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.
Same here with FreeTube. YT has become a toxic experience on any browser and recently it has stopped working on my laptop with Firefox and uBlock Origin, no matter if I surf it as logged in in my main google account or not. The same arrangement works on my main desktop, but i mostly use FreeTube there as well.
Adding that once one accidentally clicks on a short all the results are skewed in that direction afterwards. I have to close the browser, run BleachBit and start over.
Instead of directly clicking the short to play it, open the menu at the bottom right and click add to playlist. This will play out in the classic player without having to configure ublock rules. And if the rest of the playlist is playing at more than 1x, this will also apply to the short.
I have a userscript that does this, but one downside is that it refreshes the page, so if I go back in history (eg I misclicked), it resets the recommendation page
A nuclear option that's worked extremely well for me is going into Youtube's settings and disabling history.
I no longer am even able to see shorts, they don't get suggested to me.
However, this is an extreme nuclear option and also disables the entire 'Home' and for-you type content. You can search and watch videos, but it flips it so it is 100% intention driven. Which means discoverability and browsing is non-existent. You're still able to see your existing subscriptions but that's it.
It's REALLY helped me disconnect from the addictive dopamine of the infinite, short type formats. YMMV
This is exactly what I’ve done for my Google settings after feeling more and more upset with what the Youtube homepage was showing me. Not so much in that it was necessarily contrary to what I may have wanted to watch, but more-so me thinking “My god.. is this what I’ve become?”
I now much prefer to open Youtube (quasi)tabula rasa. I still have subscriptions set up so I can follow “vetted” accounts, but for other things I now rely on that intentionality.
The one minor bummer is that Youtube won’t remember your spot in a video, say if you’re watching in your phone and want to continue on your desktop (or vice-versa). Not the biggest hassle to manually check the time and sync it up, though.
Yea - the not remembering a spot in a video IS a slight inconvenience, but for me it's a small price to pay in order to not get sucked into HOURS thrown away chasing the next 'hit' of dopamine from shorts.
I think this is the best way of using Youtube if you're trying to avoid brain rot and doomscrolling. This way helped me alot and gives you full control over what you consume.
For an older Internet user, it feels baffling that returning a website to a state where it shows you what you search for, and what you subscribe to, is considered an extreme nuclear option.
I'm also an older Internet user, but I assumed that it was a nuclear option to so dramatically change the expected behavior that without warning people they would be quite shocked. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I have been happy with the serendipity of YouTube’s algorithm generally. I followed an external link to a YouTube video about an exotic piano, and played a few related videos afterwards. These were videos about other unusual musical instruments, such as very high-pitched and very low-pitched wind instruments. And somehow that was part of a process leading to Japanese metal bands.
Dopamine-driven behavior in ourselves is certainly to be watched for.
I DO miss the discoverability. I really do. But my self control for watching shorts ends up being incredibly self sabotaging. I truly wish I could permanently disable shorts in some way. I wish I could use my DNS to block shorts, but alas they're not distinct.
Here is another one I found in my personal userscripts. I believe this script is more effective than my previous one because it prevents recommendations for Shorts or other videos from being shown.
// ==UserScript==
// @name No YT Sidebar and Shorts
// @match https://www.youtube.com/*
// ==/UserScript==
function noYTSidebar () {
const element = document.getElementById('secondary')
if (element === null) {
window.setTimeout(noYTSidebar, 1000)
return
}
element.getElementById('secondary').style.display = 'none'
}
function noYTShorts () {
const elements = document.querySelectorAll('ytd-rich-shelf-renderer')
if (elements.length === 0) {
window.setTimeout(noYTShorts, 1000)
return
}
for (e of document.querySelectorAll('ytd-rich-shelf-renderer')) {
e.style.display = 'none'
}
}
noYTSidebar()
noYTShorts()
Thanks for sharing. I realised I have several userscripts I've written over time to tackle web browsing distractions. I found another one and this is probably the most effective for me because it hides Shorts at the CSS level. That means I don't need to rely on setTimeout(..., 1000) to catch elements that get inserted dynamically after the page loads.
Oh this is amazing, thank you! I tried to make my own but youtube's CSS is so complex, I gave up. I have no idea why they push shorts to me when I'm on my computer. But then again, I really cannot stand them, even on my phone.
I also just discovered a way[1] to just get real videos from my youtube RSS feeds, free from shorts. Honestly it's been a joy to not have my RSS reader notify me for a old video republished as vertical.
The CSS is complex indeed. Moreover, the page renders the Shorts widgets after the page has completed loading, so JavaScript-based solutions need to exercise a little care in ensuring that it can hide the distracting elements after the page has loaded. Despite the complexity, I've found that just hiding all elements with the 'ytd-rich-shelf-renderer' class just works fine. For example:
.ytd-rich-shelf-renderer { display: none }
This single line of CSS seems to just work fine for me.
I keep Control Panel for YouTube [1] up to date with the latest YouTube shenanigans. Most recently: restoring the Related sidebar layout with the giant thumbs, if you're not hiding them.
Shorts are hidden and redirected if you land on one externally by default, and it _was_ also restoring the sort by Upload date filter UI, until YouTube went and killed that in the API ;_;
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.
Unhook is solid. I’m building Maxxmod [1] (shameless plug). The goal is similar in spirit, but with more granular control, a structured admin panel with live previews.
Still in development, but feedback from the HN crowd is very welcome. The site includes interactive prototypes and screenshots that give a clear picture of what it’s aiming to become.
Sorry, I initially mixed it up Unhook with UnTrap [1] because of the similar name. UnTrap's Chrome version seems maintained (February 2026 [2]), while the Firefox version seems abandoned too (December 2024 [3]).
One of my goals with Maxxmod is to avoid that abandonment pattern.
For anyone whose Unhook has stopped working, I cannot recommend Youtube Redux enough. I originally installed it because I hate the new layout, but it is amazing in all the options it allows, including disabling infinite scroll and removing shorts altogether.
Some of the Unhook options are broken nowadays I think. Its that or one of my other 10 YouTube extensions I now have to deshittify that damn page. Disable translate, SponsorBlock, Disable AutoPlay, some better thumbnail thing..
Does it still work for you? Unhook hasn't been updated in years and doesn't work for shorts anymore, on Firefox. It's still worth it to get rid of the suggested videos though.
It works fine for me, I have not noticed degradation
> doesn't work for shorts anymore, on Firefox
I do get shorts in search results, but if I click they do not load (the audio plays but no video). For the purposes it fills, that blocks them enough for me.
Many stuff are addictive, some legal (smoking, gambling), some legal with prescription (drugs) and some illigal (opioids). Infinite scrolling, either video only (yt shorts) or mixed content lies in the first category. This is a war one fights by himself as law doesn't helps with gatekeeping. Any weapon that helps me is welcome. Filtering the content that whould otherwise polute my screen space and distract me from the useful content is desirable. In Homer Iliad, Ulysses ordered his sailors to tie him up in order to withstand the voice of Sirens, while they were wearing earplugs. Today we have uBlock.
Haha, I take it as a compliment for now. Being not a native English speaker and managing to tie an LLM is a little flattering. Besides, Sirens are mentioned in Odyssey.
I’ve noticed this behavior for all Google properties. Every time I click “not interested” “don’t show me this again” or anything similar, it seems to have no effect as the best case. The worst case I’ve seen is when clicking these options seems to acts as a positive signal to show me more of that content. I’ve noticed this over years.
As such, I’ve simply stopped interacting with googles recommendation systems and most of googles content delivery systems. Including using YouTube as minimally as possible.
It's the same in tiktok: there's literally a button that says “I'm not interested in any live videos”, but it keeps inserting livestreams into the feed anyway.
I'm 100% convinced that these 'show fewer' options are there for dark-pattern reasons. They are sprinkled throughout Facebook and LinkedIn as well. My hypothesis is that companies put them there to give consumers the idea that they have any control at all over their "feed." But if they actually try to use them, they discover the options don't actually do anything, and resign themselves to whatever the algorithm feeds them.
I clicked the "show fewer shorts" button on youtube for a while--they'd come back every 2-3 weeks, but then I'd click it again. Then I tried a different tactic: as soon as I saw a short in my "recommendations" I closed youtube and didn't return for at least 24 hours. I only had to do that about three times and I haven't seen shorts in my recommendations for at least 6 months now.
It's purely there to provide a signal to the oxygen waster product manager who is pushing the obnoxious "feature" in the first place. Their KPIs are not only "positive" engagement with the feature but also lack of "negative" engagement such as clicking the "show fewer" button. It otherwise has zero user-facing impact.
The phrasing alone proves it's a dark pattern. At this point, I think we need some good-guy-AI to fight the algorithms, dark patters, and bad-guy-AI. It should also do everything it can to discourage the bad guys from even trying to implement them...
I do the same, and after a day of doing it- they seem to go away for a time depending on the platform, but they always come back and sometimes they come back a lot.
The web-browser is the least aggressive and I think I haven’t even seen them on Apple TV.
The iPhone App is the most egregious offender of not respecting the request though, it seems to almost not care at all, and now the thumbnails on the home screen have started autoplaying (with audio) and I can’t find how to disable it (older instructions seem to be invalid).
They have all the content though; so I have no choice but to deal with this, until a good enough competitor comes along and my favourite youtube channels upload to both places.
Auto play with audio needs to be controllable for accessibility. May be a regulatory requirement depending where you live. So it’s gotta be there somewhere.
Which would make sense, but they do it for the logged-in users as well! (And of course there’s platforms like LinkedIn or Twitter which do this and require you to log in for any meaningful interaction.)
I’ve left Twitter, yeah, and I’ve only really used LinkedIn while searching for a job last year. I am, however, guilty of scrolling through Instagram every now and then, even though it’s just as hostile.
My point is that you get this even if you try to do it correctly. The best you are ever going to get with cookies or local storage, even with the best intentions, is "ask me again later".
They'll also record the press and probably use it as part of their "KPIs". "The number of suckers trying to have control has decreased 5% this month, well done all".
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
In the US the door close button is required to work in "fire service" mode, so that's why the button is always there.
Outside of fire service the button most likely will work, just that it can't override the minimum open door delay mandated by the ADA, so it feels like it doesn't work. You may be able to trick the logic into disregarding the timer by pressing door open and door close immediately.
In Europe, there is no "fire service" mode that I know of, so the button isn't always there. But if it is, it basically always works and doesn't have a minimum delay.
> it can't override the minimum open door delay mandated by the ADA
I've definitely seen this not be the case, though it is probably in elevators older than the ADA. I lived in a building where selecting a floor or using the "Close Door" button immediately began closing the door. Some hotels as well.
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.
Shorts are treated as a privileged feature; they aren't going to simply hide them just because a few of us have the unmitigated gall not to watch them. That's not to their benefit. Youtube and the other platforms want to manipulate users into getting on that particular hamster wheel, and the app's UX reflects that. In that, it's not dissimilar to how streaming services routinely prioritize engagement maximization over user experience. If it takes you a few more clicks to find your continue watching list, that's your problem.
