoring the second and third order effects of their 'optimizations'. Want to search by upload date? Sorry, we removed that! Have some slop! Want to look for a video? Here's a bunch of unrelated bullshit instead - have you tried some slop? Also, have some ads.
The experience for creators is even worse. The recommendation algorithm and monetization policies change every month and YT conveniently gets to collect all the ad money if you've been demonitized. They're shoving a bajillion AI tools down creator's throats and even editing videos after they've been uploaded.
In the end, YouTube caters to advertisers. You're just the product.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a bot shoving slop in a human's face -- forever.
I used to use Invidious but it was breaking too often. Nowadays, I just open YouTube in a private window, or use yt-dlp from time to time to watch something later offline.
I have some lists [1] I use to hide YouTube's constant recommendations of things I've already watched.
They also hide previously watched music videos, which may be a downside.
Not a blocklist, but for anyone who wants this, Control Panel for Twitter [1] can hide most things you'd want to hide on Twitter. The latest version adds a way to keep using the Dim dark mode variant theme they recently removed.
Nice. I've also been doing this for a while too. I don't like to depend on a lot of addons, so I find the ublock only implementation of it quite elegant and fast. I also try to use filters nowadays to block other types of dark patterns (eg. Infinite scroll recommendations). It's surprising how much you can de-enshittify the modern corporate internet by just blocking tags with some css path filters.
Unpopular opinion, but I like youtube shorts. No ads, no rambling, no product placement. it forces brevity and getting to point. it is how youtube should be.
Is there an explanation for why YouTube is hell bent on pushing Shorts to people, other than to get them addicted? There must be something we can do about these abusive arseholes. I hate that the number one business strategy right now is to make something addictive. This isn't good for us.
Not everyone has the brain chemistry to watch them in a healthy way. Google seems to be preying on that population by preventing people from disabling the feature; to make some quarterly charts look better.
They appear to have recently removed the "show fewer shorts options" in the app. I pay for premium and the idea I cannot remove them from the app even as part of that is absolutely infuriating.
unlock is great. So many standalone extensions turn out to be a lot better simply as ublock filters.
I would like one of these to block the community posts as well. I'm getting really tired of seeing screencaps of Twitter engagement bait from 8 years ago. There's one account that just won't go away, even now that I'm reporting it for spam when it comes up.
Welcome to HN! Plugging your stuff is okay, but it’s generally frowned upon if you’re only here to sell something:
> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity. – https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Perhaps you could just participate in the discussion for now, and do a Show HN later when you’re ready?
You’re right, and I appreciate you pointing that out.
I’m mainly looking for early feedback to validate the direction before launch, not trying to use HN purely as a marketing channel. I’ll participate in the discussion and, once it’s ready, do a proper Show HN.
Looks great! But all the screenshots are of the settings. It would be nice to see what the end result is after enabling certain features.The preview is not the actual UX. I would like to see how will this tool change my youtube experience.
The reason I like unhook is, it doesn't change or force me to learn new ways to use YouTube but just reduce it to just video viewing with no distractions and blocking all the addictive pulls.
> It would be nice to see what the end result is after enabling certain features.
The previews in the admin panel are meant to reflect the actual UI changes on YouTube. For example, if you enable Speed Control in the player, the control appears in the player preview. Settings are saved on the fly, and when you go to youtube.com you get the modified experience accordingly.
On the website I only included a static demo, not an interactive one. Does that clarify your concern?
Maxxmod is still in development but we already have functional alpha builds. If you’re interested in testing one and giving feedback, feel free to email me at maxxmod [at] proton.me. Thanks, Pablo.
Legit question, do you guys get really bad Shorts recommendations? Mine aren't half bad (really more of the same as with regular videos) plus creators don't insert ad spots. I get it, TikTok-style scrolling is annoying, but the format has its merits. At least less yapping and more to the point.
Nearly all of the video I watch is on horizontal screens.
Whether I'm using a real computer or a BFT or an iPad or I'm watching a something with my pocket supercomputer while bored on a plane: It's horizontal. This is simply how I do it, how I have always done it, and how I am likely to always do it.
YouTube Shorts aren't compatible with this viewing method.
In addition: Nearly all of the videos I watch are longer than 3 minutes, and YouTube Shorts aren't compatible with this either.
Whether I'm watching a video because I want to be entertained or to learn something new, I want to be involved with it and focused on it. I am very capable of making time to do so when it behooves me.
---
Anyway, to answer your question: I have no idea if my YouTube Shorts recommendations are good or not good. I don't partake. I don't need empty, <3-minute dopamine hits in my life.
I constantly get tik tok style everything everywhere all at once fever dream headache rapid edited clips. There's a difference between to the point and just being brain rot delivered with no background. Reminds me of happy hardcore techno - you can't really feel the bass because it's not getting enough time to reverberate.
I avoid Shorts (and Tiktok) for the same reason I avoid stimulant drugs and video games: it depletes dopamine faster than regular YT videos (especially the somber kind of videos I mostly watch).
There are about a dozen reasons to hate shorts regardless of the content.
Everyone else has listed a bunch already. Here's yet another, the pointlessly limited UI.
There are no play controls to back, forward or scrub. You missed something? Hope it was near the beginning because while you can restart by reloading, you can't skip ahead. Want to pause at a particular spot to show your wife? You get to wait for the whole thing to play again from the start so you can hopefully pause it at the right spot. There was one important part? too bad, you can only replay the whole thing... And why? Even if you want to assume the case of some video that is actually legitimately only a couple minutes long, ok fine, but why the artificially stupid UI?
There is no legitimate reason. It's pure user manipulation. It's the service calling the shots to do what it wants to get what it wants instead of giving you a service that does what you want to give you what you want. Even if you are paying them money
There are all kinds of other problems, like I simply didn't ask for this. I don't care how great someone else thinks something is, or even if I would agree it's great if I asked for it. But anything that you don't want but can't avoid, and it's not the weather but something someone DOES have control over and is choosing to inflict on you over your expressed wishes, as a paying customer on top of all, is automatically intolerable.
But in fact I don't agree they are great at all ever. It doesn't matter what the content is or who's making it, including people I like on topics I like.
I want to say I don't have ADHD and don't want to develop it, but really idk I might actually have some level by the looks of all my unfinished projects, and even so, shorts make me feel like what people with adhd look and sound like from the outside. It's a hell existence. I don't understand how people can just willingly sit there and let these things feed them this constant stream of spastic hyper ephemeral shit. Even if I can understand how someone can fall into it unwittingly initially, how do they not realize what's happening to them after a while? Is everyone really so utterly unconscious?
If you do want to watch one for whatever reason you can open it in the standard interface. The video IDs are neutral it's just the URL that determines which interface you get.
Actually I guess a browser extension to redirect to a fixed up URL would resolve the problem entirely.
Mine are usually pretty bad. If I ever do see one that I like I catch myself flicking through way too many of them afterwards and I hate that. So I prefer to hide them entirely.
There’s a lot of stupid shit garbage on the internet that needs more blocking and nobody’s doing anything about it. Aside from bad JavaScript and css garbage and other things that are obvious and still only slightly blocked by ubo, there’s entire swaths of categories that are going completely untouched.
Every Reddit mod post is cancer for example. So is every pinned post and automod. 99% of email. Any story about farting or buttholes or diarrhea or any other child joke about how you were unable to be in control of your butthole. I don’t want to hear it and every single day there it is. Any pro-terrorism post from jihadist groups like maga, posts from other nations pretending to be Americans, posts asking people to explain a loaded joke they understand but are trying to get more views on or spread the topic about. Any ai video any video about crypto any fake news.
There’s a lot of room for improvement. Even just detecting things like if a news article doesn’t actually contain information. It seems like we have a ton of areas we could be filtering out cancer a lot better.
