Someone at YouTube needs glasses
442 comments
·April 30, 2025rozab
matsemann
What kills me with the autoplay (at least on mobile), is that the video continues from where it was when you click it. But the autoplay had no sound, and I probably didn't watch it closely. So I always have to scroll back to the beginning, as I've just now been put in the middle of a sentence a bit into the video. Especially for channels which actually gets straight to the point (like Numberphile) it's annoying. Such a stupid design.
Additionally there's a bug on the Android app that it sometimes doesn't show video titles (or the worlds worst A/B test?), so scrolling through I just see talking heads (since it autoplays instead of showing the video thumb) and have to force restart it to actually understand what's going on.
morsch
YMMV. If I trigger autoplay, it's almost always on purpose, and I tend to read the subtitles. Jumping into the video right where I was works well for me! Losing my position would be very annoying.
mvdtnz
What's even more insane is that if you hover a video for 5 seconds it thinks you "watched" it and it goes into your watch history.
joezydeco
Does the creator get credit for that? I've got a few friends that need a few million views and I could easily write a mouse driver to take care of that.
numpad0
That is what paperclip maximization does to your life. Stupid designs frustrate you more and make you engage more.
They're making slot machines, effectively.
princevegeta89
Mobile? There's also another sneaky piece of crap Google pulls - even if you're a Premium user and set your video preferences to high quality, they only play videos for you at 480p, even though higher resolutions up to 4k are all available.
If you manually increase the quality on that video, it will only apply for that video, and whatever videos you play next, will still be limited to 480p.
All this is just to save costs..A truly fucking shady tactic to fuck over paying users. Fuck Google for what they do and how they cheat naive users.
nerdsniper
This is also an issue on desktop web. YT will arbitrarily change the quality/resolution but doesn’t update the selector displayed in the UI. So for every single video I have to select 4K just in case YT might be serving it at 1080p or some other resolution even though it displays “4K” on the UI element.
Also the compression algorithm is very aggressive and it works reasonably well for general content but for edge cases (like starcraft streams), the 1080p loses enough details to make it hard to see important things like observers and outlines of individual units in crowded clusters. The compression algorithm just isn’t trained/tuned for these types of content, so even on a 1080p screen I need to stream at 4K just to see the details properly.
veloxo
YouTube Auto-HD browser extension: https://github.com/avi12/youtube-auto-hd?tab=readme-ov-file#...
toxik
I get "premium 1080p" most of the time, but yeah not being able to set it directly is annoying.
Tijdreiziger
I have Premium and I always get a high resolution, if my connection allows for it.
Karsteski
This shit was one of the reasons I stopped paying for YouTube premium and went back to aggressively blocking all ads. You try to give them money and they spit in your face regardless.
AlfredBarnes
Also if you do watch shorts, they are ALL added to your liked Videos.
toxik
Uh no they're not
It's easy to like them by accident though
hnlurker22
[flagged]
kotaKat
THIS. THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS.
This has been one of the most frustrating things I run into with Youtube scrolling the page. Can’t leave your cursor on the page while scrolling without managing to have the spacing shift the thumbnails just so slightly so that your cursor lands back into a thumbnail for an autoplay to start and add to the metrics.
jtbayly
I can’t think of other examples, but this exact problem is a constant frustration for me on multiple sites. I can’t scroll with my cursor on the page without crap happening that I don’t want to happen.
As to the reason, at least with Youtube and Facebook, the answer is obvious: they want to increase their ad revenue by claiming additional “plays” or “interactions” or whatever they want to call it today. I remember realizing several times over the years that I had been conned when I paid for ads. The top-level numbers looked good, but when I dug in, I realized they were all faked.
krisoft
> I can’t scroll with my cursor on the page without crap happening that I don’t want to happen.
Same stuff with the mobile youtube app. If you so much as graze the screen anywhere while watching a video the replay speed doubles. This is so sensitive that even a tiny unintentional finger touch, or a water droplet landing on the screen triggers it. Whoever thought that is a good idea as a feature, i can’t comprehend.
Plus they have no data to see how badly their feature annoys me. From a metrics perspective “the user wanted to fast forward for 5s” looks the same as “a careless finger cradling the phone triggered the fast forward and it took the user 5s to realise what is going on and adjust their hold, now they are annoyed at how fragile this app is”. Someone might have even used the statistics of all the inadvertent activations in their promo package to show what a popular feature they made!
jeffhuys
You can just... turn it off: https://www.youtube.com/account_playback
I have it turned on, but leave my mouse to the right of the screen if I don't want autoplay. It's habit now.
jaymzcampbell
This drives me absolutely nuts on Netflix too, perhaps more so.
gwbas1c
It's even worse on mobile. You don't even need to hover for an autoplay video to show in your history.
s3p
This may be a dumb question, but when you have video doing autoplay (as in the video starts playing while you're scrolling looking at multiple videos - you haven't clicked on one), does it show up in your watch history?
magackame
Just tested. If you hover for 10s+ then it does get added to your watch history.
