I have a bit of an issue with short-form content. It’s so easy to lose hours scrolling through Instagram Reels at night that I deleted the app, and I only use the Instagram website on my laptop (a categorically worse Instagram experience). The problem is, I just moved my addiction to YouTube Shorts. Because you’re greeted with a grid of Shorts as soon as you launch the YouTube app, it’s too easy to just keep scrolling through Shorts for hours.
It looks like I’m not the only one with this problem: Back in October, YouTube added an option to limit your Shorts watch time. Then, in January, it rolled out an option to disable Shorts in YouTube search. But while these changes are helpful, they’re far from perfect: The lowest you could go with the timer was 15 minutes, so you could still watch Shorts when you launched the app—even if only for a quarter of an hour. Now, YouTube is taking things one step further, adding a new “0 minutes” option to its Shorts time management feature. It’s not exactly what I would have wanted—a toggle to disable Shorts altogether—but this is a start, especially since it removes Shorts from your main feed.
The only issue here is that this is not a strict block. You will still see a Shorts tab, and if you tap on a Short from a profile, you’ll see an option to ignore the limit for the day. If you choose this, you’re right back to where you started.
How to “block” Shorts from the YouTube app on iPhone and Android
To enable this feature, open the YouTube app, go to your Profile tab, tap the Settings icon from the top toolbar, and choose the Time Management option. Here, enable the Shorts feed limit feature, then pick the new 0 minutes option. YouTube is rolling out this feature slowly across the globe, so it might take a while for you to see it. According to The Verge, who spoke to YouTube spokesperson Makenzie Spiller, the option is live now for parents and is currently being rolled out to all users. If you’re a parent managing a kid’s account, you should see the option to limit Shorts to zero minutes right now. The rest of us might have to wait a bit longer for it. If you’re curious what a Shorts-free feed looks like, take a look at the video below.
What do you think so far?
If you mostly watch YouTube on your laptop, there’s no need to wait. You can block Shorts using the UnTrap extension for YouTube. It has over 300 options for customizing the YouTube interface, but my favorite feature is its ability to reliably delete the Shorts section from the YouTube home screen.
