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.
This is the way. I get plenty of feeds, recommendations etc. from others, enough to keep me busy. Follow who I want, and drop in when I see they have something new.
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.
To me history is useful to continue watching or find videos I’ve already seen. Turning it off will remove a feature I actually need. They force us to see their horrible “for you” content in exchange - so shameful.
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.
Yep. Gabe was right when he said it and he's still right now. Valve knows the product is service. This is why Epic Games Store and Microsoft Store have such a hard time. Good games come and go, but good service is good service.
And now, Valve is pushing to leave Windows, because they see which way the wind blows in Redmond. They don't want to be leased to Microsoft in 2026 anymore than Microsoft wanted to be leashed to IBM in 1986.
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.
No, that's like calling Amazon a social media platform.
YouTube is a content delivery platform that has social media features. You can tell because if you shut off all the comments, people still visit the site in droves. But if you shut off the videos and left the comments then nobody would visit the site at all.
Now, it's possible that YouTube doesn't realize that, but I think they're just unwilling to make any changes at all if it doesn't give them any competitive advantages.
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.
That's very short-sighted though. The money is forcing everyone (users and creators) to stay on YouTube, no matter how big of a cut they take or how much crap they throw at us as users.
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.
uBlock Origin updates its lists automatically. If you want to spend $6, just donate to uBlock instead and never see an ad again on 99% of the Internet.
I pay for plenty of other media (music, games, sports, comedy, books) and even do some Patreon for a few podcasts and YT channels, but I refuse to directly support a publishing monopoly that has had an actively user-hostile interface for over a decade.
Yes I know that Google just reported YouTube’s revenue is larger than Netflix’s. But I really don’t find anything interesting on YouTube. Every time I try to find an interesting tutorial on for me AWS, if it isn’t produced by AWS itself, it’s usually subpar and I end up just paying for it on Udemy or using my company paid Pluralsight.
I pay for plenty of goods and services. Just not YouTube. As others have noted, YouTube premium makes ads go away, but none of the other engagement baiting and user disrespecting anti-patterns. As far as I'm concerned, Google is in adversarial relationship with its users, whether your paying or not.
I currently pay for YouTube premium but I'm strongly considering stopping again. For me it's a combination of prices creeping up (small part) and the worsening UX and engagement-bait (big part). It's the same reason I dropped Spotify a few years ago.
I don’t know. But most of the time when I don’t like a service, I don’t use it. I know that’s a crazy idea. I find YouTube like everything Google does a piss poor user experience. I’m forced to only use it to watch official AWS videos and those don’t have ads.
No, but SponsorBlock[0] is fantastic for that. I even have it setup on my home server[1] so it skips sponsor segments on my Apple TV, which is where we watch most of our YouTube.
With the change in culture here, especially in the last 2-3 years, HN might as well be called Reddit News now. So it's not surprising that most people aren't consistent with their principles.
Was HN known for consistency of principles before? I don’t remember that.
Whenever an online community is anthropomorphized as an individual, it looks hypocritical. The only groups that don’t look hypocritical are monocultural backwaters of groupthink, permabans, and self-editing.
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.
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
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.
> 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 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.
This is also not true and hasn't been so for years. One can set a preference to "not recommend", but one can not explicitly block any channel.
Depending on your particular "preference constellation's weights" (over which you have no direct control), you can, in fact, be shown videos from that channel again.
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”
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.
>Youtube is far too significant a video collection to risk losing it.
> Not sure whether increasing financial pressure (above what must, no doubt, build up on its own) is the right answer here.
fantastic, an appeal to personal guilt to fund large corporate money making and national/corporate-soft-power efforts.
an acquired predatory advertiser, the worlds #1 inadequate and neglectful child nanny, and world wide cultural trend-setter is also bad at making money? and they need more? and you say they won't squander it?
I think i'll donate to PBS while aiding YT archival efforts.
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 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 might be getting mixed up with the “close door” button, which is something always included because it makes people feel better but when you order the elevator you can choose whether it actually does anything or not
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.
> You'd think they'd want to notice that I _absolutely never_ watch shorts, and stop showing them to me, instead recommending something else.
Oh they've noticed, and they just haven't found the right recco just yet to get you to watch. Bear with them, as they will eventually find you something. Even if it is just a video you would normally watched cropped to format.
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.
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 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 ;_;
If you're using Firefox you could set up a userContent.css to apply the necessary CSS overrides to youtube.com, otherwise you'd need an extension to do that.
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.
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..
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.
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()
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
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 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.
It's not broken from Google's perspective. The results are just optimized for their ad revenue rather than your viewing preference. Even the engagement hooks don't care what your viewing preferences are - just what they've calculated to optimize watch potential * ad revenue.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Control Panel for YouTube [1] lets you remove most of the clutter from the Shorts player UI, or redirect Shorts to the normal player (using YouTube's internal navigation if on desktop, so no full page reload)
You'll have to disable hiding them first, as they're completly hidden by default
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is the way. I get plenty of feeds, recommendations etc. from others, enough to keep me busy. Follow who I want, and drop in when I see they have something new.
