I HATE Short form video content and no matter how many times I select "show me less of this" I still get them front and center when I open the app or website.
Absolutely this! I was looking to see if it was an option yesterday. Annoyingly not :/
It just needs to be a preference!
Remember, with normal videos you (primarily) decide what to watch, but in shorts, you decide what not to watch.
It also gets rid of that nonsense they did to the search page.
I HATE youtube shorts. Not their content (I've never watched one) but how they've infected the whole youtube experience.
You search for something and half the results are irrelevant... which includes a ton of shorts.
I mean, I do know, it's ads and the attention economy, but still. Pick a lane. This is why I pay for Nebula.
EDIT: I said "do put it on my desktop" -- I meant to write "DON"T put it on my desktop".
And 98% of it is just grabbing popular snippets of long form videos, cropping them slightly, and overlaying some bubbly animated text (or worse, just closed captions but with a bright font).
It's almost as annoying as the deluge of people who email and say "we can auto-translate your content into 20 languages!"
I go to Youtube, shorts.
I go to Instagram, shorts.
I go to Facebook, shorts.
I go to Imgur, shorts.
I go to Pinterest, no shorts because it only plays 1 video per screen, but on mobile the screen is smaller so, shorts.
I go to Reddit, shorts.
I go to Bluesky, shorts.
I don't go to Twitter.
Tumblr is probably the only social media that isn't filled with vertical videos and that has an algorithmic feed. I go to Explore and I get dandelions. A static photo of them, not a video. I'm crossing my fingers it stays that way.
-Enhancer for YouTube extension (Firefox) — mopsi
-Unhook extension (Chrome/Firefox) — jabroni_salad, kelvinjps10
-YouTube-shorts block add-on — timbit42
-ReVanced for mobile — kelvinjps10
-Shorts filter list in Brave browser (works on mobile) — my personal favorite
More guidelines available at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If yes, then they don't care. Sorry. If you'll tolerate it and some other cohort of users will engage with the site for 0.1 seconds more than they would otherwise, it stays. YouTube is an optimization machine.
Better than the results on google these days, so YT is at least doing better.
I also hate shorts, however, if this is to believed, we're for sure stuck with it: https://www.zebracat.ai/post/youtube-shorts-statistics
And for fucks sake give me an option to disable the AI translation trash everywhere, and show the title of shorts on a creator's feed page...
manifest.json
containing: { "manifest_version": 3, "name": "Hide YouTube Shorts", "version": "1.0", "description": "Hides YouTube Shorts", "content_scripts": [ { "matches": ["://www.youtube.com/"], "js": ["content.js"] } ] }
and a file named content.js
containing:
function hideShorts() { const shorts = document.querySelectorAll('ytd-rich-shelf-renderer[is-shorts]'); shorts.forEach(short => { short.style.display = 'none'; }); } hideShorts(); const observer = new MutationObserver(hideShorts); observer.observe(document.body, { childList: true, subtree: true });
add the contents of this folder as a chrome extension
I also hate that the first one or two short may be relevant to whatever I'm consuming, researching, then it quickly turns into me watching Kill Tony comedians, girls basically naked in the gym, etc. they know my brain basically just turns off and enters the void
Not your software, not your control.
The do grab your attention, but they have no lasting effect, it is so short and there is so much of it that you quickly forget everything you have watched, including the ads.
They are good for the platforms though, because effective or not, they get paid good money for these ads.
It’s similar to why I don’t buy Oreos. I like Oreos, everyone likes Oreos - they’re engineered to be liked, but they’re bad for you. The best way to not eat them is to not have them in the house.
Short form videos are the heroin of media consumption - meta having to pivot instagram to it is because they’re facing competitive pressure. Same with YouTube. You can’t only have vegetables when your competitors are dealing heroin and your revenue is engagement based.
It seems the revealed preference of addicting consumption for engagement is tv with with a novelty button. TikTok and short form videos are that distilled to its purest form.