I'd be surprised if the algorithms have much say on when and where shorts show up in your feed versus just inserting them into specific spots in your feed that were determined by a whole lot of user testing to see what's most effective. There might be some logic to tweak it, but overall placement is probably fairly uniform across users.
I would expect (but cannot prove) that these hostile patterns decrease engagement on the individual level.
But maybe the effort to cater to people who avoid this stuff isn't worth it, or maybe they find it doesn't really discourage us from finding what we want, or the value of this stuff is so high that they find a sufficient number of converts over time.
As someone that pays for YouTube premium (and isn’t served ads), I don’t understand why they push Shorts to me too. Presumably they should want me to spend the bare minimum amount of time on YouTube necessary to keep me subscribed, as any further use just contributes to higher infrastructure and bandwidth costs.
I have done the same and it seems to have no consequence. I suspect YouTube only wants to track the opposition to shorts, not to provide a personal preference for their users. This uBlock filter is therefore much appreciated
For me, it does result in no shorts on the main recommendations list. They still appear on the recommendations shown while a video is playing (and there they don't have the "show fewer" option) but they eventually (maybe 7-10 days or so) reappear on the main list as well.
this is all in the iOS YouTube app, which is the only place I watch YouTube.
Door close button is supposed to cancel the door dwell time. But due to some disability codes in some regions all major manufactures allow it to be disabled (as required by some codes). i.e. The owners/managers/technicians can disable it.
I "Provide Feedback" every time anything annoys me, repeatedly. And I'm annoyed really easily. I have family premium, so I make sure to mention that.
- Hide all shorts, everywhere on the site, not just on my PC. uBO filters are amazing, but limited.
- The root page to show my Subscriptions instead of "Your History Is Turned Off..."
- I want links to go directly to the video and fill the window. I'll use the back button to go back where I came from, and native "Full Screen" if I want it to fill my screen.
All of it could be non-default settings available with Premium only.
Seriously though, do any of our German / French compatriots here on HN have different experience of corporations, versus the USA's "maximizing profit" purpose, given the "corporate social responsibility" mandate of those countries?
Greed (opportunism) is human and I wonder if that's "better" in the Germany or French corporate-world?
Mhhh although this is a bit OT it is also very interesting:
Germany has unions and works council.
It is required by law that companies allow works council to exist and if they exist they get certain rights.
> In Germany, they serve two functions. The first is called co-determination, through which works councils elect members of the board of directors of German companies. The second is called participation, and means that works councils must be consulted about specific issues and have the right to make proposals to management.
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_council#Germany )
Also Germany has good amounts of regulations for certain issues (sometimes too much regulation but oh well).
And Germany has many options to participate in local and regional politics that prevent the worst offenders.
But in the end a company is still a company that is forced to act in a way that maximizes it's profits. I think from my perspective we do not have such wild predator companies like you see them in the US but there are certainly a few very dubious things going on.
Except maybe the gGmbH and Vereine (clubs) which are companies and semi company structures that must act for the common good and without profit interest.
And one funny thing is that in Germany stock companies are required to act to the "best interests of the company" and not the "best interests of the stock holder" - in German law the company includes the worker, the future of the company and social aspects.
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 watch things from unknown-to-me creators in a private window, then copy the URL over to logged in window if it's any good. Same idea, might be an easier workflow.
Absurd that we have these sorts of workarounds, but of course the view numbers are better if it keeps fishing for just the right kind of clickbait trash that you'll wolf it down endlessly.
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.
I transitioned to using youtube with just that left sidebar for updates from channels i subscribed to, id watch the 2-3 creators videos maybe, slowly that became 1, now its 0. I still consider watching that final creator, but if i do its gonna be because i went to youtube and wanted to type that channel into the search bar, not because of a notification.
Everyone seems to act like youtube is something we need, I just don't really agree. If i want to watch something for entertainment, there are so many amazing shows with deep stories to choose from. If i want to learn, the video medium to me is just straight up garbage. I prefer to read to learn.
Of course there are topics this doesnt totally apply to, but for my purposes, videos are almost always just a way to not only likely repeat the same things you already know for a good chunk of the video, but when you finally find the meat, its still being delivered in a slower way than it could be ingested by reading.
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.
I am waiting for the day when they permanently turn off the channels rss feeds. Recently, after years of smooth sailing, they had a couple of outages, first selective, with only about 50% of my feeds effected and yesterday again with 100%, returning 404s. I am concerned given this development and alphabets apparent plan to kill as much interop as possible.
For the uninitiated, afaik, some feedreaders can auto discover the rss url when you add the channels url. Otherwise you have to manually search the channel page source for 'RSS' or 'channel_id='.
And for those that want to get the feed URL, this little Python snippet can get the feed URL from a channel's page, either from the channel's URL itself or a video or playlist page:
I just use two browsers. On one my recommendations are truly well curated but I can’t watch a single out of place video or my feed is corrupted. The other browser is for brain rot time and it’s the Wild West.
I used to have an account for my kids. I thought I would be smart by seeding the history with educational content. I clicked on a lot of videos, let them play etc. I was there when my kids would watch videos - and slowly but surely YouTube started recommending junk AI generated videos.
It is my opinion their algorithms are tuned to push this kind of engagement no matter what.
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.
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?
Oh and why is the list nine miles long anyway? Self-inflicted problem subscribing to so many channels you can't possibly be watching...
Well I've always had history turned off, and a few years ago YT blanked out the home screen if you have history turned off. Ever since then I have a blank home screen with just a message saying to go into settings to correct the error that I have history turned off.
I never used to subscribe to any channels, but then when they blanked out the home screen you have no other way to get any kind of feed. So only after they did that, I subscribed to a bunch of channels so that at least the subscriptions page would have some kind of feed.
This still doesn't give you anything related, just exactly the subscribed channels. If you want any kind of variety and quantity you have to keep subscribing to more and more channels so that the subscriptions page can almost sorta provide something like the old home page before they blanked it.
I complain, but I gotta say one thing, this way I NEVER see Mr.Beast or SsssniperWolf or anything like those any more. So, maybe it's better this way.
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.
almost all creators have some other way to get paid by viewers, and they'll take a good chunk more than 55%, why give google a dime. Not to mention its more direct support for the creators you actually care about, and an absurd higher amount than a subscription would ever benefit that individual.
Look at it the other way round, Google takes nearly half of their income, where they're putting a huge amount of time and energy into creating content while Google's contribution is hosting the data on a server. It also reinforces the YouTube hostage situation where content creators can't afford to leave the abusive relationship because they'll lose most of the income that Google isn't already taking off them.
uBlock Origin updates its lists automatically. If you want to spend $6, just donate to uBlock instead and never see an ad again on 99% of the Internet.
I pay mainly because a really like being able to play the videos in iOS pip background mode. I do find it crazy that Apple allows that OS level feature to be paywalled by apps.
I pay for plenty of goods and services. Just not YouTube. As others have noted, YouTube premium makes ads go away, but none of the other engagement baiting and user disrespecting anti-patterns. As far as I'm concerned, Google is in adversarial relationship with its users, whether your paying or not.
I currently pay for YouTube premium but I'm strongly considering stopping again. For me it's a combination of prices creeping up (small part) and the worsening UX and engagement-bait (big part). It's the same reason I dropped Spotify a few years ago.
i dropped spotify because i saw how terrible the non paid version of spotify is between payments, and was offended at how much i felt they used my library to hold me hostage.
Im not interested in being held hostage to pay a company xx$ a month for literally my entire life. At least when a netflix subscription is over, its not crafting up ways to torture its users into feeling obligated to resubscribe. Not that i like the streaming video services much either...
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.
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 find plenty of interesting videos, but I needed to slowly craft my following list.
I started with some CS lectures, and conference talks and it was alright, but something I reached for out of necessity.
Once I started watching videos out of curiosity I slowly ended up finding channels around my hobbies that filled my feed with pretty interesting stuff. There's good content out there beyond dense lectures, but also a lot of crap. I built my curated list of channels making videos worth watching and rarely watch something outside of those.
Similarly to music discovery, once you find what you like keep an eye on neighboring artists. I stay curious, but I'm quick to reject.
Also HN commenters: “I don’t want to pay for goods and services”
People became used to getting a thing for free then it slowly enshittified over time into the current blend of grift and bait. They also strongly promote via shorts the very things they discouraged because sex sells. Now they are promoting AI generated bait. As such they deserve any and all vitriol in my opinion. I personally would never pay for that hot mess.
I watch a few popular channels because I can but probably not much longer. Eventually I will just watch the videos people copy over to Rumble until that platform follows the grift patterns of YT. It won't be long.
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.
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 leashed to Microsoft in 2026 anymore than Microsoft wanted to be leashed to IBM in 1986.
Since the beginning of Youtube, it has always struck my as reeking of such desperation to keep you hooked. Just the idea that you're watching a video, and there is simultaneously a list of 10 OTHER videos right next to the view. Most have become so numbed to that, but if you step back you should find it just such a sign of desperation to hook you (is the best way I can put it).
Before a video is even over, they have to plaster the video window with MORE VIDEOS. "Here try this, what about this other thing, here have you considered this?"
My mind is always "I haven't even digested this one video and you're already PUSHING MORE!"
When my kids are over my shoulder on YouTube I'm constantly zooming in w/ Mac zoom to obscure the other videos, the other spam, etc.
Just learn to absorb and soak in one thing. And digest it for a moment.
It's all so obnoxious and it's now the norm.
FWIW, I only ever login in a fresh private window.
First I will say that clearly all these attention hooks must work or they wouldn't keep doing them but, for me, it just doesn't match how I use YT.
Specifically, I am almost always going to YT with the intention of watching something specific. It could be because I need to solve a problem (eg installing a smoke detector). I also for some reason use it to play music despite having Spotify. I honestly don't know why.
But I almost never go to YT to look for something to watch. I do sometimes watch a related video after I'm done but this wouldn't happen more than 10-15% of the time. I think I'm in the minority here as people seem to go on YT and just keep chaining videos.
But I find YT's interface to be a confusing mess of "me too" products that are half-assed and various likely fiefdoms that force UX onto things that don't make sense.
For example, YT's Live streams are, well, ass. The player is terrible. The UX is terrible. And you still have that right panel showing related videos. But watching Live videos is a vastly different UX than watching VODs. So why is it there? I suspect because whatever team owns that recommendation panel has a lot of power. And it probably drives metrics still so it's still there.
And bringing this back to YT Shorts. Ugh, I too would like to never see them. It's a "me too" Tiktok. And it's worse. Tiktok's UI/UX is just a step above Shorts (and Reels). And I spend 98% of my Tiktok time on my fyp.
But yes the "please watch another video" UI is everywhere. The end of a video, your home page, the right panel and in-video prompts/
As the other guy said, it's like having a drug dealer wait outside your house and try to push you some smack. This must be illegal, the fact that it's not illegal must be illegal.
I can sympathize a bit with YouTube trying to boost engagement to increase ad views, like, love it or hate it, thats the game they have to play hosting and serving petabytes of video.
But all of that shit should disappear the moment I start paying for it out of pocket. Like, I'm already paying, getting me to watch more videos costs them more money that it would to leave me the fuck alone!