Best I can come up with: people flag shit and it goes to a server, and like PiHole, anyone subscribed to that server will have the crap excised.
I'm liking Apple's "Hide Distracting Items…" feature in Safari. Now if only everyone's audits could be shared, a consensus arrived at, then others could be spared having to spend time hiding-distracting-items themselves.
On the main page, shorts, as all the other videos, are served by the recommendation algorithm which should filter out general audience crap you'd see if you're not logged in or have view history disabled. You'd normally see the same stuff you're subscribed to there, plus a few random videos of cats. Maybe a wamen butt occasionally. Might as well hide the main page entirely if you're not that easily entertained. To be quite frank, the main page is such an echo chamber lately that I almost got myself unhooked from procrastinating on YouTube.
On the search page, shorts are mostly a mixed bag, but you do occasionally get useful results.
So what does this solve? Seems like a form of protest nobody important (those in power) cares about.
Another thing is, I have, to my own surprise, discovered a few decent channels that I like, that post their videos in form of shorts exclusively. That's a somewhat new trend and mostly relevant to humor-related or music channels, though.
Almost forgot to mention. YouTube recently added the scroll bar to the shorts so they aren't all that different from the other videos now.
Filtering content is not "a form of protest", it is about deciding what content you want to see in your browser and what not. Youtube, even the paid version, does not offer much in terms of customising one's experience (imo the "algorithm" deciding what you should watch based on your history does not count as one) and shorts is a proven addictive pattern that one may not want to encounter online.
It is fine if you like watching shorts, such filter lists are for those who do not want to watch shorts.
I might be wrong, but I don't think people really care about the addictiveness in the first place. As I see it, the shorts were irritating to see, mainly because they were heavily out of tune with the rest of recommendations. But they seem to have tuned them to be more in line with the rest of the videos. Being not that different from the rest of the videos one gets recommended, there is not much point in hiding them? I'm not exactly protecting shorts here. My point is, you can, of course, cut some of the videos from the feed, but the rest would still be affected by the same algorithm. You still don't get to filter anything, really. So what's the point?
If addictiveness really is that much of a factor, I rest my case.
The main benefit for me is hiding content I'm actively uninterested in seeing. Shorts are portrait mode content that pretty much never seem to be long enough to discuss anything interesting. I watch on widescreen monitors, so I just don't care for them. There's nothing else to it really.
In addition to the unhook addon that others also recommended and is great, I would also suggest, as an alternative, setting a redirection rule from "www.youtube.com/shorts/XYWZ" to "www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYWZ". This will play the short but in the classical youtube video (landscape) format, with no infinite scrolling, or replay or autoplay (assuming these are in general disabled), which takes away a big part of the addictive aspect of shorts.
I use the rule
in uBlock Origin.
(Except that it doesn't work if you click on a short from YouTube's interface - it loads with JavaScript which bypasses the redirection.)
try tapermonkey script
``` // ==UserScript== // @name YouTube Shorts → Normal Player // @match ://www.youtube.com/ // @run-at document-start // ==/UserScript==
function redirectShorts() { const match = location.pathname.match(/^\/shorts\/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/); if (match) { location.replace(`/watch?v=${match[1]}`); } }
// Catch initial page load redirectShorts();
// Catch SPA navigation early (fires before page renders) document.addEventListener('yt-navigate-start', redirectShorts);
// Fallback document.addEventListener('yt-navigate-finish', redirectShorts); ```
Replacing "shorts" with "v" also works, so the resulting URL is www.youtube.com/v/XYWZ
Oh great, didn't know that! Thanks! That makes things much simpler.
That's an awesome idea — sometimes I really do want to watch a short but not in that interface. Do you know how to set this up in general?
Redirector to the rescue: https://einaregilsson.com/redirector/
Been using it for annoyances like Slack pushing you to their desktop app, or fixing links when sites change domains (ahem, Anna’s Archive).
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I use this addon for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/fi/firefox/addon/youtube-shorts-b...
I personally solved this by using revanced and disabling shorts completely.
Same here with FreeTube. YT has become a toxic experience on any browser and recently it has stopped working on my laptop with Firefox and uBlock Origin, no matter if I surf it as logged in in my main google account or not. The same arrangement works on my main desktop, but i mostly use FreeTube there as well.
I personally solved this by never clicking a short. We don't have to engage with every technology presented to us.
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Instead of directly clicking the short to play it, open the menu at the bottom right and click add to playlist. This will play out in the classic player without having to configure ublock rules. And if the rest of the playlist is playing at more than 1x, this will also apply to the short.
I personally solved this need with a simple bookmarklet: https://samulisuomi.github.io/youtube-unshortify-bookmarklet...
I have a userscript that does this, but one downside is that it refreshes the page, so if I go back in history (eg I misclicked), it resets the recommendation page
A nuclear option that's worked extremely well for me is going into Youtube's settings and disabling history.
I no longer am even able to see shorts, they don't get suggested to me.
However, this is an extreme nuclear option and also disables the entire 'Home' and for-you type content. You can search and watch videos, but it flips it so it is 100% intention driven. Which means discoverability and browsing is non-existent. You're still able to see your existing subscriptions but that's it.
It's REALLY helped me disconnect from the addictive dopamine of the infinite, short type formats. YMMV
This is exactly what I’ve done for my Google settings after feeling more and more upset with what the Youtube homepage was showing me. Not so much in that it was necessarily contrary to what I may have wanted to watch, but more-so me thinking “My god.. is this what I’ve become?”
I now much prefer to open Youtube (quasi)tabula rasa. I still have subscriptions set up so I can follow “vetted” accounts, but for other things I now rely on that intentionality.
The one minor bummer is that Youtube won’t remember your spot in a video, say if you’re watching in your phone and want to continue on your desktop (or vice-versa). Not the biggest hassle to manually check the time and sync it up, though.
Yea - the not remembering a spot in a video IS a slight inconvenience, but for me it's a small price to pay in order to not get sucked into HOURS thrown away chasing the next 'hit' of dopamine from shorts.
I think this is the best way of using Youtube if you're trying to avoid brain rot and doomscrolling. This way helped me alot and gives you full control over what you consume.
For an older Internet user, it feels baffling that returning a website to a state where it shows you what you search for, and what you subscribe to, is considered an extreme nuclear option.
Amazon and Spotify and Netflix are all enormous examples of not just giving you what you asked for (->recommendation engines).
They were there all along, just less egregiously.
Even PageRank (the secret sauce in the original Google search) is arguably a recommendation engine.
You can just use PCA of some feature then use cosine similarity, this has been known forever.
I'm also an older Internet user, but I assumed that it was a nuclear option to so dramatically change the expected behavior that without warning people they would be quite shocked. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I have been happy with the serendipity of YouTube’s algorithm generally. I followed an external link to a YouTube video about an exotic piano, and played a few related videos afterwards. These were videos about other unusual musical instruments, such as very high-pitched and very low-pitched wind instruments. And somehow that was part of a process leading to Japanese metal bands.
Dopamine-driven behavior in ourselves is certainly to be watched for.
That's weird. They keep showing me rage-bait videos with like 100 views. I'd much prefer pianos and Japanese metal bands.
I DO miss the discoverability. I really do. But my self control for watching shorts ends up being incredibly self sabotaging. I truly wish I could permanently disable shorts in some way. I wish I could use my DNS to block shorts, but alas they're not distinct.
It doesn't break subscribed channels though so I just bookmarked that page as my youtube page.
This doesn't seem nuclear, this seems WAI. YouTube gives you the option of only seeing what you want to see.
I wrote this little quick and dirty userscript for myself sometime back:
This isn't as comprehensive as the uBlock filter but it has worked pretty well for me so far.