These companies can’t turn them off - they’re trapped by market incentives, it’s moloch. A few years back when Facebook had a more dominant market position Zuck said they were intentionally going to focus on human connections and friends despite the revenue cost that would cause because it was the ideal he wanted. In battle against TikTok you can’t hold those kinds of ideals unfortunately.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-shorts-bloc...
Luckily Google hasn't "manifest away" this type of extensions (yet).
This would be like Starbucks randomly serving tea to 20% of customers who order coffee because they want to compete more effectively with Lipton. That’s not how competition works.
A browser is my everything app. It is the most security essential tool I use daily, which requires vigilance in how I extend it. More users is a crappy proxy for how likely a developer can sneak through an insidious change.
You get almost a complete blank page and a search bar when you go to "youtube.com", and then when you search, you get the results. Just simple, really.
And also yes, I want long form and short form videos to be separated, when I'm scrolling through results 6 at a time(minus 1-2 ads) to queue the shorts really mess up the flow.
https://gist.github.com/insin/ef93c7d87b1f97f1c9411e6128d520...
http://www.sebastianmihai.com/idiocracy.html
and no wonder they write papers about "negative sampling" because they don't collect clean data. I made the mistake once of clicking on a video where a Chinese lady transforms into a fox on America's Got Talent and oh my god I am suddenly scheduled for thousands of AI slop videos where some Chinese girl transforms into something on that show with the same music and with the same reaction shots.
There is an answer to the coldest cold start problem and that is have a hand curated collection of about 100 or so content pieces that are of broad interest and stupendously high quality. Instagram will show you videos that are amazing (like somebody cooking a fine meal under rustic conditions) if you're cold and Stumbleupon did the same back in the day. Now Instagram 2025 and Stumbleupon 2012 are not "cold" from the viewpoint of content the way YT Shorts is, but Google has the money to pay professionals to make something -- but their ideology is against it.
Who places ads everywhere else on the web?
Greasyfork restricts what 3rd party libraries can be pulled in + you have the option of disabling automatic updates in your userscript manager.
(Seriously though... Facebook's video playback UI. What the fuck is that? Why is it so bad?)
I guess they don't get that there's going to be only one winner in each niche, unless TikTok goes down for political/national security reasons. Why do I need Youtube shorts if I have TikTok? Why do I need Google+ if I have Facebook? Why do I want Facebook videos if I have Youtube? Unsolved puzzle.
https://www.jimcollins.com/concepts/the-flywheel.html
and you might think, "I have (say) N=250,000 people playing game A and I can get them playing game B" you are probably going to be disappointed and very lucky if you get somewhere between 250 and 2500 of them playing your new game.
The two-sided market that makes YouTube impossible to dethrone makes it just as hard to change direction. For one thing you have to change the behavior of the viewers, but you also have to change the behavior of the creators, who know how to make videos, who know how to monetize them, all of that.
Myself I find I don't have a big attention span for short videos. I mean, Chinese girls doing the robot turn on my mirror neurons as much as anything. I can watch a 30 second video and get 30 seconds of fun but I don't want to watch another and another and another. However I cannot get enough of Techmoan talking about tape decks and such
This filter list is the most up-to-date that I've found to hide shorts with uBlock Origin:
Not exactly fly-by-night...
facebook works the exact same way
billion dollar companies forcing you to look at stuff you dont want and gaslighting you into thinking you have a choice
The analogy fails as well. It would be more like Starbucks asking every customer whether they want tea as well. And I imagine that whichever tea company is partnered with Starbucks at that point is going to be very happy. Product bundling works very well, especially in cases like this, when an established giant decides that they are going now offer the thing as well. YouTube Music worked the same.
If you want your own home you can use something like Urbit.
Generally in the web as it is, we are all serfs on other people’s computers.
Also, a channel that posts shorts exclusively needs like 30 million views to be monetized, you're infinitely more likely to reach that threshold creating compilation of cute cat videos than with your own original content (regardless of the niche). I'd be shocked if even 2% of channels earning money from shorts create any original content what so ever.
this is a hilarious image. "ooh, don't mind if i do".