We have such powerful AI tools these days. Every media recommendation service should have a slider you can set to indicate how much you want to be "challenged."
High challenge = CS papers explained
Medium challenge = bridge engineering videos
Low challenge = some guy playing video games for you on YouTube
This is exactly the only reason why I don’t pay for YouTube. Why would I pay money to make it even more addictive, when what I want is to make it less addictive.
Turn off your watch history. It stops all shorts except from your subscriptions.
If they remove this, I will surely be done with YouTube. I was so desperate to disable shorts and ready to be done with the app, but then I learned that disabling watch history pretty much perfectly allows me to use the app how I want to.
> I can’t permanently turn off shorts - and this I find personally insulting. It really feels like encountering a drug dealer outside my house every time I come home, always expecting me to cave and try some of that good smack.
YouTube's hostility is truly remarkable, by far the most egregious that the Subscriptions page in the TV app having a dedicated row for "recommendations" and "shorts" before you can proceed.
Not only I cannot turn off shorts, recently the iOS YouTube app auto plays random short the millisecond I start the app. That is against my user desires in three different ways - and there's no way I can find to stop it.
And Google whines when people install ad-blockers. It's pathetic.
I was willing to watch ads. But then Google introduced NEVER-ENDING ads, when the program is interrupted frequently and will never return unless you herd it along periodically by clicking Skip. Screw you, Google. I'm cooking, with my hands covered with who knows what, and now I can't watch the program.
This is not true. You can in fact block specific channels. From YouTube support[1]:
> On certain pages, such as your Home and Watch Next pages, find a video from a channel that you don’t want recommended to you.
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”
this is a filter im using that blocks a channel from showing in the search results. just add a channel name after "title"
www.youtube.com##ytd-search ytd-video-renderer:has(#text.ytd-channel-name:is([title*="add ai slop channel name here"], [title*="more ai slop here"]))
youll have to have to repeat the same name with other filters to also hide them on the homepage or the suggestions sidebar.
freetube is another option that works on desktop and it lets you block a channel by name by adding it in the "distraction free" section of the settings. if youre on android theres also a version of freetube in the f-droid store that works ok enough, even thought the freetube UI is not really designed for mobile
obviously this only gets you so far. at some point there could be more slop than non-slop so it wont be possible to block them all, but so far im finding this useful for the few repeat offenders that keep showing up in the search results*
Youtube is far too significant a video collection to risk losing it. Yes there is insane anounts of garbage and yes their history is getting spottier by the day, but nothing else comes close to all of the good stuff that is still on it.
Google needs to get its shit together and give users power tools. YT hasn't improved materially for many years now. I hope they can snap out of whatever governance dysfunction they're in. Not sure whether increasing financial pressure (above what must, no doubt, build up on its own) is the right answer here. It will probably only lead to more enshittification, and a long, slow death and I'm pretty saddened by that thought.
Youtube could vanish from existence tomorrow and I'd probably just be upset that there isn't a place that might show me a 180p 20 year old video of how to properly clean my old dishwasher. I don't really know what these super high value videos are other than those. I really don't know why they must all exist on this one platform either.
>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.
A Tapermonkey script which redirects a short to the classic YT experience is somewhat more helpful, because sometimes there are interesting snippets in the Shorts. This lets you see the video but breaks you out of doomscrolling.
What bothers me most about YT is that it constantly plays videos with an AI-generated voice.
In general, I like AI features and use AI daily to build prototypes, but this feature looks so stupid to me and feels so wrong. I have no problem with it being an option, but by default I just want to watch the videos with their original soundtracks. But instead YT decides that I should watch the videos with some mediocre AI translation...
Maybe I could disable it using an account, but I still prefer not to have one when it's not necessary.
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.
Better to use Gemini to search YT, you can just talk to it what you want, and see the videos right there in the chat window. I used this to find well targeted music, it can also review artists and discuss about them not just play music.
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.
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.
Yeah like, I went to middle/high school 2008-2014, when Facebook was so popular that it's kinda hard to imagine today. I didn't have one. At some point I was so out of the loop that nobody even told me we had a freshman dance. In hindsight, could've just used it for a few minutes a week, so that's what I did in college.
Also have a burner Twitter just because that was the only damn way to contact the DMV in 2020.
It's a region-locked subscription available in the EU and a few other countries. Before that they were intensifying efforts to derail adblockers, which already made the site painful to use (and, ironically, easier drop entirely). Personally I had issues loading the feed and posting comments, but until it occurred to me to disable uBlock for a moment, I was chalking it up to "move fast and break things" (emphasis on the latter).
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.
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.
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 switched from using YouTube to invidious mainly because they don't support shorts and blocked YouTube on the DNS level, it's a bit slower, but I know I won't be sucked into doom-scrolling
After dealing with lists like this for far too long, Google will find ways to block it.
The best solution up to date is Brave Browser.
They do provide their own "lists", you do not have access to it :)
That is the beauty of it, you cannot, neither can big techs so it lasts longer.
So far, Brave filter is the only one able to block Shorts and a lot of crappy from YT. No filter will do that, or will get blocked very soon until a new one is released.
I'm curious if anyone knows of something like SponsorBlock or a UBlock list, that can flag tje onslaught of AI videos that are appearing. I find those crappy videos worse than the ads and the shorts.
I got an idea. We could use some kind of voting system where user can upvote or downvote YouTube videos, and it shows the rating when someone click on it.
It could be as simple as 2 buttons and a percentage bar right under the video, on the right, close to the dislike button that does nothing lol.
This is basically what Sponsorsblock does - it takes crowdsourced inputs to update the info for each video, then automatically skips the parts of the video that we want to avoid. "AIblock" could simply add some indicator of videos to ignore, or maybe just hide them from me.
i can't even get youtube to load with ublock.. theres a years old thread with hundreds of comments on the github -- what are people actually using today to preserve their sanity on youtube?
edit: the issue with ublock is the black screen - sometimes the video loads after 10 or so seconds, sometimes it doesnt. i dont consider hiding the ad while still having to wait around for it to finsish playing behind an overlay the same as "blocking" :|
Using ublock and umatrix both on firefox with full tracking protection enabled. Don't recall ever having any issues with youtube. Sometimes an alert will pop up "see why you're experiencing playback interruptions" and it clicks through to a page about how this is due to my adblocking extension but the joke is on them because I don't recall it ever actually being interrupted. It's just this erroneous alert that occasionally pops up.
Auto video playback in Twitter/X isn’t much better especially on the mobile app. I realised this can be remedied by switching to the webapp. It’s a subpar user experience due to constraints of mobile web (and lack of investment by X) but it’s also likely why auto video playback rarely works, so it evens out.
Is frustrating I have no control over it s as a paying user, same with hiding the blue checkmark
I've noticed other junk like 'games' and ads for paid 'premium' content getting through uBlock's filter list. Hope those are added to the list too.
I used uBlock's element zapper feature to block the youtube logo on top left, because it's often animated and always distracting (I desperately need fewer distractions when using youtube, not more, even if minor).
It's just the most horrible thing. The whole idea of YouTube for me was to control what you watch in comparison to traditional TV where they fed you what they wanted. I know people say that you should not click on it but we all how low times in our day that we have exhausted our brain.
As a user that doesn't use uBlock, I was also kind of sick of youtube shorts shoving into my eyes. I just made my own firefox plugins forcibly remove them as well. It is good to see the filter list here. Looks like I missed out on the mobile ones.
I swear I didn't even know one COULD pay for YouTube!!
Why would you want to?
They're are so many good front ends that block ALL that toxic garbage. Revamped still works, so does pipepipe, youpipe, noutube, etc.
I would pay any money for ability to block for my kids chosen channels on youtube. For some reason this is not possible and worthless crap keeps being promoted there.
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.
anything that blocks the doom-scrolling mode on twitter videos?
I dont see youtube shorts, have no login to instagram or tiktok, and stopped using facebook years ago; only social media i frequent is twitter -- and once i view a video in the feed, it hijacks my attention by auto scrolling to a new video.
I burned a couple of evenings this way -- and I need to be more careful about this.
I can't even stand to visit YT without the combo of Blocktube/Unhook/uBlock Origin/SponsorBlock/Return YouTube Dislike. (Some people may also find Clickbait Remover useful.)
Blocktube is a godsend; it adds a context menu for blocking videos/channels, and you can block vids/channels/comments based on a regex or keywords (e.g. transparently remove every 'minecraft' or 'roblox' vid, or remove every comment with 'Telegram' in it). It even removes vids before the DOM rendering, so blocked vids don't show up as empty title cards or blank spaces.
Unhook lets you independently toggle visibility of the home feed, the rec sidebar, endscreen recs, comments, shorts, and the unrelated BS they ad to search results. (The latest YT update lets endscreen recs slip through again; be sure to add
youtube.com##.html5-video-player.ended-mode .ytp-fullscreen-grid to your ublock filter to get rid of them again.)
Surprisingly YouTube still generates a feed for every channel's video page, so I just add channels to my RSS reader for updates instead of bothering with the increasingly flaky subscriptions page. (If they ever break this or yt-dlp I'm not even going to bother with YT in the future.)
Remember when Google exec Prabhakar Raghavan (the man who previously ran Yahoo search into the ground) made Google Search worse so they could serve more ads?
This is the YouTube philosophy; make the platform worse to drive 'engagement', completely ignoring the second and third order effects of their 'optimizations'. Want to search by upload date? Sorry, we removed that! Have some slop! Want to look for a video? Here's a bunch of unrelated bullshit instead - have you tried some slop? Also, have some ads.
The experience for creators is even worse. The recommendation algorithm and monetization policies change every month and YT conveniently gets to collect all the ad money if you've been demonitized. They're shoving a bajillion AI tools down creator's throats and even editing videos after they've been uploaded.
In the end, YouTube caters to advertisers. You're just the product.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a bot shoving slop in a human's face -- forever.
I used to use Invidious but it was breaking too often. Nowadays, I just open YouTube in a private window, or use yt-dlp from time to time to watch something later offline.
I have some lists [1] I use to hide YouTube's constant recommendations of things I've already watched.
They also hide previously watched music videos, which may be a downside.
Not a blocklist, but for anyone who wants this, Control Panel for Twitter [1] can hide most things you'd want to hide on Twitter. The latest version adds a way to keep using the Dim dark mode variant theme they recently removed.
Nice. I've also been doing this for a while too. I don't like to depend on a lot of addons, so I find the ublock only implementation of it quite elegant and fast. I also try to use filters nowadays to block other types of dark patterns (eg. Infinite scroll recommendations). It's surprising how much you can de-enshittify the modern corporate internet by just blocking tags with some css path filters.
Unpopular opinion, but I like youtube shorts. No ads, no rambling, no product placement. it forces brevity and getting to point. it is how youtube should be.
Not everyone has the brain chemistry to watch them in a healthy way. Google seems to be preying on that population by preventing people from disabling the feature; to make some quarterly charts look better.
Is there an explanation for why YouTube is hell bent on pushing Shorts to people, other than to get them addicted? There must be something we can do about these abusive arseholes. I hate that the number one business strategy right now is to make something addictive. This isn't good for us.