Here is another one I found in my personal userscripts. I believe this script is more effective than my previous one because it prevents recommendations for Shorts or other videos from being shown.
This is what I used, they have field `is-short`, https://github.com/epicseven-cup/remove-youtube-short/blob/m...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/remove-youtub...
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I did a firefox addon 3 months ago. You can disable/enable things in addon menu. I'm using Study mode actively as I'm a student.
https://github.com/ErenayDev/YouTube-Focus
Oh this is amazing, thank you! I tried to make my own but youtube's CSS is so complex, I gave up. I have no idea why they push shorts to me when I'm on my computer. But then again, I really cannot stand them, even on my phone.
I also just discovered a way[1] to just get real videos from my youtube RSS feeds, free from shorts. Honestly it's been a joy to not have my RSS reader notify me for a old video republished as vertical.
[1]: https://blog.amen6.com/blog/2025/01/no-shorts-please-hidden-...
The CSS is complex indeed. Moreover, the page renders the Shorts widgets after the page has completed loading, so JavaScript-based solutions need to exercise a little care in ensuring that it can hide the distracting elements after the page has loaded. Despite the complexity, I've found that just hiding all elements with the 'ytd-rich-shelf-renderer' class just works fine. For example:
This single line of CSS seems to just work fine for me.
Unhook[1] has been my go-to for this. Gives full customization over shorts, recommendations, comments, etc.
1a: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...
1b: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/unhook-remove-youtu...
Sadly, it hasn't been updated since 2024 and is slowly breaking. Haven't found a good replacement yet.
I keep Control Panel for YouTube [1] up to date with the latest YouTube shenanigans. Most recently: restoring the Related sidebar layout with the giant thumbs, if you're not hiding them.
Shorts are hidden and redirected if you land on one externally by default, and it _was_ also restoring the sort by Upload date filter UI, until YouTube went and killed that in the API ;_;
[1] https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube
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Unhook is solid. I’m building Maxxmod [1] (shameless plug). The goal is similar in spirit, but with more granular control, a structured admin panel with live previews.
Still in development, but feedback from the HN crowd is very welcome. The site includes interactive prototypes and screenshots that give a clear picture of what it’s aiming to become.
[1] https://maxxmod.com
> Unhook is solid.
Last updated 2 years ago (Apr 12, 2024)
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For anyone whose Unhook has stopped working, I cannot recommend Youtube Redux enough. I originally installed it because I hate the new layout, but it is amazing in all the options it allows, including disabling infinite scroll and removing shorts altogether.
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-redux...
Some of the Unhook options are broken nowadays I think. Its that or one of my other 10 YouTube extensions I now have to deshittify that damn page. Disable translate, SponsorBlock, Disable AutoPlay, some better thumbnail thing..
You should check out dearrow as well. Gets rid of clickbait titles and thumbnails
Does it still work for you? Unhook hasn't been updated in years and doesn't work for shorts anymore, on Firefox. It's still worth it to get rid of the suggested videos though.
It still works for me in Brave. While we're on the topic of "Unhooking" I also like to recommend the DeArrow[1] extension for YouTube.
1: https://dearrow.ajay.app/
It works fine for me, I have not noticed degradation
> doesn't work for shorts anymore, on Firefox
I do get shorts in search results, but if I click they do not load (the audio plays but no video). For the purposes it fills, that blocks them enough for me.
I clicked comments to say the same thing. Can recommend
I’m sure I’ve clicked “show fewer shorts” every single time it’s shown me shorts. It seems to make zero difference.
I’ve noticed this behavior for all Google properties. Every time I click “not interested” “don’t show me this again” or anything similar, it seems to have no effect as the best case. The worst case I’ve seen is when clicking these options seems to acts as a positive signal to show me more of that content. I’ve noticed this over years.
As such, I’ve simply stopped interacting with googles recommendation systems and most of googles content delivery systems. Including using YouTube as minimally as possible.
I feel like they don't use those signals, just time spent...and you spend more time fishing for the 'not interested' button
It's the same in tiktok: there's literally a button that says “I'm not interested in any live videos”, but it keeps inserting livestreams into the feed anyway.
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Yeah they take any interaction as a give me more button. Its gross.
I'm 100% convinced that these 'show fewer' options are there for dark-pattern reasons. They are sprinkled throughout Facebook and LinkedIn as well. My hypothesis is that companies put them there to give consumers the idea that they have any control at all over their "feed." But if they actually try to use them, they discover the options don't actually do anything, and resign themselves to whatever the algorithm feeds them.
I clicked the "show fewer shorts" button on youtube for a while--they'd come back every 2-3 weeks, but then I'd click it again. Then I tried a different tactic: as soon as I saw a short in my "recommendations" I closed youtube and didn't return for at least 24 hours. I only had to do that about three times and I haven't seen shorts in my recommendations for at least 6 months now.
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It's purely there to provide a signal to the oxygen waster product manager who is pushing the obnoxious "feature" in the first place. Their KPIs are not only "positive" engagement with the feature but also lack of "negative" engagement such as clicking the "show fewer" button. It otherwise has zero user-facing impact.
The phrasing alone proves it's a dark pattern. At this point, I think we need some good-guy-AI to fight the algorithms, dark patters, and bad-guy-AI. It should also do everything it can to discourage the bad guys from even trying to implement them...
I do the same, and after a day of doing it- they seem to go away for a time depending on the platform, but they always come back and sometimes they come back a lot.
The web-browser is the least aggressive and I think I haven’t even seen them on Apple TV.
The iPhone App is the most egregious offender of not respecting the request though, it seems to almost not care at all, and now the thumbnails on the home screen have started autoplaying (with audio) and I can’t find how to disable it (older instructions seem to be invalid).
They have all the content though; so I have no choice but to deal with this, until a good enough competitor comes along and my favourite youtube channels upload to both places.
Auto play with audio needs to be controllable for accessibility. May be a regulatory requirement depending where you live. So it’s gotta be there somewhere.
Modern tech companies behave like abusers or creepy stalkers. They won't take No for an answer.
That would be a beautiful revival of an ad campain.
"NO MEANS NO!"
I'm disappointed that even Signal does this when asking you for access to your contacts.
To be fair, as long as you aren't logged in, that's the best you're going to get with cookies or local storage.
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For me, clicking that hides shorts for 30 days and then I need to click it again. So it's a monthly ritual.
That’s like the crosswalk button that does nothing. It’s there purely for the placebo effect.
They'll also record the press and probably use it as part of their "KPIs". "The number of suckers trying to have control has decreased 5% this month, well done all".
See also: call elevator to your floor buttons
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Short form video is addictive, so they want to push it. It maximizes time on site.
It's amazing that the algorithms are so universal rather than personalized. You'd think they'd want to notice that I _absolutely never_ watch shorts, and stop showing them to me, instead recommending something else.
I understand why FB/IG do it; I _occasionally_ give in and get sucked into a couple. But that NEVER happens to me with YT.
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As someone that pays for YouTube premium (and isn’t served ads), I don’t understand why they push Shorts to me too. Presumably they should want me to spend the bare minimum amount of time on YouTube necessary to keep me subscribed, as any further use just contributes to higher infrastructure and bandwidth costs.
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I have done the same and it seems to have no consequence. I suspect YouTube only wants to track the opposition to shorts, not to provide a personal preference for their users. This uBlock filter is therefore much appreciated
For me, it does result in no shorts on the main recommendations list. They still appear on the recommendations shown while a video is playing (and there they don't have the "show fewer" option) but they eventually (maybe 7-10 days or so) reappear on the main list as well.
this is all in the iOS YouTube app, which is the only place I watch YouTube.
It used to be that they were gone for a month. Now they're gone for a day. Possibly less.
