No it doesn't. If you were hoping it would mean you don't see shorts when you visit the Youtube home page, that's not what this is. I just tried the thing mentioned in the article-- set my Shorts time limit to 0 minutes. What it does is make it so if you click a short from somewhere the short plays, but then if you try to swipe to the next one it hits you with the "You reached your short limit". If you then return to the home page you still see Shorts.
It really amazes how how Youtube refuses to let me hide stuff I don't want to see on my homepage. I still long for the ability to tell them to not give me mix playlists, I do not want them, and often they annoy me when the first song is one I'd click on but I don't want to have to pay attention enough to kill it before the next song plays (since you cannot disable play next in playlists...)
It's not a product where you are the user. Your attention is the product being sold to advertisers and the videos are a harvesting/production mechanism.
It is not in the interests of either YT or the advertisers to allow you to opt out of features that are proven to be lucrative for eyeballs.
I’m a Premium subscriber. I don’t see ads, and YouTube added a feature so I can easily skip in-video sponsored sections.
It seems like the incentive for Premium subscribers should be to keep them happy, so they keep paying, and minimize how much they watch, as they’ll be a cheaper user using less bandwidth.
> YouTube added a feature so I can easily skip in-video sponsored sections
That feature benefits YouTube, too. Maybe even more than its value as a Premium feature. It makes it so that viewers can skip the ads the creator was paid to make without YouTube getting a cut of the proceeds, pushing down the value of those ads.
The thing that is funny about it is at least with the mixes, it does actively make me engage less because there are videos I would click on if they were not being tied into a mix, but because they are I actively choose not to open the video and let the song play.
YouTube has multiple different products. YouTube as a company do not call your attention a product. There isn't a product team that is in charge of people's attention as a product.
Believe me, if they tried as hard as FB, an ordinary user wouldn't stand a chance. As it is now, a single uBlock Origin action is enough to make these disappear from my YT page for good, and for all accounts.
Youtube has added random people's text posts to my subscription feed, and it's pissing me off. They're never anything interesting or entertaining, it's always just gumpf
I so hate the videos YouTube shows me that I wrote a plugin to place a white box over videos called TubeGate [0], which I open-sourced [1]. It does keyword-based filtering so you can tell it to hide "sports", "politics", etc.
Honestly, the only thing really keeping me from watching shorts is the perplexing UX decision to not show the channel name as part of the preview tile. As basic Internet hygiene it just feels real bad to click on a video without the tiniest bit of idea about its provenance. For that reason I never do and have always just wanted to hide Shorts altogether.
Classic "self regulation" of an addictive product. "You look like you might have a problem with self-control, here are tools for managing yourself better" while admitting no fault and continuing with all of the hooks and barbs, design and advertising built to addict as many people as possible.
Swipe. Not a problem with mouse control and generally full computer, seems like even such a dumb move as swiping can become addictive and be done subconsiously. Never understood why people complain here so much about shorts since they never go beyond the one video played that I opened myself I guess that explains it.
Tablets/touchscreens/phones are not the best way to experience online stuff, rather the worst. ublock origin in firefox makes internet usable in other dimension for me, since I am allergic to ads but thats another story
I actually set the time limit to 0 minutes , then I restarted the app in iOS and right now I do not see any shorts. Let’s see how long it would take for them to reappear again
"Shorts" is the #1 reason I switched to the SmartTube app on my Chromecast.
No more Shorts.
It also has other great features that are well beyond what the Youtube app lets you do to customize the expernience.
And then I realized, it also blocks all the ads. I was a Youtube subscriber, but they alienated me with their "Shorts", so I switched apps, and then I cancelled my subscription.
Most of big tech is too big. It's ridiculous how bad these monoliths have gotten.
Argh. I was really excited for this. I'm a YouTube Premium user, and I get a lot of value from YouTube, but I can't get rid of the nicotine-tastic home feed and shorts. I go to YouTube for useful (especially, long-form) stuff, and get sucked into garbage.
On desktop you can manage this with extensions. Not so much on mobile.
If you want to completely eschew shorts, consider adding https://www.youtube.com/shorts to your adblocker blocklist, and maybe use an extension like Stylus to hide the "Shorts" links on YT pages.
I would rather keep the ability to see a short if I need it.