They appear to have recently removed the "show fewer shorts options" in the app. I pay for premium and the idea I cannot remove them from the app even as part of that is absolutely infuriating.
unlock is great. So many standalone extensions turn out to be a lot better simply as ublock filters.
I would like one of these to block the community posts as well. I'm getting really tired of seeing screencaps of Twitter engagement bait from 8 years ago. There's one account that just won't go away, even now that I'm reporting it for spam when it comes up.
Welcome to HN! Plugging your stuff is okay, but it’s generally frowned upon if you’re only here to sell something:
> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity. – https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Perhaps you could just participate in the discussion for now, and do a Show HN later when you’re ready?
You’re right, and I appreciate you pointing that out.
I’m mainly looking for early feedback to validate the direction before launch, not trying to use HN purely as a marketing channel. I’ll participate in the discussion and, once it’s ready, do a proper Show HN.
Looks great! But all the screenshots are of the settings. It would be nice to see what the end result is after enabling certain features.The preview is not the actual UX. I would like to see how will this tool change my youtube experience.
The reason I like unhook is, it doesn't change or force me to learn new ways to use YouTube but just reduce it to just video viewing with no distractions and blocking all the addictive pulls.
> It would be nice to see what the end result is after enabling certain features.
The previews in the admin panel are meant to reflect the actual UI changes on YouTube. For example, if you enable Speed Control in the player, the control appears in the player preview. Settings are saved on the fly, and when you go to youtube.com you get the modified experience accordingly.
On the website I only included a static demo, not an interactive one. Does that clarify your concern?
Maxxmod is still in development but we already have functional alpha builds. If you’re interested in testing one and giving feedback, feel free to email me at maxxmod [at] proton.me. Thanks, Pablo.
Legit question, do you guys get really bad Shorts recommendations? Mine aren't half bad (really more of the same as with regular videos) plus creators don't insert ad spots. I get it, TikTok-style scrolling is annoying, but the format has its merits. At least less yapping and more to the point.
Nearly all of the video I watch is on horizontal screens.
Whether I'm using a real computer or a BFT or an iPad or I'm watching a something with my pocket supercomputer while bored on a plane: It's horizontal. This is simply how I do it, how I have always done it, and how I am likely to always do it.
YouTube Shorts aren't compatible with this viewing method.
In addition: Nearly all of the videos I watch are longer than 3 minutes, and YouTube Shorts aren't compatible with this either.
Whether I'm watching a video because I want to be entertained or to learn something new, I want to be involved with it and focused on it. I am very capable of making time to do so when it behooves me.
---
Anyway, to answer your question: I have no idea if my YouTube Shorts recommendations are good or not good. I don't partake. I don't need empty, <3-minute dopamine hits in my life.
I constantly get tik tok style everything everywhere all at once fever dream headache rapid edited clips. There's a difference between to the point and just being brain rot delivered with no background. Reminds me of happy hardcore techno - you can't really feel the bass because it's not getting enough time to reverberate.
I avoid Shorts (and Tiktok) for the same reason I avoid stimulant drugs and video games: it depletes dopamine faster than regular YT videos (especially the somber kind of videos I mostly watch).
There are about a dozen reasons to hate shorts regardless of the content.
Everyone else has listed a bunch already. Here's yet another, the pointlessly limited UI.
There are no play controls to back, forward or scrub. You missed something? Hope it was near the beginning because while you can restart by reloading, you can't skip ahead. Want to pause at a particular spot to show your wife? You get to wait for the whole thing to play again from the start so you can hopefully pause it at the right spot. There was one important part? too bad, you can only replay the whole thing... And why? Even if you want to assume the case of some video that is actually legitimately only a couple minutes long, ok fine, but why the artificially stupid UI?
There is no legitimate reason. It's pure user manipulation. It's the service calling the shots to do what it wants to get what it wants instead of giving you a service that does what you want to give you what you want. Even if you are paying them money
There are all kinds of other problems, like I simply didn't ask for this. I don't care how great someone else thinks something is, or even if I would agree it's great if I asked for it. But anything that you don't want but can't avoid, and it's not the weather but something someone DOES have control over and is choosing to inflict on you over your expressed wishes, as a paying customer on top of all, is automatically intolerable.
But in fact I don't agree they are great at all ever. It doesn't matter what the content is or who's making it, including people I like on topics I like.
I want to say I don't have ADHD and don't want to develop it, but really idk I might actually have some level by the looks of all my unfinished projects, and even so, shorts make me feel like what people with adhd look and sound like from the outside. It's a hell existence. I don't understand how people can just willingly sit there and let these things feed them this constant stream of spastic hyper ephemeral shit. Even if I can understand how someone can fall into it unwittingly initially, how do they not realize what's happening to them after a while? Is everyone really so utterly unconscious?
If you do want to watch one for whatever reason you can open it in the standard interface. The video IDs are neutral it's just the URL that determines which interface you get.
Actually I guess a browser extension to redirect to a fixed up URL would resolve the problem entirely.
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
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.
In addition to the unhook addon that others also recommended and is great, I would also suggest, as an alternative, setting a redirection rule from "www.youtube.com/shorts/XYWZ" to "www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYWZ". This will play the short but in the classical youtube video (landscape) format, with no infinite scrolling, or replay or autoplay (assuming these are in general disabled), which takes away a big part of the addictive aspect of shorts.
I use the rule
in uBlock Origin.(Except that it doesn't work if you click on a short from YouTube's interface - it loads with JavaScript which bypasses the redirection.)
Replacing "shorts" with "v" also works, so the resulting URL is www.youtube.com/v/XYWZ
Oh great, didn't know that! Thanks! That makes things much simpler.
That's an awesome idea — sometimes I really do want to watch a short but not in that interface. Do you know how to set this up in general?
Redirector to the rescue: https://einaregilsson.com/redirector/
Been using it for annoyances like Slack pushing you to their desktop app, or fixing links when sites change domains (ahem, Anna’s Archive).
This is perfect, exactly what I was looking for. Thank you!
I use this addon for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/fi/firefox/addon/youtube-shorts-b...
I personally solved this by using revanced and disabling shorts completely.
Same here with FreeTube. YT has become a toxic experience on any browser and recently it has stopped working on my laptop with Firefox and uBlock Origin, no matter if I surf it as logged in in my main google account or not. The same arrangement works on my main desktop, but i mostly use FreeTube there as well.
I personally solved this by never clicking a short. We don't have to engage with every technology presented to us.
It is hard not to accidently click on shorts when they are interleaved in search results.
Adding that once one accidentally clicks on a short all the results are skewed in that direction afterwards. I have to close the browser, run BleachBit and start over.
Instead of directly clicking the short to play it, open the menu at the bottom right and click add to playlist. This will play out in the classic player without having to configure ublock rules. And if the rest of the playlist is playing at more than 1x, this will also apply to the short.
I personally solved this need with a simple bookmarklet: https://samulisuomi.github.io/youtube-unshortify-bookmarklet...
I have a userscript that does this, but one downside is that it refreshes the page, so if I go back in history (eg I misclicked), it resets the recommendation page
A nuclear option that's worked extremely well for me is going into Youtube's settings and disabling history.
I no longer am even able to see shorts, they don't get suggested to me.
However, this is an extreme nuclear option and also disables the entire 'Home' and for-you type content. You can search and watch videos, but it flips it so it is 100% intention driven. Which means discoverability and browsing is non-existent. You're still able to see your existing subscriptions but that's it.
It's REALLY helped me disconnect from the addictive dopamine of the infinite, short type formats. YMMV
This is exactly what I’ve done for my Google settings after feeling more and more upset with what the Youtube homepage was showing me. Not so much in that it was necessarily contrary to what I may have wanted to watch, but more-so me thinking “My god.. is this what I’ve become?”
I now much prefer to open Youtube (quasi)tabula rasa. I still have subscriptions set up so I can follow “vetted” accounts, but for other things I now rely on that intentionality.
The one minor bummer is that Youtube won’t remember your spot in a video, say if you’re watching in your phone and want to continue on your desktop (or vice-versa). Not the biggest hassle to manually check the time and sync it up, though.
Yea - the not remembering a spot in a video IS a slight inconvenience, but for me it's a small price to pay in order to not get sucked into HOURS thrown away chasing the next 'hit' of dopamine from shorts.
I think this is the best way of using Youtube if you're trying to avoid brain rot and doomscrolling. This way helped me alot and gives you full control over what you consume.
For an older Internet user, it feels baffling that returning a website to a state where it shows you what you search for, and what you subscribe to, is considered an extreme nuclear option.
Amazon and Spotify and Netflix are all enormous examples of not just giving you what you asked for (->recommendation engines).
They were there all along, just less egregiously.
Even PageRank (the secret sauce in the original Google search) is arguably a recommendation engine.
You can just use PCA of some feature then use cosine similarity, this has been known forever.
I'm also an older Internet user, but I assumed that it was a nuclear option to so dramatically change the expected behavior that without warning people they would be quite shocked. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I have been happy with the serendipity of YouTube’s algorithm generally. I followed an external link to a YouTube video about an exotic piano, and played a few related videos afterwards. These were videos about other unusual musical instruments, such as very high-pitched and very low-pitched wind instruments. And somehow that was part of a process leading to Japanese metal bands.
Dopamine-driven behavior in ourselves is certainly to be watched for.
I DO miss the discoverability. I really do. But my self control for watching shorts ends up being incredibly self sabotaging. I truly wish I could permanently disable shorts in some way. I wish I could use my DNS to block shorts, but alas they're not distinct.
That's weird. They keep showing me rage-bait videos with like 100 views. I'd much prefer pianos and Japanese metal bands.
It doesn't break subscribed channels though so I just bookmarked that page as my youtube page.
This doesn't seem nuclear, this seems WAI. YouTube gives you the option of only seeing what you want to see.
I wrote this little quick and dirty userscript for myself sometime back:
This isn't as comprehensive as the uBlock filter but it has worked pretty well for me so far.Here is another one I found in my personal userscripts. I believe this script is more effective than my previous one because it prevents recommendations for Shorts or other videos from being shown.
This is what I used, they have field `is-short`, https://github.com/epicseven-cup/remove-youtube-short/blob/m...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/remove-youtub...
Thanks for sharing. I realised I have several userscripts I've written over time to tackle web browsing distractions. I found another one and this is probably the most effective for me because it hides Shorts at the CSS level. That means I don't need to rely on setTimeout(..., 1000) to catch elements that get inserted dynamically after the page loads.
I did a firefox addon 3 months ago. You can disable/enable things in addon menu. I'm using Study mode actively as I'm a student.
https://github.com/ErenayDev/YouTube-Focus
Oh this is amazing, thank you! I tried to make my own but youtube's CSS is so complex, I gave up. I have no idea why they push shorts to me when I'm on my computer. But then again, I really cannot stand them, even on my phone.
I also just discovered a way[1] to just get real videos from my youtube RSS feeds, free from shorts. Honestly it's been a joy to not have my RSS reader notify me for a old video republished as vertical.
[1]: https://blog.amen6.com/blog/2025/01/no-shorts-please-hidden-...