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.
Turn off history. Completely disables the food. The only content you see is what you search for.
To me history is useful to continue watching or find videos I’ve already seen. Turning it off will remove a feature I actually need. They force us to see their horrible “for you” content in exchange - so shameful.
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
Yep. Gabe was right when he said it and he's still right now. Valve knows the product is service. This is why Epic Games Store and Microsoft Store have such a hard time. Good games come and go, but good service is good service.
And now, Valve is pushing to leave Windows, because they see which way the wind blows in Redmond. They don't want to be leased to Microsoft in 2026 anymore than Microsoft wanted to be leashed to IBM in 1986.
Yup. I pay for YouTube, but not being able to disable shorts made me use ReVanced.
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.
No, that's like calling Amazon a social media platform.
YouTube is a content delivery platform that has social media features. You can tell because if you shut off all the comments, people still visit the site in droves. But if you shut off the videos and left the comments then nobody would visit the site at all.
Now, it's possible that YouTube doesn't realize that, but I think they're just unwilling to make any changes at all if it doesn't give them any competitive advantages.
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?
What's crazy is that their adtech definitely knows how to categorise stuff down to super specific topics, yet they only use that internally.
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.
You are much better off donating money directly or buying merch than further inflating Google's profits.
By paying for youtube, you're supporting Google and walled gardens more than creators, I'd argue.
Not financially, since creators get 55% of YouTube premium fees.
That's very short-sighted though. The money is forcing everyone (users and creators) to stay on YouTube, no matter how big of a cut they take or how much crap they throw at us as users.
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
> YT has started to place its content behind sign-in wall
Any examples of that?
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.
Because it’s $6 a month where I live and at that price it’s easier than any faffing or arms race with Adblock.
uBlock Origin updates its lists automatically. If you want to spend $6, just donate to uBlock instead and never see an ad again on 99% of the Internet.
uBlock origin does not accept donations. I would have loved to donate to them, but they don't.
Hacker News commenters: “I don’t like ads. They are evil”
Also HN commenters: “I don’t want to pay for goods and services”
I pay for plenty of other media (music, games, sports, comedy, books) and even do some Patreon for a few podcasts and YT channels, but I refuse to directly support a publishing monopoly that has had an actively user-hostile interface for over a decade.
I do too. I don’t use YouTube with the one exception of official AWS videos. But those don’t have commercials.
And how do I pay for a YouTube competitor that's libre or at least won't spy back without losing access to its monopolisticly large catalog?
Yes I know that Google just reported YouTube’s revenue is larger than Netflix’s. But I really don’t find anything interesting on YouTube. Every time I try to find an interesting tutorial on for me AWS, if it isn’t produced by AWS itself, it’s usually subpar and I end up just paying for it on Udemy or using my company paid Pluralsight.
I pay for plenty of goods and services. Just not YouTube. As others have noted, YouTube premium makes ads go away, but none of the other engagement baiting and user disrespecting anti-patterns. As far as I'm concerned, Google is in adversarial relationship with its users, whether your paying or not.
I currently pay for YouTube premium but I'm strongly considering stopping again. For me it's a combination of prices creeping up (small part) and the worsening UX and engagement-bait (big part). It's the same reason I dropped Spotify a few years ago.
I don’t know. But most of the time when I don’t like a service, I don’t use it. I know that’s a crazy idea. I find YouTube like everything Google does a piss poor user experience. I’m forced to only use it to watch official AWS videos and those don’t have ads.
Does it make the sponsor sections of the videos go away too?
No, but SponsorBlock[0] is fantastic for that. I even have it setup on my home server[1] so it skips sponsor segments on my Apple TV, which is where we watch most of our YouTube.
[0] https://sponsor.ajay.app/ [1] https://github.com/dmunozv04/iSponsorBlockTV
It makes them less annoying. With premium if you hit the scrub forward button once it jumps directly to the end of the sponsor section
Normies who can't figure out the 3 buttons it takes to use ublock pay for such things.
Its a tax on not being smart?
I'm mostly kidding, but I just use ublock and I've never considered buying youtube premium. Try harder google?
With the change in culture here, especially in the last 2-3 years, HN might as well be called Reddit News now. So it's not surprising that most people aren't consistent with their principles.
Was HN known for consistency of principles before? I don’t remember that.
Whenever an online community is anthropomorphized as an individual, it looks hypocritical. The only groups that don’t look hypocritical are monocultural backwaters of groupthink, permabans, and self-editing.
doesn’t work on iPad or iOS? Also not worth my time given how cheap it is
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.
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
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.
> 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..
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.
Then stop paying if you are unsatisfied
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
This is also not true and hasn't been so for years. One can set a preference to "not recommend", but one can not explicitly block any channel.
Depending on your particular "preference constellation's weights" (over which you have no direct control), you can, in fact, be shown videos from that channel again.
Or they just launch another channel. I've had to block about a dozen channels by that bald bearded guy with the glasses.
You can block from recommendations but there's either a fixed length with the oldest bumped off or it resets. I have to reblock stuff all the time.