ROFL because there is no danger that I'm going to spend any time watching shorts. If they put some limit on other videos now that might be relevant... but shorts are just taking up real estate on the screen which could be filled with content I might engagement. I want to say it is like picking their shareholder's pockets except nobody profits from the existence of shorts in any way.
An ad blocker handles this use case just fine, however. It's easy to create a rule to remove the div containing shorts. Also works on many Use AI buttons.
In my case, once I set the limit to 0 minutes and refreshed the home tab I don't see Shorts recommendations at all. There is still a Shorts tab at the bottom that tells me I have no remaining time (and allows me to trivially override it, sigh). But otherwise this seems to have cleaned up the "feed" that I see in the app of anything Shorts related (for now, at least).
Upvoting because Shorts are terrible. Flagging because the submission title - which is 100% faithful to the friendly article - is a complete lie!
Plug: I added a bunch of features to Control Panel for YouTube [1] which let you either hide Shorts completely, everywhere (which is the default) or take more control of how you use them if you do (e.g. redirecting to the normal video player)
I deleted my Google account and now occasionally use Invidious with LibRedirect[6] to watch YT videos. Importing subscriptions into Invidious was a helpful stepping stone.
160 comments
>YouTube now lets you turn off Shorts
No it doesn't. If you were hoping it would mean you don't see shorts when you visit the Youtube home page, that's not what this is. I just tried the thing mentioned in the article-- set my Shorts time limit to 0 minutes. What it does is make it so if you click a short from somewhere the short plays, but then if you try to swipe to the next one it hits you with the "You reached your short limit". If you then return to the home page you still see Shorts.
It is not in the interests of either YT or the advertisers to allow you to opt out of features that are proven to be lucrative for eyeballs.
It seems like the incentive for Premium subscribers should be to keep them happy, so they keep paying, and minimize how much they watch, as they’ll be a cheaper user using less bandwidth.
Am I missing something?
> YouTube added a feature so I can easily skip in-video sponsored sections
That feature benefits YouTube, too. Maybe even more than its value as a Premium feature. It makes it so that viewers can skip the ads the creator was paid to make without YouTube getting a cut of the proceeds, pushing down the value of those ads.
https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/wiki/solutions/youtube
[0]: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/tubegate/aokfpmegea...
[1]: https://github.com/webcoyote/tubegate
Honestly, the only thing really keeping me from watching shorts is the perplexing UX decision to not show the channel name as part of the preview tile. As basic Internet hygiene it just feels real bad to click on a video without the tiniest bit of idea about its provenance. For that reason I never do and have always just wanted to hide Shorts altogether.
> scrolling is paused but you may still see individual Shorts
It prevents doomscrolling, not what you see in your feed or homepage.
now I'm just angry again.
Tablets/touchscreens/phones are not the best way to experience online stuff, rather the worst. ublock origin in firefox makes internet usable in other dimension for me, since I am allergic to ads but thats another story
I switched to this. It is less fun, but also less of a timewaste.
No more Shorts.
It also has other great features that are well beyond what the Youtube app lets you do to customize the expernience.
And then I realized, it also blocks all the ads. I was a Youtube subscriber, but they alienated me with their "Shorts", so I switched apps, and then I cancelled my subscription.
Most of big tech is too big. It's ridiculous how bad these monoliths have gotten.
On desktop you can manage this with extensions. Not so much on mobile.
Profound product misalignment.
I would rather keep the ability to see a short if I need it.
You’ve added a “forbidden fruit” element to the Shorts.
I went in hoping to set it to 5 minutes. I don't see that as a problem. However, suddenly losing 15 minutes, yeah that's an issue
Plug: I added a bunch of features to Control Panel for YouTube [1] which let you either hide Shorts completely, everywhere (which is the default) or take more control of how you use them if you do (e.g. redirecting to the normal video player)
[1] https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube
Brave Shields[1] - Adblock
SponsorBlock[2] - Crowd-sourced skip sponsored segments
DeArrow[3] - Make thumbnails not clickbait
UnTrap[4] - Remove shorts and make UI amazing.
Return Youtube Dislike[5]
I deleted my Google account and now occasionally use Invidious with LibRedirect[6] to watch YT videos. Importing subscriptions into Invidious was a helpful stepping stone.
[1] https://brave.com [2] https://sponsor.ajay.app [3] https://dearrow.ajay.app [4] https://untrap.app [5] https://www.returnyoutubedislike.com [6] https://libredirect.github.io/