The CSS is complex indeed. Moreover, the page renders the Shorts widgets after the page has completed loading, so JavaScript-based solutions need to exercise a little care in ensuring that it can hide the distracting elements after the page has loaded. Despite the complexity, I've found that just hiding all elements with the 'ytd-rich-shelf-renderer' class just works fine. For example:
This single line of CSS seems to just work fine for me.Unhook[1] has been my go-to for this. Gives full customization over shorts, recommendations, comments, etc.
1a: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...
1b: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/unhook-remove-youtu...
Sadly, it hasn't been updated since 2024 and is slowly breaking. Haven't found a good replacement yet.
I keep Control Panel for YouTube [1] up to date with the latest YouTube shenanigans. Most recently: restoring the Related sidebar layout with the giant thumbs, if you're not hiding them.
Shorts are hidden and redirected if you land on one externally by default, and it _was_ also restoring the sort by Upload date filter UI, until YouTube went and killed that in the API ;_;
[1] https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube
>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.
YouTube killing he sort by upload date made me furious.
I feel like the only fight back is boycotting.
Unhook is solid. I’m building Maxxmod [1] (shameless plug). The goal is similar in spirit, but with more granular control, a structured admin panel with live previews.
Still in development, but feedback from the HN crowd is very welcome. The site includes interactive prototypes and screenshots that give a clear picture of what it’s aiming to become.
[1] https://maxxmod.com
> Unhook is solid.
Last updated 2 years ago (Apr 12, 2024)
You’re right, Unhook does look abandoned.
Sorry, I initially mixed it up Unhook with UnTrap [1] because of the similar name. UnTrap's Chrome version seems maintained (February 2026 [2]), while the Firefox version seems abandoned too (December 2024 [3]).
One of my goals with Maxxmod is to avoid that abandonment pattern.
[1] https://untrap.app
[2] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/untrap-%E2%80%93-re...
[3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/untrap-for-yo...
Note that you might also want to check out:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/control-panel...
For anyone whose Unhook has stopped working, I cannot recommend Youtube Redux enough. I originally installed it because I hate the new layout, but it is amazing in all the options it allows, including disabling infinite scroll and removing shorts altogether.
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-redux...
Some of the Unhook options are broken nowadays I think. Its that or one of my other 10 YouTube extensions I now have to deshittify that damn page. Disable translate, SponsorBlock, Disable AutoPlay, some better thumbnail thing..
You should check out dearrow as well. Gets rid of clickbait titles and thumbnails
Does it still work for you? Unhook hasn't been updated in years and doesn't work for shorts anymore, on Firefox. It's still worth it to get rid of the suggested videos though.
It still works for me in Brave. While we're on the topic of "Unhooking" I also like to recommend the DeArrow[1] extension for YouTube.
1: https://dearrow.ajay.app/
It works fine for me, I have not noticed degradation
> doesn't work for shorts anymore, on Firefox
I do get shorts in search results, but if I click they do not load (the audio plays but no video). For the purposes it fills, that blocks them enough for me.
I clicked comments to say the same thing. Can recommend
Many stuff are addictive, some legal (smoking, gambling), some legal with prescription (drugs) and some illigal (opioids). Infinite scrolling, either video only (yt shorts) or mixed content lies in the first category. This is a war one fights by himself as law doesn't helps with gatekeeping. Any weapon that helps me is welcome. Filtering the content that whould otherwise polute my screen space and distract me from the useful content is desirable. In Homer Iliad, Ulysses ordered his sailors to tie him up in order to withstand the voice of Sirens, while they were wearing earplugs. Today we have uBlock.
This reads like AI slop?
Haha, I take it as a compliment for now. Being not a native English speaker and managing to tie an LLM is a little flattering. Besides, Sirens are mentioned in Odyssey.
It didn’t read like that to me, at all. Also, did you mean to ask a question? :)
> Many stuff are
> polute
Not at all. It's an organic comment.
ESL AI?
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.
Yeah they take any interaction as a give me more button. Its gross.
I'm 100% convinced that these 'show fewer' options are there for dark-pattern reasons. They are sprinkled throughout Facebook and LinkedIn as well. My hypothesis is that companies put them there to give consumers the idea that they have any control at all over their "feed." But if they actually try to use them, they discover the options don't actually do anything, and resign themselves to whatever the algorithm feeds them.
I clicked the "show fewer shorts" button on youtube for a while--they'd come back every 2-3 weeks, but then I'd click it again. Then I tried a different tactic: as soon as I saw a short in my "recommendations" I closed youtube and didn't return for at least 24 hours. I only had to do that about three times and I haven't seen shorts in my recommendations for at least 6 months now.
OK Bob, we'll roll out this ridiculously silly "shorts" thing of yours, but only if we auto bail for users who stop engaging.
True or not, tis funny to me.
It's purely there to provide a signal to the oxygen waster product manager who is pushing the obnoxious "feature" in the first place. Their KPIs are not only "positive" engagement with the feature but also lack of "negative" engagement such as clicking the "show fewer" button. It otherwise has zero user-facing impact.
The phrasing alone proves it's a dark pattern. At this point, I think we need some good-guy-AI to fight the algorithms, dark patters, and bad-guy-AI. It should also do everything it can to discourage the bad guys from even trying to implement them...
I do the same, and after a day of doing it- they seem to go away for a time depending on the platform, but they always come back and sometimes they come back a lot.
The web-browser is the least aggressive and I think I haven’t even seen them on Apple TV.
The iPhone App is the most egregious offender of not respecting the request though, it seems to almost not care at all, and now the thumbnails on the home screen have started autoplaying (with audio) and I can’t find how to disable it (older instructions seem to be invalid).
They have all the content though; so I have no choice but to deal with this, until a good enough competitor comes along and my favourite youtube channels upload to both places.
Auto play with audio needs to be controllable for accessibility. May be a regulatory requirement depending where you live. So it’s gotta be there somewhere.
That would be a beautiful revival of an ad campain.
"NO MEANS NO!"
I'm disappointed that even Signal does this when asking you for access to your contacts.
To be fair, as long as you aren't logged in, that's the best you're going to get with cookies or local storage.
Which would make sense, but they do it for the logged-in users as well! (And of course there’s platforms like LinkedIn or Twitter which do this and require you to log in for any meaningful interaction.)
Have you considered not rewarding their bad behavior?
I’ve left Twitter, yeah, and I’ve only really used LinkedIn while searching for a job last year. I am, however, guilty of scrolling through Instagram every now and then, even though it’s just as hostile.
Cookies can contain "no".
Cookies don't last forever, certainly not across different browsers. It's why you keep having to accept GDPR policies over and over.
The reason why you have to decline tracking is because they want to wear you down.
My point is that you get this even if you try to do it correctly. The best you are ever going to get with cookies or local storage, even with the best intentions, is "ask me again later".
Cookies don't stick around forever.
For me, clicking that hides shorts for 30 days and then I need to click it again. So it's a monthly ritual.
That’s like the crosswalk button that does nothing. It’s there purely for the placebo effect.
They'll also record the press and probably use it as part of their "KPIs". "The number of suckers trying to have control has decreased 5% this month, well done all".
See also: call elevator to your floor buttons
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
This is highly region-dependent.
In the US the door close button is required to work in "fire service" mode, so that's why the button is always there.
Outside of fire service the button most likely will work, just that it can't override the minimum open door delay mandated by the ADA, so it feels like it doesn't work. You may be able to trick the logic into disregarding the timer by pressing door open and door close immediately.
In Europe, there is no "fire service" mode that I know of, so the button isn't always there. But if it is, it basically always works and doesn't have a minimum delay.
> it can't override the minimum open door delay mandated by the ADA
I've definitely seen this not be the case, though it is probably in elevators older than the ADA. I lived in a building where selecting a floor or using the "Close Door" button immediately began closing the door. Some hotels as well.
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.
Shorts are treated as a privileged feature; they aren't going to simply hide them just because a few of us have the unmitigated gall not to watch them. That's not to their benefit. Youtube and the other platforms want to manipulate users into getting on that particular hamster wheel, and the app's UX reflects that. In that, it's not dissimilar to how streaming services routinely prioritize engagement maximization over user experience. If it takes you a few more clicks to find your continue watching list, that's your problem.
I'd be surprised if the algorithms have much say on when and where shorts show up in your feed versus just inserting them into specific spots in your feed that were determined by a whole lot of user testing to see what's most effective. There might be some logic to tweak it, but overall placement is probably fairly uniform across users.
I would expect (but cannot prove) that these hostile patterns decrease engagement on the individual level.
But maybe the effort to cater to people who avoid this stuff isn't worth it, or maybe they find it doesn't really discourage us from finding what we want, or the value of this stuff is so high that they find a sufficient number of converts over time.
At some time you watch one (maybe by mistake,) and then they gotcha.
They are playing the long game.
You gotta try though. Just one hit. Listen. Next time you buy weed from me I’ll throw in just a few fentys for free. You gotta try it, man.
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
I have done the same and it seems to have no consequence. I suspect YouTube only wants to track the opposition to shorts, not to provide a personal preference for their users. This uBlock filter is therefore much appreciated
For me, it does result in no shorts on the main recommendations list. They still appear on the recommendations shown while a video is playing (and there they don't have the "show fewer" option) but they eventually (maybe 7-10 days or so) reappear on the main list as well.
this is all in the iOS YouTube app, which is the only place I watch YouTube.
It used to be that they were gone for a month. Now they're gone for a day. Possibly less.
"My Eyes! The Goggles Do Nothing!"--Rainier Wolfcastle as Radioactive Man
It's like pressing the "close door" button on an elevator.
Door close button is supposed to cancel the door dwell time. But due to some disability codes in some regions all major manufactures allow it to be disabled (as required by some codes). i.e. The owners/managers/technicians can disable it.
I "Provide Feedback" every time anything annoys me, repeatedly. And I'm annoyed really easily. I have family premium, so I make sure to mention that.
- Hide all shorts, everywhere on the site, not just on my PC. uBO filters are amazing, but limited.
- The root page to show my Subscriptions instead of "Your History Is Turned Off..."
- I want links to go directly to the video and fill the window. I'll use the back button to go back where I came from, and native "Full Screen" if I want it to fill my screen.
All of it could be non-default settings available with Premium only.
It also seems to make zero difference :/
Clearly that is useless for people who browse YT anonymously, hence the usefulness of the list.
The whole YT front page is an absolute utter clusterfook.
[flagged]
Chafe them nipples.
Seriously though, do any of our German / French compatriots here on HN have different experience of corporations, versus the USA's "maximizing profit" purpose, given the "corporate social responsibility" mandate of those countries?
Greed (opportunism) is human and I wonder if that's "better" in the Germany or French corporate-world?
Mhhh although this is a bit OT it is also very interesting:
Germany has unions and works council. It is required by law that companies allow works council to exist and if they exist they get certain rights.
> In Germany, they serve two functions. The first is called co-determination, through which works councils elect members of the board of directors of German companies. The second is called participation, and means that works councils must be consulted about specific issues and have the right to make proposals to management. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_council#Germany )
Also Germany has good amounts of regulations for certain issues (sometimes too much regulation but oh well).