I, too, believe anything Google says and deny the evidence in front of my eyes.
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”
but you're still paying
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.
>Youtube is far too significant a video collection to risk losing it.
> Not sure whether increasing financial pressure (above what must, no doubt, build up on its own) is the right answer here.
fantastic, an appeal to personal guilt to fund large corporate money making and national/corporate-soft-power efforts.
an acquired predatory advertiser, the worlds #1 inadequate and neglectful child nanny, and world wide cultural trend-setter is also bad at making money? and they need more? and you say they won't squander it?
I think i'll donate to PBS while aiding YT archival efforts.
Don't pay for YouTube
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.
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 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.
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.
See also: call elevator to your floor buttons
How else do you get on the elevator? Wait for it to randomly appear?
They might be getting mixed up with the “close door” button, which is something always included because it makes people feel better but when you order the elevator you can choose whether it actually does anything or not
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.
I'm disappointed that even Signal does this when asking you for access to your contacts.
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
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.
> You'd think they'd want to notice that I _absolutely never_ watch shorts, and stop showing them to me, instead recommending something else.
Oh they've noticed, and they just haven't found the right recco just yet to get you to watch. Bear with them, as they will eventually find you something. Even if it is just a video you would normally watched cropped to format.
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.
Infrastructure and bandwidth cost savings aren't worth the risk that you start spending time on Netflix and cancel your subscription.
they don't want you to realise that you're not watching it much and cancel your subscription
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.
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.
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
YouTube killing he sort by upload date made me furious.
I feel like the only fight back is boycotting.
>Remove the pink gradient from progress bars
How do I do that without an entire addon? This pink gradient irritates me so much.
If you're using Firefox you could set up a userContent.css to apply the necessary CSS overrides to youtube.com, otherwise you'd need an extension to do that.
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.
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
I clicked comments to say the same thing. Can recommend
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.
Replacing "shorts" with "v" also works, so the resulting URL is www.youtube.com/v/XYWZ
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?
I use this addon for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/fi/firefox/addon/youtube-shorts-b...
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.
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 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.
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 prefer using RYS <https://lawrencehook.com/rys/> which has this as a feature, but a lot more, too.
I can confirm this works great, you are back to a mid 2010s kind of homescreen without any of the modern cellphone format crap.
Even works on safari iPhone, nice
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.
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.
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.
I feel like I'm the only person on this site that likes shorts. I only see videos from interesting creators, mainly comedy skits.
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.
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.I suggest trying the "Enhancer for YouTube" extension.
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).
I use the extension "Control Panel for YouTube" which also supports hiding shorts and much more
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.
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.
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.
It is better to use google to search youtube via site:youtube.com operator.
It's not broken from Google's perspective. The results are just optimized for their ad revenue rather than your viewing preference. Even the engagement hooks don't care what your viewing preferences are - just what they've calculated to optimize watch potential * ad revenue.
You've got to permanently block 1000s of "popular" channels. Then youtube starts working like it did in 2006 again.
NEVER worked for me. I have always shorts shoved in every possible page, device and results, and I have watch history off since forever.
Converted to 1Blocker format: https://gist.github.com/egze/7f672ebebecde0546ddb928e7f3adb4...
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.
Blocktube extension does this with just a checkmark
can also hide other things
While I use uBlock to skip the ads, I think unhook.app does a better job of hiding the actual elements on YouTube.
Do not use YouTube to consume YouTube content. FreeTube and yt-dlp are your friends.
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
Just take the next step and stop going to youtube entirely, and pull the video from the url.
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.
Finally, tired of creating this custom filter in all my devices lol. I wish it would all automatically apply the "videos" filter as well.
Canceled YouTube subscription and deleted the app. Don't miss it, surprisingly.
Shorts seem good to me, but only when watched at 3x
Wish we could use this as a proxy for phones that connect to internet !
I love you!
yt neuter has this and much more: https://github.com/mchangrh/yt-neuter
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
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.
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.
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?
I have so many freakin' rules in ublock just to make youtube's UI acceptable
I really don't mind shorts, but I want to be the one that chooses to watch them.
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" :|
Still using ublock. Recently there's a delay starting vid sometimes, about 3 sec. I can deal with it.
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.
I have the same issue. Perma-black loading screen that resolves as soon as I disable ublock origin. Using Firefox on Debian.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 reject addiction-designs on principle.
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.
Control Panel for YouTube [1] lets you remove most of the clutter from the Shorts player UI, or redirect Shorts to the normal player (using YouTube's internal navigation if on desktop, so no full page reload)
You'll have to disable hiding them first, as they're completly hidden by default
[1] https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube
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).
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...
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.
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.
No, because it’s that much easier to justify watching “just one more” and totally lose the desire to go to sleep or do some other healthy behavior.
If you’re only “irritated” by them for now, that’s just because the algorithm hasn’t gotten you yet. One day, you will be weak and fall prey.
> One day, you will be weak and fall prey.
I really dislike statements like this. It's not cocaine.
For me, it is about addictiveness. Otherwise, if they were just "bad recommendations", I would probably just ignore them.
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.
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?