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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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).
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.
Converted to 1Blocker format: https://gist.github.com/egze/7f672ebebecde0546ddb928e7f3adb4...
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
Clearly that is useless for people who browse YT anonymously, hence the usefulness of the list.
For me, clicking that hides shorts for 30 days and then I need to click it again. So it's a monthly ritual.
Short form video is addictive, so they want to push it. It maximizes time on site.
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.
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.
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.
Wish we could use this as a proxy for phones that connect to internet !
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.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.
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.
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 prefer using RYS <https://lawrencehook.com/rys/> which has this as a feature, but a lot more, too.
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'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.
Anyone have any similar uBlock filter lists like this?
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 there anything that might work for the YT app on the Android?
Finally, tired of creating this custom filter in all my devices lol. I wish it would all automatically apply the "videos" filter as well.
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!
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.
I love you!
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.
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
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...
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?
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).
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.
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.