And Germany has many options to participate in local and regional politics that prevent the worst offenders.
But in the end a company is still a company that is forced to act in a way that maximizes it's profits. I think from my perspective we do not have such wild predator companies like you see them in the US but there are certainly a few very dubious things going on.
Except maybe the gGmbH and Vereine (clubs) which are companies and semi company structures that must act for the common good and without profit interest.
And one funny thing is that in Germany stock companies are required to act to the "best interests of the company" and not the "best interests of the stock holder" - in German law the company includes the worker, the future of the company and social aspects.
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 watch things from unknown-to-me creators in a private window, then copy the URL over to logged in window if it's any good. Same idea, might be an easier workflow.
Absurd that we have these sorts of workarounds, but of course the view numbers are better if it keeps fishing for just the right kind of clickbait trash that you'll wolf it down endlessly.
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.
I transitioned to using youtube with just that left sidebar for updates from channels i subscribed to, id watch the 2-3 creators videos maybe, slowly that became 1, now its 0. I still consider watching that final creator, but if i do its gonna be because i went to youtube and wanted to type that channel into the search bar, not because of a notification.
Everyone seems to act like youtube is something we need, I just don't really agree. If i want to watch something for entertainment, there are so many amazing shows with deep stories to choose from. If i want to learn, the video medium to me is just straight up garbage. I prefer to read to learn.
Of course there are topics this doesnt totally apply to, but for my purposes, videos are almost always just a way to not only likely repeat the same things you already know for a good chunk of the video, but when you finally find the meat, its still being delivered in a slower way than it could be ingested by reading.
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.
I am waiting for the day when they permanently turn off the channels rss feeds. Recently, after years of smooth sailing, they had a couple of outages, first selective, with only about 50% of my feeds effected and yesterday again with 100%, returning 404s. I am concerned given this development and alphabets apparent plan to kill as much interop as possible.
For the uninitiated, afaik, some feedreaders can auto discover the rss url when you add the channels url. Otherwise you have to manually search the channel page source for 'RSS' or 'channel_id='.
And for those that want to get the feed URL, this little Python snippet can get the feed URL from a channel's page, either from the channel's URL itself or a video or playlist page:
https://gist.github.com/Q726kbXuN/834882f59bc921a3865272a66d...
I just use two browsers. On one my recommendations are truly well curated but I can’t watch a single out of place video or my feed is corrupted. The other browser is for brain rot time and it’s the Wild West.
I used to have an account for my kids. I thought I would be smart by seeding the history with educational content. I clicked on a lot of videos, let them play etc. I was there when my kids would watch videos - and slowly but surely YouTube started recommending junk AI generated videos.
It is my opinion their algorithms are tuned to push this kind of engagement no matter what.
Turn off history. Completely disables the food. The only content you see is what you search for.
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'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.
YouTube used to have direct messages until 2019.
Reimplemented in Nov 2025 for Ireland and Poland.
What's crazy is that their adtech definitely knows how to categorise stuff down to super specific topics, yet they only use that internally.
And not even alphabetical. It's ridiculous.
You should see me or my wife sometimes scrolling down this nine miles long single column list on the Roku to find a particular channel. It's in there, it just could be anywhere in there...
They didn't happen to post any new videos lately so they aren't on the main subscriptions page of latest videos, you have to go to the menu on the left to the list of all subscribed channels and just arrow down forever, back up, down again... Why in the ever loving world isn't that list at least alphabetical?
Oh and why is the list nine miles long anyway? Self-inflicted problem subscribing to so many channels you can't possibly be watching...
Well I've always had history turned off, and a few years ago YT blanked out the home screen if you have history turned off. Ever since then I have a blank home screen with just a message saying to go into settings to correct the error that I have history turned off.
I never used to subscribe to any channels, but then when they blanked out the home screen you have no other way to get any kind of feed. So only after they did that, I subscribed to a bunch of channels so that at least the subscriptions page would have some kind of feed.
This still doesn't give you anything related, just exactly the subscribed channels. If you want any kind of variety and quantity you have to keep subscribing to more and more channels so that the subscriptions page can almost sorta provide something like the old home page before they blanked it.
I complain, but I gotta say one thing, this way I NEVER see Mr.Beast or SsssniperWolf or anything like those any more. So, maybe it's better this way.
People subscribe so they can "get more" of a channel in their feed. As if that does that much.
It's not self-inflicted, it's purposefully done this way to take control and power away from users.
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.
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.
almost all creators have some other way to get paid by viewers, and they'll take a good chunk more than 55%, why give google a dime. Not to mention its more direct support for the creators you actually care about, and an absurd higher amount than a subscription would ever benefit that individual.
Look at it the other way round, Google takes nearly half of their income, where they're putting a huge amount of time and energy into creating content while Google's contribution is hosting the data on a server. It also reinforces the YouTube hostage situation where content creators can't afford to leave the abusive relationship because they'll lose most of the income that Google isn't already taking off them.
If that's all of Google's contribution then creators should have no problem hosting the data themselves and keeping the difference for themselves.
You are much better off donating money directly or buying merch than further inflating Google's profits.
> I pay because I want to support content creators
I do too; I pay them via Patreon.
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?
yt-dlp has to have you install an entire JS runtime for it to function now.
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 $6, just donate to uBlock instead and never see an ad again on 99% of the Internet.
uBlock origin does not accept donations. I would have loved to donate to them, but they don't.
I pay mainly because a really like being able to play the videos in iOS pip background mode. I do find it crazy that Apple allows that OS level feature to be paywalled by apps.
Hacker News commenters: “I don’t like ads. They are evil”
Also HN commenters: “I don’t want to pay for goods and services”
I pay for plenty of goods and services. Just not YouTube. As others have noted, YouTube premium makes ads go away, but none of the other engagement baiting and user disrespecting anti-patterns. As far as I'm concerned, Google is in adversarial relationship with its users, whether your paying or not.
I currently pay for YouTube premium but I'm strongly considering stopping again. For me it's a combination of prices creeping up (small part) and the worsening UX and engagement-bait (big part). It's the same reason I dropped Spotify a few years ago.
i dropped spotify because i saw how terrible the non paid version of spotify is between payments, and was offended at how much i felt they used my library to hold me hostage.
Im not interested in being held hostage to pay a company xx$ a month for literally my entire life. At least when a netflix subscription is over, its not crafting up ways to torture its users into feeling obligated to resubscribe. Not that i like the streaming video services much either...
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
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 find plenty of interesting videos, but I needed to slowly craft my following list.
I started with some CS lectures, and conference talks and it was alright, but something I reached for out of necessity.
Once I started watching videos out of curiosity I slowly ended up finding channels around my hobbies that filled my feed with pretty interesting stuff. There's good content out there beyond dense lectures, but also a lot of crap. I built my curated list of channels making videos worth watching and rarely watch something outside of those.
Similarly to music discovery, once you find what you like keep an eye on neighboring artists. I stay curious, but I'm quick to reject.
Also HN commenters: “I don’t want to pay for goods and services”
People became used to getting a thing for free then it slowly enshittified over time into the current blend of grift and bait. They also strongly promote via shorts the very things they discouraged because sex sells. Now they are promoting AI generated bait. As such they deserve any and all vitriol in my opinion. I personally would never pay for that hot mess.
I watch a few popular channels because I can but probably not much longer. Eventually I will just watch the videos people copy over to Rumble until that platform follows the grift patterns of YT. It won't be long.
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.
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?
doesn’t work on iPad or iOS? Also not worth my time given how cheap it is
I use ReVanced on Android and it allows me to hide shorts. A 'pirated' version of the app offers a much better experience than even the paid option of it.
> We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.
- Gabe Newell
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 leashed 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.
Since the beginning of Youtube, it has always struck my as reeking of such desperation to keep you hooked. Just the idea that you're watching a video, and there is simultaneously a list of 10 OTHER videos right next to the view. Most have become so numbed to that, but if you step back you should find it just such a sign of desperation to hook you (is the best way I can put it).
Before a video is even over, they have to plaster the video window with MORE VIDEOS. "Here try this, what about this other thing, here have you considered this?"
My mind is always "I haven't even digested this one video and you're already PUSHING MORE!"
When my kids are over my shoulder on YouTube I'm constantly zooming in w/ Mac zoom to obscure the other videos, the other spam, etc.
Just learn to absorb and soak in one thing. And digest it for a moment.
It's all so obnoxious and it's now the norm.
FWIW, I only ever login in a fresh private window.
First I will say that clearly all these attention hooks must work or they wouldn't keep doing them but, for me, it just doesn't match how I use YT.
Specifically, I am almost always going to YT with the intention of watching something specific. It could be because I need to solve a problem (eg installing a smoke detector). I also for some reason use it to play music despite having Spotify. I honestly don't know why.
But I almost never go to YT to look for something to watch. I do sometimes watch a related video after I'm done but this wouldn't happen more than 10-15% of the time. I think I'm in the minority here as people seem to go on YT and just keep chaining videos.
But I find YT's interface to be a confusing mess of "me too" products that are half-assed and various likely fiefdoms that force UX onto things that don't make sense.
For example, YT's Live streams are, well, ass. The player is terrible. The UX is terrible. And you still have that right panel showing related videos. But watching Live videos is a vastly different UX than watching VODs. So why is it there? I suspect because whatever team owns that recommendation panel has a lot of power. And it probably drives metrics still so it's still there.
And bringing this back to YT Shorts. Ugh, I too would like to never see them. It's a "me too" Tiktok. And it's worse. Tiktok's UI/UX is just a step above Shorts (and Reels). And I spend 98% of my Tiktok time on my fyp.
But yes the "please watch another video" UI is everywhere. The end of a video, your home page, the right panel and in-video prompts/
As the other guy said, it's like having a drug dealer wait outside your house and try to push you some smack. This must be illegal, the fact that it's not illegal must be illegal.
I can sympathize a bit with YouTube trying to boost engagement to increase ad views, like, love it or hate it, thats the game they have to play hosting and serving petabytes of video.
But all of that shit should disappear the moment I start paying for it out of pocket. Like, I'm already paying, getting me to watch more videos costs them more money that it would to leave me the fuck alone!
We have such powerful AI tools these days. Every media recommendation service should have a slider you can set to indicate how much you want to be "challenged."
High challenge = CS papers explained
Medium challenge = bridge engineering videos
Low challenge = some guy playing video games for you on YouTube
This is exactly the only reason why I don’t pay for YouTube. Why would I pay money to make it even more addictive, when what I want is to make it less addictive.
Turn off your watch history. It stops all shorts except from your subscriptions.
If they remove this, I will surely be done with YouTube. I was so desperate to disable shorts and ready to be done with the app, but then I learned that disabling watch history pretty much perfectly allows me to use the app how I want to.
Pretty sure shorts disables if you turn off watch history: (https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/08/youtube-update-homepage-wa...)
I’ve had watch history off for years and it shows me shorts above my actual subscriptions.
> I can’t permanently turn off shorts - and this I find personally insulting. It really feels like encountering a drug dealer outside my house every time I come home, always expecting me to cave and try some of that good smack.