I don't think it makes sense to say that they are forced by the market to do this to compete with the candy store, when they already know I don't want candy in the first place. Instead, this sort of annoying practice pushes me to leave and visit the organic market instead (Nebula).
I don't think "revealed preference" is the right explanation here either, because these kinds of settings preferences are tailored to an individual account, and I never click on Shorts and always select the "hide" dropdown, so the preference that I have revealed is one that is strongly disinterested in Shorts.
I think the correct explanation is that someone's KPI is attached to increasing Shorts viewership, and they're trying to earn their bonus, even if it's at a cost to the success of the organization as a whole.
> why would I go to a grocery store that insists on slipping a pack of Oreos into every third bag of carrots?
You can see how these are not analogous. The store _is_ slipping Oreos in your vegetables. So yeah… don’t install TikTok _or_ YouTube. I get that you’d rather YouTube to be YouTube-without-shorts, but it’s not a thing anymore, vegetables-without-Oreos is not an option at this grocery store
But for a while now firefox has been asking every single goddamn time whether I want to open this page in the app instead. With the only extra option to always in open in app. What about no? What about never?
shakes fist at sky
I don't even touch short form video because I'll get sucked in and suddenly hours go by. Short form video on YouTube makes me want to never open YouTube because I know how easily I can get sucked in.
They previously had a whitelist feature where parents could curate channels and videos for their kids.
That has been silently broken and all related features are disabled or non-functional.
Whoever is pushing Shorts is the equivalent of a drug dealer waiting outside a junior school to sell heroin to kids.
Sociopaths do this kind of thing.
This guys posts only shorts: https://www.youtube.com/@hydronyc and he's got the best/funniest plumbing video you YouTube.
The bad shorts are when you scroll to the next short after watching one - never do that, only watch shorts from subscriptions.
That’s a very competitive arena and while you and I may be health conscious - they’re fighting a trench war, you and I don’t matter.
I hate that 'feature' so much.
Long form content (i.e. Veritasium) are nice for sure, but some of it suffers from fluff too.
Is it because I'm signed in to youtube, maybe?
The setting propagates to other browsers signed in to the same account, I think.
When I say I don't like short-form video content, I typically mean the tiktok-influenced infinite scrolling algorithm-driven video wall of videos. Where you might click on one thing that looks useful or interesting on your home page and without even thinking about it you start swiping through the videos and suddenly you emerge an hour later form a brain rot video fueled fever dream, with no idea how you just lost an hour of your life to useless shit online.
At least losing an hour to video games or reading online might leave you with a sense of accomplishment or satisfaction. I have never felt anything positive after binging on social media videos.
That's a delta mixer valve which is $100, plus $100 for the trim. A plumber would charge double for that, so $400 for parts. Usually labor is about the same as parts so I would expect that job to cost $800.
Maybe there was a lot of labor involved, or maybe he's embellishing the story a bit (or leaving out some of the work involved).
All the comments in the video have the same question as you.
Maybe part of the issue is that I am logged into the same account across three different devices, or that I have other Google accounts too logged in (but I don't use YouTube in them, only the account with Premium).
Anyway, it should be trivial for Google to make it actually permanent (I would love it it was stored in my account, which I pay for Premium on, instead of local or cookie storage), but lots of people have this problem.
Even that’s imperfect because Zuck really was interested in the interactions he thought were best despite them not being highest engagement, but you can’t only do that and stay alive in a competitive market.
Yeah, you are absolutely right & I misremembered - forgot I copied over my browser profile.
It is definitely a permanent setting for me though, on both laptop & desktop profiles, haven't had to re-set it since I discovered it. (Firefox/linux).
Maybe the difference is in handling multiple google accounts differently. My approach: I tend to create browser profiles for specifiec tasks; the youtube viewing profile (used daily) is permanently signed in to my (non-Premium) youtube account, but when I check my actual gmail mail (for example) which is a different google account, I do it on a different browser profile.
Apologies for confusion over propagation, anyhow & thanks for the correction!