"My Eyes! The Goggles Do Nothing!"--Rainier Wolfcastle as Radioactive Man
It's like pressing the "close door" button on an elevator.
Door close button is supposed to cancel the door dwell time. But due to some disability codes in some regions all major manufactures allow it to be disabled (as required by some codes). i.e. The owners/managers/technicians can disable it.
I "Provide Feedback" every time anything annoys me, repeatedly. And I'm annoyed really easily. I have family premium, so I make sure to mention that.
- Hide all shorts, everywhere on the site, not just on my PC. uBO filters are amazing, but limited.
- The root page to show my Subscriptions instead of "Your History Is Turned Off..."
- I want links to go directly to the video and fill the window. I'll use the back button to go back where I came from, and native "Full Screen" if I want it to fill my screen.
All of it could be non-default settings available with Premium only.
It also seems to make zero difference :/
Clearly that is useless for people who browse YT anonymously, hence the usefulness of the list.
The whole YT front page is an absolute utter clusterfook.
[flagged]
Chafe them nipples.
Seriously though, do any of our German / French compatriots here on HN have different experience of corporations, versus the USA's "maximizing profit" purpose, given the "corporate social responsibility" mandate of those countries?
Greed (opportunism) is human and I wonder if that's "better" in the Germany or French corporate-world?
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Many stuff are addictive, some legal (smoking, gambling), some legal with prescription (drugs) and some illigal (opioids). Infinite scrolling, either video only (yt shorts) or mixed content lies in the first category. This is a war one fights by himself as law doesn't helps with gatekeeping. Any weapon that helps me is welcome. Filtering the content that whould otherwise polute my screen space and distract me from the useful content is desirable. In Homer Iliad, Ulysses ordered his sailors to tie him up in order to withstand the voice of Sirens, while they were wearing earplugs. Today we have uBlock.
This reads like AI slop?
Haha, I take it as a compliment for now. Being not a native English speaker and managing to tie an LLM is a little flattering. Besides, Sirens are mentioned in Odyssey.
> Many stuff are
> polute
Not at all. It's an organic comment.
It didn’t read like that to me, at all. Also, did you mean to ask a question? :)
ESL AI?
I’m paying over 40 dollars a month for YouTube but it doesn’t allow me to choose almost anything of what I see, despite trying hard to fine-tune my recommendations.
I can’t permanently turn off shorts - and this I find personally insulting. It really feels like encountering a drug dealer outside my house every time I come home, always expecting me to cave and try some of that good smack.
But apart from ignoring me when I say I’m not interested in whole genres of ‘fun’ videos, it also resets the streaming quality to the lowest setting every single day and then hides the quality setting deep inside a menu with several fiddly clicks.
And this isn’t for my benefit of course: I can easily stream 4K video to my screens. It’s to shave a few cents off each stream and max the gouging.
YT is desperate for me to engage with rage bait news, and I’m not biting.
It’s so god damn annoying, regardless of how often I choose to ignore channels or don’t suggest feedback.
All they care about is vote time…give me content I want to view!
Also, in the evenings, my timeline gets weirdly paranoid phobia centric, like deep insecurities people live with that are triggering and keep you up late. It’s so obvious YT is doing this to try and bait me into watching these deeply emotional and personal content, and again, ignoring it and providing feedback seems to do nothing to my feed. I hate it.
I kept having issues like this, with a different kinds of videos, until I scrubbed my history of any of the kinds of videos I did not want.
If I click on something I thought I would want to watch and it is the kind of video I do not want recommended to me I immediately delete it from my watch history, block the channel, and some times block that profile from viewing my youtube channel.
~2 years ago I never had to delete anything from my watch history and my feed/recommendations were ok, now I have to if I do not want my feed/recommendations to occasionally be flooded with something I do not want.
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I only use YouTube with my watch history set to off. So there is no feed, and I only see updates from channels I actually subscribed to. If I want to see some random crap I go search for it but it’s a clean slate next time I open the app. I have found this method of using YouTube to be extremely useful.
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Do not give them the satisfaction. Dont like videos and never comment on anything. The videos are the bait. The comments sections are the trap. Use youtube as a multi-channel TV. Keep it a one-way stream of data. Give them nothing beyond the unavoidable knowledge of what you watch.
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I just use two browsers. On one my recommendations are truly well curated but I can’t watch a single out of place video or my feed is corrupted. The other browser is for brain rot time and it’s the Wild West.
I used to have an account for my kids. I thought I would be smart by seeding the history with educational content. I clicked on a lot of videos, let them play etc. I was there when my kids would watch videos - and slowly but surely YouTube started recommending junk AI generated videos.
It is my opinion their algorithms are tuned to push this kind of engagement no matter what.
Turn off history. Completely disables the food. The only content you see is what you search for.
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I'm amazed that they still haven't added any way to organise/categorise your subscribed channels, it's just a big flat list.
YouTube is social media first, even if it also happens to be a repository of useful content. Social media does not want you to navigate with agency. They want to choose what you see because it lets them keep you on the platform longer, which is the entire goal.
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What's crazy is that their adtech definitely knows how to categorise stuff down to super specific topics, yet they only use that internally.
And not even alphabetical. It's ridiculous.
You should see me or my wife sometimes scrolling down this nine miles long single column list on the Roku to find a particular channel. It's in there, it just could be anywhere in there...
They didn't happen to post any new videos lately so they aren't on the main subscriptions page of latest videos, you have to go to the menu on the left to the list of all subscribed channels and just arrow down forever, back up, down again... Why in the ever loving world isn't that list at least alphabetical?
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You can do it by using a feed reader and subscribing to the channels rss feeds. Keeps you better isolated from dark patterns as well.
edit: has the added benefit that there are different feeds for All/Videos/Shorts/Live/Specific Playlists, so this is another way to avoid shorts
PocketTube is great for this.
Why are you still paying for Youtube? I run uBlock and haven't seen ads in years, don't see any cellphone format crap now thanks to this list, and VacuumTube on my TV defaults to 4K.
I'm not OP but I pay because I want to support content creators. It also removes ads from players that don't have blocking, such as Roku.
Of course there are other ways to support creators such as donating and buying swag. I do that too.
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i'm the same as you, but YT has started to place its content behind sign-in wall
Anon usage + uBlock and VPN, is a dead man walking
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Because it’s $6 a month where I live and at that price it’s easier than any faffing or arms race with Adblock.
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Hacker News commenters: “I don’t like ads. They are evil”
Also HN commenters: “I don’t want to pay for goods and services”
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I pay mainly because a really like being able to play the videos in iOS pip background mode. I do find it crazy that Apple allows that OS level feature to be paywalled by apps.
doesn’t work on iPad or iOS? Also not worth my time given how cheap it is
I use ReVanced on Android and it allows me to hide shorts. A 'pirated' version of the app offers a much better experience than even the paid option of it.
> We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.
- Gabe Newell
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Yup. I pay for YouTube, but not being able to disable shorts made me use ReVanced.
Since the beginning of Youtube, it has always struck my as reeking of such desperation to keep you hooked. Just the idea that you're watching a video, and there is simultaneously a list of 10 OTHER videos right next to the view. Most have become so numbed to that, but if you step back you should find it just such a sign of desperation to hook you (is the best way I can put it).
Before a video is even over, they have to plaster the video window with MORE VIDEOS. "Here try this, what about this other thing, here have you considered this?"
My mind is always "I haven't even digested this one video and you're already PUSHING MORE!"
When my kids are over my shoulder on YouTube I'm constantly zooming in w/ Mac zoom to obscure the other videos, the other spam, etc.
Just learn to absorb and soak in one thing. And digest it for a moment.
It's all so obnoxious and it's now the norm.
FWIW, I only ever login in a fresh private window.
First I will say that clearly all these attention hooks must work or they wouldn't keep doing them but, for me, it just doesn't match how I use YT.
