Good Morning Friends! This morning’s post is going to document a bit of a personal crusade I have been on for the last few years. In September of 2020, YouTube debuted the Shorts medium, which is a portrait mode video format that can have a maximum duration of sixty seconds. It seems that the idea was with Tik Tok eating their lunch with younger demographics… they would attempt to rebrand themselves into something that was more phone friendly. This was fine and I mostly was able to ignore it, until Google started pushing hard for existing content creators to start using the format. Overnight it seemed like many sites that I had previously followed were releasing more short content than they were long-form video, and as such, I started looking for ways to block it.
The YouTube home page has the ability to hide the shorts content for 30 days at a time, and I was mostly okay with this. However, there was seemingly no way to actually block it in my subscription feed. I am not sure how most people consume YouTube, but I tend to treat it like it was an RSS feed and much like consuming a blog roll, my default mode was to flip over to my subscriptions tab to see what was new from the various creators that I might be interested in. It has annoyed me to no end that in the middle of my 16:9 feed would appear these oddball vertical videos, breaking up the visual harmony of the screen. This isn’t that bad, but there have been days where the majority of a screen would be consumed by shorts that I could do nothing to remove.
I searched for some sort of addon to remove them for me. The closest thing I was able to find was this Mozilla Plugin that reported blocking shorts. I had a few problems, firstly I was not sure if I wanted to give a random plugin full access to my YouTube data. Additionally, as I have highlighted in green above, the plugin requires that you turn on autoplay in order for it to work. I really do not like YouTube autoplaying because I have the bad habit of just letting it run on in the background for hours. My core method of consuming youtube is as a podcast, with it either playing in the background or on another screen while I am doing something else. So while I don’t doubt the author of this plugin has pure intentions, it is also the only one they have ever published it is hard to view a track record. Basically, I decided against using it and continued my search.
Yesterday I hit a particular spot where I was frustrated by the fact that YouTube was not accepting my “hide for 30 days” on shorts from the home page. This prompted me to do some more searching and I must have varied my terms because I actually found something interesting. I found a filter list created for an addon that I have used for ages called uBlock Origin. Over on the website LetsBlock.it a user had uploaded a set of filters designed to remove shorts entirely from YouTube. Essentially you open settings for uBlock Origin and paste the script from the webpage linked into your “My Filters” tab. Upon closing out of the settings and refreshing YouTube, the changes will apply, and if working as intended… you should no longer see shorts of any kind. It seems to have some side effects of also hiding Shorts content from google searching as well. I am perfectly fine with that, but you might at least be aware of that.
Now I can consume my subscription feed without seeing those little YouTube Shorts speedbumps in the middle of it. I get that this is probably an entirely “me” thing, but just in case there were others out there eternally annoyed by this format, I would share how I removed them. I think mostly for me it is a side effect that I do not consume video content on my phone. This is combined with the fact that even when I do watch the occasional video clip on my phone… I do so without headphones and keep my phone on silent mode permanently. I really do not like my devices making noise, and since I am not a part of the orchard I never got used to wearing wireless earbuds all the time. That means my primary source of YouTube is while sitting at a 16:9 screen with headphones on, often while playing a game and it runs in the background.
Now with one dragon slain… I move my attention to Instagram. Unfortunately, this seems to be a tougher nut to crack, but I would love to find an easy way to block stories, reels, suggested content… and of course ads. Instagram is a platform for idly flipping through pictures that my friends have posted, and I use it exclusively for that. However, I seem to spend most of my time being served content that is not from any of the people I am following. Stories are easy enough to ignore, but I am never going to actually consume them regularly. Reels have the same problem as Shorts of being an attempt to turn Instagram into Tik Tok. However based on the limited research I have done, there isn’t an easy way to intercept this and filter things out as the Instagram UI is serving up ALL of the content from the same servers and largely treating it all the same. Oh well… I have to have a mission to keep me going and this will be one that I can chew on for awhile.
YT seems to know I prefer long form content and doesn’t (regularly, at least) include shorts in my suggested views, but even need to hide the bar every 30 days instead of just letting me remove the damn thing permanently has been a source of irritation of late.
I’ve done a few Google searches, but never anything too indepth. Most of the answers I found related to the phone app as well, even with an explicit request for PC results.
So! This is greatly appreciated. Especially since I also use uBlock Origin already.
I’m with you — I despise shorts, and a lot of the creators I follow have started putting them out at anywhere from a 1:1 to even a 30:1 ratio. I’ve unfollowed the egregious ones as the shorts have replaced the content I was following them for in the 1st place. The ones remaining have shorts as speedbumps, like you called them, but not so many that I’m not willing to get around them, at least.
I really wish YT had a filter that i could use to not show me any shorts at all though. That said, I’ve not really worried about it enough to go looking for 3rd party solutions like you did either 😉
That’s weird. I use YouTube every day (Many times a day, most days) and I have never even heard of YT Shorts, far less had them pushed at me. I think maybe once or twice I might have seen a vertical format video on YT, but if I did I just assumed the creator had filmed it on their phone like that.
Looking at my YT homepage right now, I can see a category heading in the upper left corner for “Shorts”. Never noticed it before. Looks like I’d have to click on it to see any, though.
I have YT set up to go directly to my Subscriptions as the “Home” page, very much like I have Feedly set to show the Index. That does indeed make them both work somewhat like RSS feeds. To get YT to do that in Firefox, I use this which I got from the regular Add-On page. I’ve used it for a couple of years and it works perfectly. Maybe it’s just that no-one in my subs ever makes Shorts.