EDIT: or did you mean on autoplay as in part of a playlist playing in the small player in the corner while you are on the home page?
tambourine_man
> This means you can't hover your mouse in the gaps between columns while you scroll to prevent videos autoplaying when moused over
You can disable autoplay at https://www.youtube.com/account_playback, then uncheck "Video previews". It resets itself every 15 days or so, but at least one can have some peace in the meantime.
delecti
That setting can be fairly sticky. Mine has stayed off since I initially disabled it, shortly after they added the "feature". I have no idea why it's not sticky for you. Maybe they fuck with me less because I have premium?
lolinder
I don't have premium and it's sticky for me but only on a single computer, I have to reset it if I switch computers or browsers. Same with dark mode. So maybe it's stored as a cookie and they wipe their cookies?
Levitating
> It resets itself every 15 days or so
Are you saying that YouTube just alters your preferences?
bunderbunder
Constantly. They also keep resetting the settings to not show shorts or video games in the feed.
I suspect that the managers in charge of some of these features are lobbying for it as a way to artificially increase the engagement stats for their features, but spinning it as actually being good UX instead of a user-hostile move because it's important for "discoverability" or something like that.
PaulHoule
It seems to do that all the time. Try hiding YouTube shorts and they just come back.
eatbitseveryday
Many websites do this. Facebook resets your feed sorting preferences, as does LinkedIn (sort by Recent, then refresh the page, it will be Top again).
hackyhacky
> Are you saying that YouTube just alters your preferences?
My preferences change all the time, regardless of Youtube. For example, when I was a kid, I hated mustard.
On the other hand, my Youtube configuration may change independent of my actions.
RankingMember
See also: Spotify's "repeat" functionality. I turn it off whenever I see it on, but somehow it's always back on within a few days.
tambourine_man
If you are not being sarcastic, yes, it happens all the time. Probably to maximize whatever metric they're measuring.
I'm fearing the day they'll just remove that toggle for good.
tredre3
> It resets itself every 15 days or so, but at least one can have some peace in the meantime.
It's also just stored in a cookie/session, so you have to do it in each client and every time you wipe your cookies. Very frustrating.
OtherShrezzing
You can also set this in your browser with the _reduce motion_ parameter.
Absolutely no sites, including YouTube, honour the parameter. But you can at least tell the site that you'd prefer it another way.
mubou
> You can also set this in your browser with the _reduce motion_ parameter.
Unfortunately there's no way to set this per-site, at least in Chrome. Similarly, if you disable animations in Windows, you also disable all animations and transitions in websites that support prefers-reduced-motion, causing some sites to feel janky as a result.
They really need to add a per-site toggle for that, and a browser-level option to ignore the OS' setting. Turning off animations in Word shouldn't turn them off in Google Calendar.
tuetuopay
This bugged me so much and yet I ended up noticing a simple workaround: keep the mouse in the top bar where the search box is.
By all UI logic this should not scroll as this element is not scrollable (it's the top bar above the scrollable content), but YouTube and Google in their infinite UX wisdom kept the scroll mouse events go behind the hovered element. I won't complain about this one too.
zootboy
I know this is just a weird workaround, but you can put your mouse cursor on top of the scroll bar. The scroll wheel still works like normal there (at least in my tests on Linux / Firefox).
n2d4
Which ones are misaligned? At least the ones shown to me are perfectly aligned on my computer (both Safari and Chrome on a Mac).
Is it maybe caused by an adblocker? (I have YouTube premium, so no ads.)
Edit: Actually, the picture in the article shows a misalignment in the "Breaking News" section. It's odd, because the sections align perfectly for me on various screen sizes
insin
It's probably an adblocker, I explained why they get misaligned ([is-in-first-column] attribute adding extra margin) if a video gets hidden and the rest flow to fill in its place here:
mmmmmbop
This bit of information makes the entire thread hilarious to read.
Bunch of hackers using adblockers that modify the client-side UI to cheat Google out of money and then complaining loudly about a minor UI convenience. How dare Google not optimize for them!
I say this as someone who uses an adblocker myself. But come on.
burnte
The video grid is mind boggling now, they keep making the thumbnails bigger, and now they don't even show two rows of 3, it's a row of 3 then a row of 3 but with only 2 links! There's a giant blank box for no reason!
They added fuchsia to the timeline bar so that it now clashes in an ugly way with everything else on the page.