Specifically, I am almost always going to YT with the intention of watching something specific. It could be because I need to solve a problem (eg installing a smoke detector). I also for some reason use it to play music despite having Spotify. I honestly don't know why.
But I almost never go to YT to look for something to watch. I do sometimes watch a related video after I'm done but this wouldn't happen more than 10-15% of the time. I think I'm in the minority here as people seem to go on YT and just keep chaining videos.
But I find YT's interface to be a confusing mess of "me too" products that are half-assed and various likely fiefdoms that force UX onto things that don't make sense.
For example, YT's Live streams are, well, ass. The player is terrible. The UX is terrible. And you still have that right panel showing related videos. But watching Live videos is a vastly different UX than watching VODs. So why is it there? I suspect because whatever team owns that recommendation panel has a lot of power. And it probably drives metrics still so it's still there.
And bringing this back to YT Shorts. Ugh, I too would like to never see them. It's a "me too" Tiktok. And it's worse. Tiktok's UI/UX is just a step above Shorts (and Reels). And I spend 98% of my Tiktok time on my fyp.
But yes the "please watch another video" UI is everywhere. The end of a video, your home page, the right panel and in-video prompts/
As the other guy said, it's like having a drug dealer wait outside your house and try to push you some smack. This must be illegal, the fact that it's not illegal must be illegal.
I can sympathize a bit with YouTube trying to boost engagement to increase ad views, like, love it or hate it, thats the game they have to play hosting and serving petabytes of video.
But all of that shit should disappear the moment I start paying for it out of pocket. Like, I'm already paying, getting me to watch more videos costs them more money that it would to leave me the fuck alone!
We have such powerful AI tools these days. Every media recommendation service should have a slider you can set to indicate how much you want to be "challenged."
High challenge = CS papers explained
Medium challenge = bridge engineering videos
Low challenge = some guy playing video games for you on YouTube
This is exactly the only reason why I don’t pay for YouTube. Why would I pay money to make it even more addictive, when what I want is to make it less addictive.
Turn off your watch history. It stops all shorts except from your subscriptions.
If they remove this, I will surely be done with YouTube. I was so desperate to disable shorts and ready to be done with the app, but then I learned that disabling watch history pretty much perfectly allows me to use the app how I want to.
Pretty sure shorts disables if you turn off watch history: (https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/08/youtube-update-homepage-wa...)
I’ve had watch history off for years and it shows me shorts above my actual subscriptions.
> I can’t permanently turn off shorts - and this I find personally insulting. It really feels like encountering a drug dealer outside my house every time I come home, always expecting me to cave and try some of that good smack.
This should be illegal..
YouTube's hostility is truly remarkable, by far the most egregious that the Subscriptions page in the TV app having a dedicated row for "recommendations" and "shorts" before you can proceed.
Not only I cannot turn off shorts, recently the iOS YouTube app auto plays random short the millisecond I start the app. That is against my user desires in three different ways - and there's no way I can find to stop it.
Grrr.
Why are you still watching youtube, then? What's drawing you in?
And Google whines when people install ad-blockers. It's pathetic.
I was willing to watch ads. But then Google introduced NEVER-ENDING ads, when the program is interrupted frequently and will never return unless you herd it along periodically by clicking Skip. Screw you, Google. I'm cooking, with my hands covered with who knows what, and now I can't watch the program.
Then stop paying if you are unsatisfied
Don't pay for YouTube
And yet if Youtube didn't have a paid option (and still now, even while it does) people would be saying If you're not paying, You're the product
Sorry - these companies have proven they're malicious even while you're paying them
(Except possibly Gmail. Facebook Verified is apparently a crock of shit, but Gmail MIGHT give you some account support more than people who don't pay)
but you're still paying
I hate that you can’t block specific channels from showing up in your feed. So much ai slop.
This is not true. You can in fact block specific channels. From YouTube support[1]: > On certain pages, such as your Home and Watch Next pages, find a video from a channel that you don’t want recommended to you.
> Click More next to the video title.
> Select Don't recommend channel .
[1]: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6342839?hl=en
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And the community posts and polls from random communities you have no interest in and don’t give you the same “don’t show me content from this channel”
this is a filter im using that blocks a channel from showing in the search results. just add a channel name after "title"
youll have to have to repeat the same name with other filters to also hide them on the homepage or the suggestions sidebar.
freetube is another option that works on desktop and it lets you block a channel by name by adding it in the "distraction free" section of the settings. if youre on android theres also a version of freetube in the f-droid store that works ok enough, even thought the freetube UI is not really designed for mobile
obviously this only gets you so far. at some point there could be more slop than non-slop so it wont be possible to block them all, but so far im finding this useful for the few repeat offenders that keep showing up in the search results*
If you pay for youtube, you are part of the problem
Youtube is far too significant a video collection to risk losing it. Yes there is insane anounts of garbage and yes their history is getting spottier by the day, but nothing else comes close to all of the good stuff that is still on it.
Google needs to get its shit together and give users power tools. YT hasn't improved materially for many years now. I hope they can snap out of whatever governance dysfunction they're in. Not sure whether increasing financial pressure (above what must, no doubt, build up on its own) is the right answer here. It will probably only lead to more enshittification, and a long, slow death and I'm pretty saddened by that thought.
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Yes, enshittification.
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I use Brave to watch YouTube. I was pleasantly surprised that they had so many YouTube related features, blocking shorts is one of them.
Same. One I want though is for it to remember to not auto-preview videos. YouTube refuses to remember this setting.
I prefer using RYS <https://lawrencehook.com/rys/> which has this as a feature, but a lot more, too.
A Tapermonkey script which redirects a short to the classic YT experience is somewhat more helpful, because sometimes there are interesting snippets in the Shorts. This lets you see the video but breaks you out of doomscrolling.
"Enhancer for YouTube" have that 'convert Shorts' option or hide them entirely.
Just pause watch history and it will disable shorts recommendation. The only shorts you will see will be from your subscribed channels.
I've always had watch history off, but my searches now return a couple of pages of short form nonsense, before my actual results.
YouTube search is just broken. Has been for a long long long time. You get 3-4 relevant results and then it just shows you random unrelated crap.
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NEVER worked for me. I have always shorts shoved in every possible page, device and results, and I have watch history off since forever.
I can confirm this works great, you are back to a mid 2010s kind of homescreen without any of the modern cellphone format crap.
What bothers me most about YT is that it constantly plays videos with an AI-generated voice.
In general, I like AI features and use AI daily to build prototypes, but this feature looks so stupid to me and feels so wrong. I have no problem with it being an option, but by default I just want to watch the videos with their original soundtracks. But instead YT decides that I should watch the videos with some mediocre AI translation...
Maybe I could disable it using an account, but I still prefer not to have one when it's not necessary.
Daily reminder that these tools are made possible by the power of general purpose computing, and corporate interests want to take it away. In a hypothetical future not too far from us where your devices become "trusted", you will have to view whatever they want you to see, with no recourse like blocking ads or undesirable content.
Then I shall not look at it at all. Some months ago Facebook gave me the "ads vs payment" ultimatum. I closed the tab and didn't log into Facebook since.
That's good, but everyone has only a limited amount of social capital to refuse popular things. School teachers, which are essentially agents of the government, often make your children watch Youtube videos, for example.
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What's the "ads vs payment" ultimatum, they block ad-blockers? Occasionally someone sends me a link there, and it never bothers me for having uBO.
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Oh, it's a list you can add to your uBO. I thought it was a descriptive headline: "(The) uBlock filter list (is going) to hide ..."
I only watch Youtube via browser now for both adblocking and my own custom userscripts, both on my laptop and my phone. A couple creators I watch mostly do shorts so I tolerate them but I wrote a userscript that changes all /shorts/<videoid> URLs into normal /watch?v=<videoid> to lessen the temptation to doomscroll.