This should be illegal..
YouTube's hostility is truly remarkable, by far the most egregious that the Subscriptions page in the TV app having a dedicated row for "recommendations" and "shorts" before you can proceed.
Not only I cannot turn off shorts, recently the iOS YouTube app auto plays random short the millisecond I start the app. That is against my user desires in three different ways - and there's no way I can find to stop it.
Grrr.
Why are you still watching youtube, then? What's drawing you in?
And Google whines when people install ad-blockers. It's pathetic.
I was willing to watch ads. But then Google introduced NEVER-ENDING ads, when the program is interrupted frequently and will never return unless you herd it along periodically by clicking Skip. Screw you, Google. I'm cooking, with my hands covered with who knows what, and now I can't watch the program.
Then stop paying if you are unsatisfied
Don't pay for YouTube
And yet if Youtube didn't have a paid option (and still now, even while it does) people would be saying If you're not paying, You're the product
Sorry - these companies have proven they're malicious even while you're paying them
(Except possibly Gmail. Facebook Verified is apparently a crock of shit, but Gmail MIGHT give you some account support more than people who don't pay)
but you're still paying
I hate that you can’t block specific channels from showing up in your feed. So much ai slop.
This is not true. You can in fact block specific channels. From YouTube support[1]: > On certain pages, such as your Home and Watch Next pages, find a video from a channel that you don’t want recommended to you.
> Click More next to the video title.
> Select Don't recommend channel .
[1]: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6342839?hl=en
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.
The one with the really high quality crystal methamphetamine?
I actually liked him before he got gakked on the sauce.
VS__ce?
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”
this is a filter im using that blocks a channel from showing in the search results. just add a channel name after "title"
youll have to have to repeat the same name with other filters to also hide them on the homepage or the suggestions sidebar.freetube is another option that works on desktop and it lets you block a channel by name by adding it in the "distraction free" section of the settings. if youre on android theres also a version of freetube in the f-droid store that works ok enough, even thought the freetube UI is not really designed for mobile
obviously this only gets you so far. at some point there could be more slop than non-slop so it wont be possible to block them all, but so far im finding this useful for the few repeat offenders that keep showing up in the search results*
If you pay for youtube, you are part of the problem
Youtube is far too significant a video collection to risk losing it. Yes there is insane anounts of garbage and yes their history is getting spottier by the day, but nothing else comes close to all of the good stuff that is still on it.
Google needs to get its shit together and give users power tools. YT hasn't improved materially for many years now. I hope they can snap out of whatever governance dysfunction they're in. Not sure whether increasing financial pressure (above what must, no doubt, build up on its own) is the right answer here. It will probably only lead to more enshittification, and a long, slow death and I'm pretty saddened by that thought.
Youtube could vanish from existence tomorrow and I'd probably just be upset that there isn't a place that might show me a 180p 20 year old video of how to properly clean my old dishwasher. I don't really know what these super high value videos are other than those. I really don't know why they must all exist on this one platform either.
>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.
Yes, enshittification.
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I use Brave to watch YouTube. I was pleasantly surprised that they had so many YouTube related features, blocking shorts is one of them.
Same. One I want though is for it to remember to not auto-preview videos. YouTube refuses to remember this setting.
I prefer using RYS <https://lawrencehook.com/rys/> which has this as a feature, but a lot more, too.
A Tapermonkey script which redirects a short to the classic YT experience is somewhat more helpful, because sometimes there are interesting snippets in the Shorts. This lets you see the video but breaks you out of doomscrolling.
"Enhancer for YouTube" have that 'convert Shorts' option or hide them entirely.
What bothers me most about YT is that it constantly plays videos with an AI-generated voice.
In general, I like AI features and use AI daily to build prototypes, but this feature looks so stupid to me and feels so wrong. I have no problem with it being an option, but by default I just want to watch the videos with their original soundtracks. But instead YT decides that I should watch the videos with some mediocre AI translation...
Maybe I could disable it using an account, but I still prefer not to have one when it's not necessary.
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.
It is better to use google to search youtube via site:youtube.com operator.
Better to use Gemini to search YT, you can just talk to it what you want, and see the videos right there in the chat window. I used this to find well targeted music, it can also review artists and discuss about them not just play music.
NEVER worked for me. I have always shorts shoved in every possible page, device and results, and I have watch history off since forever.
I can confirm this works great, you are back to a mid 2010s kind of homescreen without any of the modern cellphone format crap.
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.
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.
Yeah like, I went to middle/high school 2008-2014, when Facebook was so popular that it's kinda hard to imagine today. I didn't have one. At some point I was so out of the loop that nobody even told me we had a freshman dance. In hindsight, could've just used it for a few minutes a week, so that's what I did in college.
Also have a burner Twitter just because that was the only damn way to contact the DMV in 2020.
What's the "ads vs payment" ultimatum, they block ad-blockers? Occasionally someone sends me a link there, and it never bothers me for having uBO.
Basically this:
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67226394
It's a region-locked subscription available in the EU and a few other countries. Before that they were intensifying efforts to derail adblockers, which already made the site painful to use (and, ironically, easier drop entirely). Personally I had issues loading the feed and posting comments, but until it occurred to me to disable uBlock for a moment, I was chalking it up to "move fast and break things" (emphasis on the latter).
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.
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.
Is this really working on ALL shorts?
And if I click on the panel "no more shorts", is this setting then applied continuously?
Nothing’s working on ALL shorts, not for long, because google shakes things up semi-frequently to jam shorts down everybody’s throats
To solve it once and for all you’d probably want to extract the length of all displayed videos and hide all that fit within the short’s limits
I have leechblock setup to block:
and that seems to block all viewing of shorts. It doesn't stop their inclusion in playlists/recommendations or on a given channel's page(s). Works for me.Idk, I’m using a previous version of this list (the one it was forked from) and it works for me! Didn’t even realize it wasn’t updated.
I switched from using YouTube to invidious mainly because they don't support shorts and blocked YouTube on the DNS level, it's a bit slower, but I know I won't be sucked into doom-scrolling
After dealing with lists like this for far too long, Google will find ways to block it. The best solution up to date is Brave Browser.
They do provide their own "lists", you do not have access to it :) That is the beauty of it, you cannot, neither can big techs so it lasts longer. So far, Brave filter is the only one able to block Shorts and a lot of crappy from YT. No filter will do that, or will get blocked very soon until a new one is released.
Everything is public, won't last!
was able to get these added to ublock origin lite, which works in chrome; just paste the content directly into the custom filter settings.
same. hopefully it doesn't change frequently
I'm curious if anyone knows of something like SponsorBlock or a UBlock list, that can flag tje onslaught of AI videos that are appearing. I find those crappy videos worse than the ads and the shorts.
I got an idea. We could use some kind of voting system where user can upvote or downvote YouTube videos, and it shows the rating when someone click on it.
It could be as simple as 2 buttons and a percentage bar right under the video, on the right, close to the dislike button that does nothing lol.
This is basically what Sponsorsblock does - it takes crowdsourced inputs to update the info for each video, then automatically skips the parts of the video that we want to avoid. "AIblock" could simply add some indicator of videos to ignore, or maybe just hide them from me.
i can't even get youtube to load with ublock.. theres a years old thread with hundreds of comments on the github -- what are people actually using today to preserve their sanity on youtube?
edit: the issue with ublock is the black screen - sometimes the video loads after 10 or so seconds, sometimes it doesnt. i dont consider hiding the ad while still having to wait around for it to finsish playing behind an overlay the same as "blocking" :|
Using ublock and umatrix both on firefox with full tracking protection enabled. Don't recall ever having any issues with youtube. Sometimes an alert will pop up "see why you're experiencing playback interruptions" and it clicks through to a page about how this is due to my adblocking extension but the joke is on them because I don't recall it ever actually being interrupted. It's just this erroneous alert that occasionally pops up.
Still using ublock. Recently there's a delay starting vid sometimes, about 3 sec. I can deal with it.
Ublock origin for whatever reason never blocks ads before video for me. IDK what is up with my parameters because I know it works for other people.
I have the same issue. Perma-black loading screen that resolves as soon as I disable ublock origin. Using Firefox on Debian.
Thats interesting. If you’re on Chrome I’d try out Firefox just to see. I haven’t had any issues for a long time.
Works fine for me, FF Win11
Premium
yep, can confirm. we pay for the service, we use an ad-blocker and we are the ones affected. oh the irony... i now have ublock disabled for youtube.
Auto video playback in Twitter/X isn’t much better especially on the mobile app. I realised this can be remedied by switching to the webapp. It’s a subpar user experience due to constraints of mobile web (and lack of investment by X) but it’s also likely why auto video playback rarely works, so it evens out.
Is frustrating I have no control over it s as a paying user, same with hiding the blue checkmark
I've noticed other junk like 'games' and ads for paid 'premium' content getting through uBlock's filter list. Hope those are added to the list too.
I used uBlock's element zapper feature to block the youtube logo on top left, because it's often animated and always distracting (I desperately need fewer distractions when using youtube, not more, even if minor).
It's just the most horrible thing. The whole idea of YouTube for me was to control what you watch in comparison to traditional TV where they fed you what they wanted. I know people say that you should not click on it but we all how low times in our day that we have exhausted our brain.
You should look into filters setup by https://github.com/letsblockit/letsblockit for YouTube. That was an ambitious project, sadly discontinued.
The road to death with any OSS project is scope creep.
I appreciate your comment though! Thanks :)
I use the extension "Control Panel for YouTube" which also supports hiding shorts and much more
As a user that doesn't use uBlock, I was also kind of sick of youtube shorts shoving into my eyes. I just made my own firefox plugins forcibly remove them as well. It is good to see the filter list here. Looks like I missed out on the mobile ones.
I swear I didn't even know one COULD pay for YouTube!! Why would you want to? They're are so many good front ends that block ALL that toxic garbage. Revamped still works, so does pipepipe, youpipe, noutube, etc.
People who watch on locked down devices
Converted to 1Blocker format: https://gist.github.com/egze/7f672ebebecde0546ddb928e7f3adb4...
I would pay any money for ability to block for my kids chosen channels on youtube. For some reason this is not possible and worthless crap keeps being promoted there.
I know this won't help much, however, FreeTube can help with this. Yes, it is a standalone app, however...
Also, if you a Google/Youtube employee, rubbing your hands together, making fun of folks, and generally thinking negative thoughts, take it from a former veteran software engineer/manager (never had the desire to move up the ladder, and I am disabled now thanks to a tragic accident): There are a ton of negative comments about your UX, even from paid users. Nobody likes your shit. They only tolerate it because you currently have a monopoly. That will not always be the case. You are failing yourself, your job, and your users. Learn to put those users first. If Google had stuck to that early on, uBlock Origin wouldn't exist.
I know everyone at Google is tone deaf, so let me put this another way: Someone is ALWAYS left holding the bag. It could be you, the lowly programmer, or it could be you, the lowly manager. It could also be anyone in C-Suite. Once the numbers don't align with what investors want to see, someone will be blamed. As we reach the top of an AI bubble, those at the top are going to want to find a way to blame others down below, that means you will likely take the hit.
