Disabling YouTube Shorts: An easy way
I’ll keep this… short. sigh.
Table of Contents
I enjoy YouTube, but I find the “shorts” trend exhausting. It’s easy to fall into a time-wasting trap that leaves me feeling mentally drained. Being able to filter them out would be the ideal solution, allowing me to use YouTube for what I want without the distraction.
The idea
Having played around with many different filtering systems over the years, both on-device but also site-wide, with DNS sinkholes, I know how beneficial such a change might be.
My go-to browser, Brave, comes with a uBlock compatible ad filtering mechanism.
I played around with it to block shorts, which resulted in a set of three rules
that fully (?) hide shorts from:
- my homepage
- the video pages (though I also use Clean YouTube)
And it (fully) blocks shorts, as in: I cannot go to youtube.com/shorts
The solution
To block YouTube shorts, you just need to add the following rules to your ad-blocker’s custom filter list. In Brave, you can do this by navigating to brave://settings/shields/filters and adding the rules in the “Create custom filters” section.
www.youtube.com/shorts/* www.youtube.com##ytd-rich-shelf-renderer www.youtube.com##ytd-reel-shelf-renderer
This should work with uBlock Origin and other compatible ad-blockers as well.