I've been using invidious for a while now but I remember I had blocked all recommends and suggestions on YT so I never saw shorts anyways (I know the recommend block was thru ublock but I can't remember if I'd blocked suggestions through YT options or if that was also a ublock filter).
Also a great way to avoid mindless feed-surfing. I only watched videos from subs or that I have specifically searched for rather than getting sucked into the algo vortex.
That takes care of the browser. Now I just need a way to filter out short videos in NewPipe (and ideally a way to specify that I only want very long ones)
And Roku.
This is one of the several reasons I always react almost violently whenever someone tries to be smarmy in any threads about adblockers on youtube, trying to say that paying for youtube makes everything good the honest way.
I do in fact pay for youtube and have for like 15 years or more, and it still sucks for a variety of reasons.
"why pay then?" for the same reason I would pay to have 8 of my fingernails pulled out instead of all 10.
Is this really working on ALL shorts?
And if I click on the panel "no more shorts", is this setting then applied continuously?
Nothing’s working on ALL shorts, not for long, because google shakes things up semi-frequently to jam shorts down everybody’s throats
To solve it once and for all you’d probably want to extract the length of all displayed videos and hide all that fit within the short’s limits
I have leechblock setup to block:
and that seems to block all viewing of shorts. It doesn't stop their inclusion in playlists/recommendations or on a given channel's page(s). Works for me.
Idk, I’m using a previous version of this list (the one it was forked from) and it works for me! Didn’t even realize it wasn’t updated.
I would pay for YouTube premium again if I could switch off shorts.
I actually stopped paying for premium to make YouTube less appealing.
Another technique is to turn off watch history. As soon as you do that, you get a blank page on YouTube. It puts the decision making on the user to choose what to watch. I rarely get into the rage bait or shorts. It’s shown in search results and the sidebar. But at least, it’s not in the face when you open the website.
was able to get these added to ublock origin lite, which works in chrome; just paste the content directly into the custom filter settings.
same. hopefully it doesn't change frequently
I switched from using YouTube to invidious mainly because they don't support shorts and blocked YouTube on the DNS level, it's a bit slower, but I know I won't be sucked into doom-scrolling
I'm curious if anyone knows of something like SponsorBlock or a UBlock list, that can flag tje onslaught of AI videos that are appearing. I find those crappy videos worse than the ads and the shorts.
I got an idea. We could use some kind of voting system where user can upvote or downvote YouTube videos, and it shows the rating when someone click on it.
It could be as simple as 2 buttons and a percentage bar right under the video, on the right, close to the dislike button that does nothing lol.
This is basically what Sponsorsblock does - it takes crowdsourced inputs to update the info for each video, then automatically skips the parts of the video that we want to avoid. "AIblock" could simply add some indicator of videos to ignore, or maybe just hide them from me.
After dealing with lists like this for far too long, Google will find ways to block it. The best solution up to date is Brave Browser.
They do provide their own "lists", you do not have access to it :) That is the beauty of it, you cannot, neither can big techs so it lasts longer. So far, Brave filter is the only one able to block Shorts and a lot of crappy from YT. No filter will do that, or will get blocked very soon until a new one is released.
Everything is public, won't last!
i can't even get youtube to load with ublock.. theres a years old thread with hundreds of comments on the github -- what are people actually using today to preserve their sanity on youtube?
edit: the issue with ublock is the black screen - sometimes the video loads after 10 or so seconds, sometimes it doesnt. i dont consider hiding the ad while still having to wait around for it to finsish playing behind an overlay the same as "blocking" :|
Using ublock and umatrix both on firefox with full tracking protection enabled. Don't recall ever having any issues with youtube. Sometimes an alert will pop up "see why you're experiencing playback interruptions" and it clicks through to a page about how this is due to my adblocking extension but the joke is on them because I don't recall it ever actually being interrupted. It's just this erroneous alert that occasionally pops up.
Still using ublock. Recently there's a delay starting vid sometimes, about 3 sec. I can deal with it.
Ublock origin for whatever reason never blocks ads before video for me. IDK what is up with my parameters because I know it works for other people.
I have the same issue. Perma-black loading screen that resolves as soon as I disable ublock origin. Using Firefox on Debian.
Thats interesting. If you’re on Chrome I’d try out Firefox just to see. I haven’t had any issues for a long time.
Works fine for me, FF Win11
Premium
yep, can confirm. we pay for the service, we use an ad-blocker and we are the ones affected. oh the irony... i now have ublock disabled for youtube.
Auto video playback in Twitter/X isn’t much better especially on the mobile app. I realised this can be remedied by switching to the webapp. It’s a subpar user experience due to constraints of mobile web (and lack of investment by X) but it’s also likely why auto video playback rarely works, so it evens out.
Is frustrating I have no control over it s as a paying user, same with hiding the blue checkmark
I've noticed other junk like 'games' and ads for paid 'premium' content getting through uBlock's filter list. Hope those are added to the list too.
I used uBlock's element zapper feature to block the youtube logo on top left, because it's often animated and always distracting (I desperately need fewer distractions when using youtube, not more, even if minor).
It's just the most horrible thing. The whole idea of YouTube for me was to control what you watch in comparison to traditional TV where they fed you what they wanted. I know people say that you should not click on it but we all how low times in our day that we have exhausted our brain.
I use the extension "Control Panel for YouTube" which also supports hiding shorts and much more
You should look into filters setup by https://github.com/letsblockit/letsblockit for YouTube. That was an ambitious project, sadly discontinued.
The road to death with any OSS project is scope creep.
I appreciate your comment though! Thanks :)
As a user that doesn't use uBlock, I was also kind of sick of youtube shorts shoving into my eyes. I just made my own firefox plugins forcibly remove them as well. It is good to see the filter list here. Looks like I missed out on the mobile ones.
I swear I didn't even know one COULD pay for YouTube!! Why would you want to? They're are so many good front ends that block ALL that toxic garbage. Revamped still works, so does pipepipe, youpipe, noutube, etc.
People who watch on locked down devices
Converted to 1Blocker format: https://gist.github.com/egze/7f672ebebecde0546ddb928e7f3adb4...
I know this won't help much, however, FreeTube can help with this. Yes, it is a standalone app, however...
Also, if you a Google/Youtube employee, rubbing your hands together, making fun of folks, and generally thinking negative thoughts, take it from a former veteran software engineer/manager (never had the desire to move up the ladder, and I am disabled now thanks to a tragic accident): There are a ton of negative comments about your UX, even from paid users. Nobody likes your shit. They only tolerate it because you currently have a monopoly. That will not always be the case. You are failing yourself, your job, and your users. Learn to put those users first. If Google had stuck to that early on, uBlock Origin wouldn't exist.
I know everyone at Google is tone deaf, so let me put this another way: Someone is ALWAYS left holding the bag. It could be you, the lowly programmer, or it could be you, the lowly manager. It could also be anyone in C-Suite. Once the numbers don't align with what investors want to see, someone will be blamed. As we reach the top of an AI bubble, those at the top are going to want to find a way to blame others down below, that means you will likely take the hit.
Blocktube extension does this with just a checkmark
can also hide other things
I would pay any money for ability to block for my kids chosen channels on youtube. For some reason this is not possible and worthless crap keeps being promoted there.
yt neuter has this and much more: https://github.com/mchangrh/yt-neuter
Finally, tired of creating this custom filter in all my devices lol. I wish it would all automatically apply the "videos" filter as well.
The easy way to do this is to hide them with custom CSS
- Install Stylebot extension for your browser
- make an entry for youtube.com
- enter this css: .shortsLockupViewModelHost { display: none}
Bam, no more shorts.