Blocktube extension does this with just a checkmark
can also hide other things
anything that blocks the doom-scrolling mode on twitter videos?
I dont see youtube shorts, have no login to instagram or tiktok, and stopped using facebook years ago; only social media i frequent is twitter -- and once i view a video in the feed, it hijacks my attention by auto scrolling to a new video.
I burned a couple of evenings this way -- and I need to be more careful about this.
yt neuter has this and much more: https://github.com/mchangrh/yt-neuter
Is there any way to get this to work outside of desktop and android? You can't pay me to watch videos on either.
I feel like I'm the only person on this site that likes shorts. I only see videos from interesting creators, mainly comedy skits.
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.
I just installed a plug-in for that, shorts are pure brain rot which YouTube already mostly is ...
While I use uBlock to skip the ads, I think unhook.app does a better job of hiding the actual elements on YouTube.
Even works on safari iPhone, nice
I have so many freakin' rules in ublock just to make youtube's UI acceptable
Just take the next step and stop going to youtube entirely, and pull the video from the url.
Thank you holy hell thank you
I can't even stand to visit YT without the combo of Blocktube/Unhook/uBlock Origin/SponsorBlock/Return YouTube Dislike. (Some people may also find Clickbait Remover useful.)
Blocktube is a godsend; it adds a context menu for blocking videos/channels, and you can block vids/channels/comments based on a regex or keywords (e.g. transparently remove every 'minecraft' or 'roblox' vid, or remove every comment with 'Telegram' in it). It even removes vids before the DOM rendering, so blocked vids don't show up as empty title cards or blank spaces.
Unhook lets you independently toggle visibility of the home feed, the rec sidebar, endscreen recs, comments, shorts, and the unrelated BS they ad to search results. (The latest YT update lets endscreen recs slip through again; be sure to add youtube.com##.html5-video-player.ended-mode .ytp-fullscreen-grid to your ublock filter to get rid of them again.)
Surprisingly YouTube still generates a feed for every channel's video page, so I just add channels to my RSS reader for updates instead of bothering with the increasingly flaky subscriptions page. (If they ever break this or yt-dlp I'm not even going to bother with YT in the future.)
Remember when Google exec Prabhakar Raghavan (the man who previously ran Yahoo search into the ground) made Google Search worse so they could serve more ads?
This is the YouTube philosophy; make the platform worse to drive 'engagement', completely ignoring the second and third order effects of their 'optimizations'. Want to search by upload date? Sorry, we removed that! Have some slop! Want to look for a video? Here's a bunch of unrelated bullshit instead - have you tried some slop? Also, have some ads.
The experience for creators is even worse. The recommendation algorithm and monetization policies change every month and YT conveniently gets to collect all the ad money if you've been demonitized. They're shoving a bajillion AI tools down creator's throats and even editing videos after they've been uploaded.
In the end, YouTube caters to advertisers. You're just the product.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a bot shoving slop in a human's face -- forever.
Google Plus already killed the coolness of YouTube long ago. There isn't much point in browsing there anymore, except maybe for music.
Oh this is great, any ideas on how to do this for Samsung and LG televisions?
Set up a proxy and inject JS on the page?
Do not use YouTube to consume YouTube content. FreeTube and yt-dlp are your friends.
I used to use Invidious but it was breaking too often. Nowadays, I just open YouTube in a private window, or use yt-dlp from time to time to watch something later offline.
For iPhone I use an extension called shorts blocker that does the same thing.
I really don't mind shorts, but I want to be the one that chooses to watch them.
Canceled YouTube subscription and deleted the app. Don't miss it, surprisingly.
I love you!
Wish we could use this as a proxy for phones that connect to internet !
Also see brizz.xyz which allows you to make YouTube whitelists.
I suggest trying the "Enhancer for YouTube" extension.
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
This is great, thanks
But what to do with android YouTube app ??
Wonder why their X account is suspended?!
Shorts seem good to me, but only when watched at 3x
is there a supply chain attack possible? What if some time later this list gets updated?
I will update it later down the line as YT changes its layout and for bug fixes... but i think this was not what your question.
I don't think that something super bad can happen with these uBlock filter, they will sanitize the filter heavily.
Maybe a potential attack vector for these lists in general is to hide the body of a few sites but this is more annoying then dangerous AFAIK.
That's the benefit of Brave Browser. The YouTube Shorts blocking feature is built into the browser itself and is not from a third party.
Nice. I've also been doing this for a while too. I don't like to depend on a lot of addons, so I find the ublock only implementation of it quite elegant and fast. I also try to use filters nowadays to block other types of dark patterns (eg. Infinite scroll recommendations). It's surprising how much you can de-enshittify the modern corporate internet by just blocking tags with some css path filters.
Unpopular opinion, but I like youtube shorts. No ads, no rambling, no product placement. it forces brevity and getting to point. it is how youtube should be.
I like YT shorts.
Not everyone has the brain chemistry to watch them in a healthy way. Google seems to be preying on that population by preventing people from disabling the feature; to make some quarterly charts look better.
I read this as "The default uBlock filter list will change to hide all YouTube Shorts".
Don't know why you're downvoted. It's exactly a 50/50 likely way to parse it.
is there anything that might work for the YT app on the Android?
Is there an explanation for why YouTube is hell bent on pushing Shorts to people, other than to get them addicted? There must be something we can do about these abusive arseholes. I hate that the number one business strategy right now is to make something addictive. This isn't good for us.
They appear to have recently removed the "show fewer shorts options" in the app. I pay for premium and the idea I cannot remove them from the app even as part of that is absolutely infuriating.
this is soo good thanks !
unlock is great. So many standalone extensions turn out to be a lot better simply as ublock filters.
I would like one of these to block the community posts as well. I'm getting really tired of seeing screencaps of Twitter engagement bait from 8 years ago. There's one account that just won't go away, even now that I'm reporting it for spam when it comes up.
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Welcome to HN! Plugging your stuff is okay, but it’s generally frowned upon if you’re only here to sell something:
> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity. – https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Perhaps you could just participate in the discussion for now, and do a Show HN later when you’re ready?
You’re right, and I appreciate you pointing that out.
I’m mainly looking for early feedback to validate the direction before launch, not trying to use HN purely as a marketing channel. I’ll participate in the discussion and, once it’s ready, do a proper Show HN.
Thanks for the guidance.
Looks great! But all the screenshots are of the settings. It would be nice to see what the end result is after enabling certain features.The preview is not the actual UX. I would like to see how will this tool change my youtube experience.
The reason I like unhook is, it doesn't change or force me to learn new ways to use YouTube but just reduce it to just video viewing with no distractions and blocking all the addictive pulls.
> It would be nice to see what the end result is after enabling certain features.
The previews in the admin panel are meant to reflect the actual UI changes on YouTube. For example, if you enable Speed Control in the player, the control appears in the player preview. Settings are saved on the fly, and when you go to youtube.com you get the modified experience accordingly.
On the website I only included a static demo, not an interactive one. Does that clarify your concern?
Maxxmod is still in development but we already have functional alpha builds. If you’re interested in testing one and giving feedback, feel free to email me at maxxmod [at] proton.me. Thanks, Pablo.
Legit question, do you guys get really bad Shorts recommendations? Mine aren't half bad (really more of the same as with regular videos) plus creators don't insert ad spots. I get it, TikTok-style scrolling is annoying, but the format has its merits. At least less yapping and more to the point.
Nearly all of the video I watch is on horizontal screens.
Whether I'm using a real computer or a BFT or an iPad or I'm watching a something with my pocket supercomputer while bored on a plane: It's horizontal. This is simply how I do it, how I have always done it, and how I am likely to always do it.
YouTube Shorts aren't compatible with this viewing method.
In addition: Nearly all of the videos I watch are longer than 3 minutes, and YouTube Shorts aren't compatible with this either.
Whether I'm watching a video because I want to be entertained or to learn something new, I want to be involved with it and focused on it. I am very capable of making time to do so when it behooves me.
---
Anyway, to answer your question: I have no idea if my YouTube Shorts recommendations are good or not good. I don't partake. I don't need empty, <3-minute dopamine hits in my life.
I constantly get tik tok style everything everywhere all at once fever dream headache rapid edited clips. There's a difference between to the point and just being brain rot delivered with no background. Reminds me of happy hardcore techno - you can't really feel the bass because it's not getting enough time to reverberate.
I reject addiction-designs on principle.
I avoid Shorts (and Tiktok) for the same reason I avoid stimulant drugs and video games: it depletes dopamine faster than regular YT videos (especially the somber kind of videos I mostly watch).
There are about a dozen reasons to hate shorts regardless of the content.
Everyone else has listed a bunch already. Here's yet another, the pointlessly limited UI.
There are no play controls to back, forward or scrub. You missed something? Hope it was near the beginning because while you can restart by reloading, you can't skip ahead. Want to pause at a particular spot to show your wife? You get to wait for the whole thing to play again from the start so you can hopefully pause it at the right spot. There was one important part? too bad, you can only replay the whole thing... And why? Even if you want to assume the case of some video that is actually legitimately only a couple minutes long, ok fine, but why the artificially stupid UI? There is no legitimate reason. It's pure user manipulation. It's the service calling the shots to do what it wants to get what it wants instead of giving you a service that does what you want to give you what you want. Even if you are paying them money
There are all kinds of other problems, like I simply didn't ask for this. I don't care how great someone else thinks something is, or even if I would agree it's great if I asked for it. But anything that you don't want but can't avoid, and it's not the weather but something someone DOES have control over and is choosing to inflict on you over your expressed wishes, as a paying customer on top of all, is automatically intolerable.
But in fact I don't agree they are great at all ever. It doesn't matter what the content is or who's making it, including people I like on topics I like.
I want to say I don't have ADHD and don't want to develop it, but really idk I might actually have some level by the looks of all my unfinished projects, and even so, shorts make me feel like what people with adhd look and sound like from the outside. It's a hell existence. I don't understand how people can just willingly sit there and let these things feed them this constant stream of spastic hyper ephemeral shit. Even if I can understand how someone can fall into it unwittingly initially, how do they not realize what's happening to them after a while? Is everyone really so utterly unconscious?
It's 99% the interface, cluttered with useless garbage over the video, that I hate.
I hate it so much that I couldn't even see the content hiding behind it, and don't really know what the recommendation is like.
If you do want to watch one for whatever reason you can open it in the standard interface. The video IDs are neutral it's just the URL that determines which interface you get.
Actually I guess a browser extension to redirect to a fixed up URL would resolve the problem entirely.
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
It's a cesspool of ripped off videos, AI generated slop, and people doing a really jazzy reading of a wikipedia article.
I mean, you can eat Doritos for dinner, and maybe you can convince yourself it's nutritionally sufficient, but it's still garbage.
Mine are usually pretty bad. If I ever do see one that I like I catch myself flicking through way too many of them afterwards and I hate that. So I prefer to hide them entirely.
I use YouTube Tweaks which has a lot of different customisation options. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/youtube-tweak...
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?
> A kind of HTML shadow banning?
A 'Proxomitron', of sorts.