Don't like Shorts? TOO BAD!
lolinder
Do you have an ad blocker? I've always seen blank boxes in the spots where ads would have gone.
xnzakg
Hmm, on one hand I agree that autoplaying videos should be illegal but on the other hand the clickbaitiness of YouTube thumbnails has reached a point where it's almost better. (cue deArrow comment)
tuetuopay
Why I do agree, the autoplay is a distraction preventing me from reading the video title and which channel posted it. Also, the clickbaitiness ends up being a feature for me: they have a specific "style" that's recognizable almost immediatly. A bit like AI-generated images, that have some eerie feeling to them. This way, I know I don't want to watch them.
herpdyderp
You can insert (and tweak) this into uBlock Origin filters:
! YouTube Fix & Customization by Arch v1.8.4 ! (1/11) YouTube 4 Videos Per Row Fix (Home and Channel Pages) / YouTube Fix & Customization
youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-row, #contents.ytd-rich-grid-row:style(display:contents !important;)
youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer, html:style(--ytd-rich-grid-items-per-row: 5 !important;)
youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer, html:style(--ytd-rich-grid-posts-per-row: 5 !important;)
ibejoeb
This filter list is the most up-to-date that I've found to hide shorts with uBlock Origin:
noname120
See here for the other forks: https://devnoname120.github.io/useful-forks/?repo=gijsdev/ub...
a123b456c
Didn't the new Chrome update break uBlock, or is that just for my test cell? I've been in mourning...
thamer
The following CSS equivalent worked for me, using the "Custom CSS by Denis" Chrome extension[1]:
ytd-rich-grid-renderer div#contents {
/* number of video thumbnails per row */
--ytd-rich-grid-items-per-row: 5 !important;
/* number of Shorts per row in its dedicated section */
--ytd-rich-grid-slim-items-per-row: 6 !important;
}
If someone can recommend a better alternative for custom CSS, I'd be interested to hear it. I guess Tampermonkey could work, if you have that.
[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/custom-css-by-denis...
orev
Vote with your clicks. Switch to Firefox
darepublic
well if you are still gonna browse on chrome don't settle for the ublock originless experience.
* download a release zip: https://github.com/gorhill/ublock/releases (expand Assets). * go to chrome://extensions, toggle developer mode on * click load unpacked and select the file you unzipped the release
then you also have to watch out because chrome will, still time later, disable ublock origin. You have to go to your extensions page and find the option for 'Keep it for now' or something. Then you can continue to browse the internet like a real gee! Thanks ublock origin!
satiated_grue
Yes, but it still works fine with Firefox.
bloppe
That's not the only extension Firefox still allows that's blocked in Chrome. FF also blocks 3rd party cookies and has shown no interest in Google's "privacy sandbox" tracking features. Funny how much better a browser can be without a massive conflict of interest
bigstrat2003
Use Brave if you want to stick with a Chromium browser. Their ad blocker still works great.
ge96
re-enable it or if not there is ublock origin lite which I believe is legit
celsoazevedo
> ublock origin lite which I believe is legit
It is, just not as capable as before due to the Manifest v3 changes.
gadrev
Magic, thank you. Works, at least for now, until they mess up with the layout again. So much better...
therein
Add this to the list.
youtube.com##ytm-paid-content-overlay-renderer
The `this video includes sponsored content` that covers and takes over the click into a video.
Whoever designed that, implemented that, approved that, needs to be fired and blacklisted from doing user-facing code changes.
Starlevel004
It used to be 12 videos until about a year ago. If you zoom in and out the thumbnails don't change size!
The worst casualty of the current design is the search. You get three videos before it inserts completely irrelevant and unrelated algorithmic recommendations. No? Fuck off? Do what I tell you to do!
swatcoder
> Do what I tell you to do!
Maybe a good opportunity to remember that you watching the videos you want to watch is actually just a workaround Google suffers through in the YouTube product.
They have to do it so that you come to the site, but it costs them money and makes it harder for them to optimize the revenue they get from your eyeballs.
Strycturally, their goal is to push the line as far as they can, and they spend a lot of product design and engineering effort to do so. They're only going to get better at it as time goes by.
And of course this principle doesn't just apply to YouTube, but at pretty much all media sites once they get large enough to pivot from growing their audience to optimizing its profitability.
titzer
> is actually just a workaround Google suffers through in the YouTube product.
It used to be a Google mantra that "focus on the user and all else will follow." They are so far beyond that they've wrapped around. They actively hate users now.
All Google really cares about is making advertisers happy. Literally nothing else registers as a priority.
SJC_Hacker
If people stop watching, advertisers will not be happy
Unfortunately this seems to be what people want.
There's plenty of YouTube competitors (Substack, Patreon, Vimeo, Twitch etc.) Unfortunately, they just don't have the traction of YouTube
zoogeny
> You get three videos before it inserts completely irrelevant and unrelated algorithmic recommendations
This has become increasingly annoying for me. Sometimes I want to find a reference I saw a few years ago on some topic. Even if I know the speaker, the topic, sometimes even the title, I can't find the video. I get a handful of results vaguely related to the search terms and then a never ending list of garbage not even slightly related to my search terms.