Stylebot is no longer actively developed, but the similar (and open-source) Stylus extension is.
Repo: https://github.com/openstyles/stylus
Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylus/clngdbkpkpe...
Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/styl-us/
To be fair, Ublock Origin is a lot more common, and the less extensions the better, so or a lot of people this would be the better way.
You can also just use Tamper Monkey (though you need to add a script called Trusted Type Helper in order to inject CSS into YouTube).
I used to use Stylebot but I switched everything over to Tamper Monkey so all my CSS and non CSS related scripts would be in one place.
Tamper Monkey/Grease Monkey scripts are very portable too, I use my scripts in Safari on iOS via the UserScripts extension.
anything that blocks the doom-scrolling mode on twitter videos?
I dont see youtube shorts, have no login to instagram or tiktok, and stopped using facebook years ago; only social media i frequent is twitter -- and once i view a video in the feed, it hijacks my attention by auto scrolling to a new video.
I burned a couple of evenings this way -- and I need to be more careful about this.
I feel like I'm the only person on this site that likes shorts. I only see videos from interesting creators, mainly comedy skits.
Is there any way to get this to work outside of desktop and android? You can't pay me to watch videos on either.
While I use uBlock to skip the ads, I think unhook.app does a better job of hiding the actual elements on YouTube.
I just installed a plug-in for that, shorts are pure brain rot which YouTube already mostly is ...
I have so many freakin' rules in ublock just to make youtube's UI acceptable
Just take the next step and stop going to youtube entirely, and pull the video from the url.
Even works on safari iPhone, nice
I can't even stand to visit YT without the combo of Blocktube/Unhook/uBlock Origin/SponsorBlock/Return YouTube Dislike. (Some people may also find Clickbait Remover useful.)
Blocktube is a godsend; it adds a context menu for blocking videos/channels, and you can block vids/channels/comments based on a regex or keywords (e.g. transparently remove every 'minecraft' or 'roblox' vid, or remove every comment with 'Telegram' in it). It even removes vids before the DOM rendering, so blocked vids don't show up as empty title cards or blank spaces.
Unhook lets you independently toggle visibility of the home feed, the rec sidebar, endscreen recs, comments, shorts, and the unrelated BS they ad to search results. (The latest YT update lets endscreen recs slip through again; be sure to add youtube.com##.html5-video-player.ended-mode .ytp-fullscreen-grid to your ublock filter to get rid of them again.)
Surprisingly YouTube still generates a feed for every channel's video page, so I just add channels to my RSS reader for updates instead of bothering with the increasingly flaky subscriptions page. (If they ever break this or yt-dlp I'm not even going to bother with YT in the future.)
Remember when Google exec Prabhakar Raghavan (the man who previously ran Yahoo search into the ground) made Google Search worse so they could serve more ads?
This is the YouTube philosophy; make the platform worse to drive 'engagement', completely ignoring the second and third order effects of their 'optimizations'. Want to search by upload date? Sorry, we removed that! Have some slop! Want to look for a video? Here's a bunch of unrelated bullshit instead - have you tried some slop? Also, have some ads.
The experience for creators is even worse. The recommendation algorithm and monetization policies change every month and YT conveniently gets to collect all the ad money if you've been demonitized. They're shoving a bajillion AI tools down creator's throats and even editing videos after they've been uploaded.
In the end, YouTube caters to advertisers. You're just the product.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a bot shoving slop in a human's face -- forever.
Google Plus already killed the coolness of YouTube long ago. There isn't much point in browsing there anymore, except maybe for music.
Do not use YouTube to consume YouTube content. FreeTube and yt-dlp are your friends.
I used to use Invidious but it was breaking too often. Nowadays, I just open YouTube in a private window, or use yt-dlp from time to time to watch something later offline.
I really don't mind shorts, but I want to be the one that chooses to watch them.
Canceled YouTube subscription and deleted the app. Don't miss it, surprisingly.
Thank you holy hell thank you
Oh this is great, any ideas on how to do this for Samsung and LG televisions?
Set up a proxy and inject JS on the page?
For iPhone I use an extension called shorts blocker that does the same thing.
I love you!
Wish we could use this as a proxy for phones that connect to internet !
I suggest trying the "Enhancer for YouTube" extension.
Also see brizz.xyz which allows you to make YouTube whitelists.
I’ve been using brave on mobile and it seems to work pretty well!
Anyone have any similar uBlock filter lists like this?
I have some lists [1] I use to hide YouTube's constant recommendations of things I've already watched. They also hide previously watched music videos, which may be a downside.
1. https://caleb-vincent.io/post/2025-10-01_youtube-filters/#ju...
I'm also looking for a blocklist for X/Twitter that can remove the "who to follow", News sections, etc.
Not a blocklist, but for anyone who wants this, Control Panel for Twitter [1] can hide most things you'd want to hide on Twitter. The latest version adds a way to keep using the Dim dark mode variant theme they recently removed.
[1] https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-twitter
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Shorts seem good to me, but only when watched at 3x
But what to do with android YouTube app ??
Wonder why their X account is suspended?!
is there a supply chain attack possible? What if some time later this list gets updated?
I will update it later down the line as YT changes its layout and for bug fixes... but i think this was not what your question.
I don't think that something super bad can happen with these uBlock filter, they will sanitize the filter heavily.
Maybe a potential attack vector for these lists in general is to hide the body of a few sites but this is more annoying then dangerous AFAIK.
That's the benefit of Brave Browser. The YouTube Shorts blocking feature is built into the browser itself and is not from a third party.
Nice. I've also been doing this for a while too. I don't like to depend on a lot of addons, so I find the ublock only implementation of it quite elegant and fast. I also try to use filters nowadays to block other types of dark patterns (eg. Infinite scroll recommendations). It's surprising how much you can de-enshittify the modern corporate internet by just blocking tags with some css path filters.
Unpopular opinion, but I like youtube shorts. No ads, no rambling, no product placement. it forces brevity and getting to point. it is how youtube should be.
I read this as "The default uBlock filter list will change to hide all YouTube Shorts".
Don't know why you're downvoted. It's exactly a 50/50 likely way to parse it.
is there anything that might work for the YT app on the Android?
Is there an explanation for why YouTube is hell bent on pushing Shorts to people, other than to get them addicted? There must be something we can do about these abusive arseholes. I hate that the number one business strategy right now is to make something addictive. This isn't good for us.
I like YT shorts.
Not everyone has the brain chemistry to watch them in a healthy way. Google seems to be preying on that population by preventing people from disabling the feature; to make some quarterly charts look better.
They appear to have recently removed the "show fewer shorts options" in the app. I pay for premium and the idea I cannot remove them from the app even as part of that is absolutely infuriating.
this is soo good thanks !
unlock is great. So many standalone extensions turn out to be a lot better simply as ublock filters.
I would like one of these to block the community posts as well. I'm getting really tired of seeing screencaps of Twitter engagement bait from 8 years ago. There's one account that just won't go away, even now that I'm reporting it for spam when it comes up.
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Welcome to HN! Plugging your stuff is okay, but it’s generally frowned upon if you’re only here to sell something:
> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity. – https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Perhaps you could just participate in the discussion for now, and do a Show HN later when you’re ready?
You’re right, and I appreciate you pointing that out.
I’m mainly looking for early feedback to validate the direction before launch, not trying to use HN purely as a marketing channel. I’ll participate in the discussion and, once it’s ready, do a proper Show HN.
Thanks for the guidance.
Looks great! But all the screenshots are of the settings. It would be nice to see what the end result is after enabling certain features.The preview is not the actual UX. I would like to see how will this tool change my youtube experience.
The reason I like unhook is, it doesn't change or force me to learn new ways to use YouTube but just reduce it to just video viewing with no distractions and blocking all the addictive pulls.
> It would be nice to see what the end result is after enabling certain features.
The previews in the admin panel are meant to reflect the actual UI changes on YouTube. For example, if you enable Speed Control in the player, the control appears in the player preview. Settings are saved on the fly, and when you go to youtube.com you get the modified experience accordingly.
On the website I only included a static demo, not an interactive one. Does that clarify your concern?
Maxxmod is still in development but we already have functional alpha builds. If you’re interested in testing one and giving feedback, feel free to email me at maxxmod [at] proton.me. Thanks, Pablo.
Legit question, do you guys get really bad Shorts recommendations? Mine aren't half bad (really more of the same as with regular videos) plus creators don't insert ad spots. I get it, TikTok-style scrolling is annoying, but the format has its merits. At least less yapping and more to the point.
Nearly all of the video I watch is on horizontal screens.
Whether I'm using a real computer or a BFT or an iPad or I'm watching a something with my pocket supercomputer while bored on a plane: It's horizontal. This is simply how I do it, how I have always done it, and how I am likely to always do it.
YouTube Shorts aren't compatible with this viewing method.
In addition: Nearly all of the videos I watch are longer than 3 minutes, and YouTube Shorts aren't compatible with this either.
Whether I'm watching a video because I want to be entertained or to learn something new, I want to be involved with it and focused on it. I am very capable of making time to do so when it behooves me.
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Anyway, to answer your question: I have no idea if my YouTube Shorts recommendations are good or not good. I don't partake. I don't need empty, <3-minute dopamine hits in my life.
I constantly get tik tok style everything everywhere all at once fever dream headache rapid edited clips. There's a difference between to the point and just being brain rot delivered with no background. Reminds me of happy hardcore techno - you can't really feel the bass because it's not getting enough time to reverberate.
I reject addiction-designs on principle.
I avoid Shorts (and Tiktok) for the same reason I avoid stimulant drugs and video games: it depletes dopamine faster than regular YT videos (especially the somber kind of videos I mostly watch).
There are about a dozen reasons to hate shorts regardless of the content.
Everyone else has listed a bunch already. Here's yet another, the pointlessly limited UI.
There are no play controls to back, forward or scrub. You missed something? Hope it was near the beginning because while you can restart by reloading, you can't skip ahead. Want to pause at a particular spot to show your wife? You get to wait for the whole thing to play again from the start so you can hopefully pause it at the right spot. There was one important part? too bad, you can only replay the whole thing... And why? Even if you want to assume the case of some video that is actually legitimately only a couple minutes long, ok fine, but why the artificially stupid UI? There is no legitimate reason. It's pure user manipulation. It's the service calling the shots to do what it wants to get what it wants instead of giving you a service that does what you want to give you what you want. Even if you are paying them money
There are all kinds of other problems, like I simply didn't ask for this. I don't care how great someone else thinks something is, or even if I would agree it's great if I asked for it. But anything that you don't want but can't avoid, and it's not the weather but something someone DOES have control over and is choosing to inflict on you over your expressed wishes, as a paying customer on top of all, is automatically intolerable.
But in fact I don't agree they are great at all ever. It doesn't matter what the content is or who's making it, including people I like on topics I like.
I want to say I don't have ADHD and don't want to develop it, but really idk I might actually have some level by the looks of all my unfinished projects, and even so, shorts make me feel like what people with adhd look and sound like from the outside. It's a hell existence. I don't understand how people can just willingly sit there and let these things feed them this constant stream of spastic hyper ephemeral shit. Even if I can understand how someone can fall into it unwittingly initially, how do they not realize what's happening to them after a while? Is everyone really so utterly unconscious?
It's 99% the interface, cluttered with useless garbage over the video, that I hate.
I hate it so much that I couldn't even see the content hiding behind it, and don't really know what the recommendation is like.
If you do want to watch one for whatever reason you can open it in the standard interface. The video IDs are neutral it's just the URL that determines which interface you get.
Actually I guess a browser extension to redirect to a fixed up URL would resolve the problem entirely.
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It's a cesspool of ripped off videos, AI generated slop, and people doing a really jazzy reading of a wikipedia article.
I mean, you can eat Doritos for dinner, and maybe you can convince yourself it's nutritionally sufficient, but it's still garbage.
Mine are usually pretty bad. If I ever do see one that I like I catch myself flicking through way too many of them afterwards and I hate that. So I prefer to hide them entirely.
I use YouTube Tweaks which has a lot of different customisation options. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/youtube-tweak...
There’s a lot of stupid shit garbage on the internet that needs more blocking and nobody’s doing anything about it. Aside from bad JavaScript and css garbage and other things that are obvious and still only slightly blocked by ubo, there’s entire swaths of categories that are going completely untouched.
Every Reddit mod post is cancer for example. So is every pinned post and automod. 99% of email. Any story about farting or buttholes or diarrhea or any other child joke about how you were unable to be in control of your butthole. I don’t want to hear it and every single day there it is. Any pro-terrorism post from jihadist groups like maga, posts from other nations pretending to be Americans, posts asking people to explain a loaded joke they understand but are trying to get more views on or spread the topic about. Any ai video any video about crypto any fake news.
There’s a lot of room for improvement. Even just detecting things like if a news article doesn’t actually contain information. It seems like we have a ton of areas we could be filtering out cancer a lot better.
Best I can come up with: people flag shit and it goes to a server, and like PiHole, anyone subscribed to that server will have the crap excised.
I'm liking Apple's "Hide Distracting Items…" feature in Safari. Now if only everyone's audits could be shared, a consensus arrived at, then others could be spared having to spend time hiding-distracting-items themselves.
A kind of HTML shadow banning?
> A kind of HTML shadow banning?
A 'Proxomitron', of sorts.
On the main page, shorts, as all the other videos, are served by the recommendation algorithm which should filter out general audience crap you'd see if you're not logged in or have view history disabled. You'd normally see the same stuff you're subscribed to there, plus a few random videos of cats. Maybe a wamen butt occasionally. Might as well hide the main page entirely if you're not that easily entertained. To be quite frank, the main page is such an echo chamber lately that I almost got myself unhooked from procrastinating on YouTube.
On the search page, shorts are mostly a mixed bag, but you do occasionally get useful results.
So what does this solve? Seems like a form of protest nobody important (those in power) cares about.
Another thing is, I have, to my own surprise, discovered a few decent channels that I like, that post their videos in form of shorts exclusively. That's a somewhat new trend and mostly relevant to humor-related or music channels, though.
Almost forgot to mention. YouTube recently added the scroll bar to the shorts so they aren't all that different from the other videos now.
> Seems like a form of protest
Filtering content is not "a form of protest", it is about deciding what content you want to see in your browser and what not. Youtube, even the paid version, does not offer much in terms of customising one's experience (imo the "algorithm" deciding what you should watch based on your history does not count as one) and shorts is a proven addictive pattern that one may not want to encounter online.
It is fine if you like watching shorts, such filter lists are for those who do not want to watch shorts.
I might be wrong, but I don't think people really care about the addictiveness in the first place. As I see it, the shorts were irritating to see, mainly because they were heavily out of tune with the rest of recommendations. But they seem to have tuned them to be more in line with the rest of the videos. Being not that different from the rest of the videos one gets recommended, there is not much point in hiding them? I'm not exactly protecting shorts here. My point is, you can, of course, cut some of the videos from the feed, but the rest would still be affected by the same algorithm. You still don't get to filter anything, really. So what's the point?
If addictiveness really is that much of a factor, I rest my case.
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The main benefit for me is hiding content I'm actively uninterested in seeing. Shorts are portrait mode content that pretty much never seem to be long enough to discuss anything interesting. I watch on widescreen monitors, so I just don't care for them. There's nothing else to it really.