I really want my own memory augmentation. A personal tracker for all of the content I have ever consumed in any form, indexed and searchable (like in a personal Elastic Search cluster). The trouble is, I only want it for like 1% of the content I have consumed. The modern web is so hostile in general that aggregating any kind of data about my own usage is so onerous that it might as well be impossible. The friction they have purposefully created worked exactly as they intended.
seafoamteal
Zooming out actually makes the thumbnails bigger, because they grow to fill the space ceded by the rest of the UI. Just incredible design all the way through.
zippergz
Yes, this search thing is absolutely infuriating.
codedokode
They think that people are idiots and unable to deal with more that 3 search results. Or maybe they think their search is so good that the wanted video is always within those 3.
subscribed
No, they promote algorithmic "results" because they care about money from ads.
slater
I just wish they'd fix the "sort by date" bug in search. I search for something, it gives me endless results. If I then choose to sort by upload date, whoopsie, no results found!
calmbonsai
I've said it before. The secret to sanity when consuming YoutTube content is to never consume it on YouTube. The interface has been actively user-hostile for over 15 years.
InMice
Thank you for writing this post! I opened youtube a few days ago to this as well. On a 24" 1440p monitor its ridiculous. It's incomprehensible there's a UI/UX team that gets paid millions of dollars per year and the result is changes like this. Thank you again for writing this post. After searching it seems like they've been "testing" this in segments for a while now.
As a result I installed the "Control Panel for Youtube" chrome plugin and Im able to fix it back to 6 videos per row. I also found I could make shorts play in the traditional youtube player by default - which is an added relief.
gorbachev
You assume the UX team has any say in any of this.
Some of the revelations from the various lawsuits against Google by the US and other governments over the years have been about this.
The company replaced leaders who cared about users with leaders who cared about revenue optimization and those leaders changed the direction of the company to what we all see in all of their products these days.
pwg
Most likely what happened is some MBA ran a short A/B test of smaller vs. bigger video thumbnails, and the A/B results showed more "engagement" with the larger size thumbs, and so, of course, to meet his/her performance goals, the MBA had the page altered to the version that showed "more engagement".
cowsup
I think it also helps them figure out which videos keep people on YouTube longer. If I scroll to a section of the page that has 6 videos, and I stare at them for 10 seconds, then scroll down, they'll know that one or two of those videos must have been somewhat interesting. But if I stare at 6 videos, then scroll away 2 seconds later, it knows that nothing in that batch was worthwhile.
The fewer videos they have in focus at a time, the more accurate their algorithms can be.
drewbeck
"It's incomprehensible there's a UI/UX team that gets paid millions of dollars per year and the result is changes like this."
Unfortunately UX teams aren't actually paid to make great UX, especially at large corps and any place ad-driven. They're paid to move the metrics and move the revenue line.
htx80nerd
>It's incomprehensible there's a UI/UX team that gets paid millions of dollars per year and the result is changes like this.
this is the story of the big company web sites
- huge budget
- best programmers
- terrible design
- terrible usability
- doesnt make sense
- gets worse over time
it's unreal. seen on many major sites.
null
Root_Denied
It's infuriating that a plugin/extension is needed to bring back what should be the a setting, if not the default, in the UI for this.
null
jeffbee
[flagged]
dang
Could I implore you to please stop breaking the site guidelines? I don't have the energy to even list all the times we've asked you already.
I don't want to ban you, but you're making it increasingly difficult not to.
jeffbee
Ah yes, but front-paging a headline that implies colleagues at YouTube are blind, that establishes a tone of reasoned civil discourse?
hackeman300
Perhaps the incentives of said UX team don't align with those of the user. They might be optimizing for maximal time spent on the site, for instance.
jaydenmilne
Yup, and that's what I meant by them turning the pain dial all the way towards money. Presumably they can run A/B tests and will no doubt be able to prove that this change makes them $X more money (since it's 1/6 a full screen ad after all). At the cost of being a miserable tasteless change.
The YouTube team has been blindly chasing monetization at the expense of their website being useful and pleasant for a while now. Unfortunately it seems they can get away with it. I wrote this post to just shake my fist at the cloud
Angostura
I’m going to take up smoking because Philip Morris says I should.
mystified5016
Microsoft's adware and spyware was designed by one of the wealthiest companies in the world, so it's good for you. Google's ad business is the most sophisticated on the planet, so their spying and tracking and reporting your location to the government is good for you, you're just too dumb to understand. The USA, one of the most powerful and advanced countries in the world has suspended FDA testing of dairy. Since you can't possibly know better, this must be a good thing.
This is called "appeal to authority" and it's a pretty unintelligent logical fallacy. Do better next time. Maybe read a book or two?
ziddoap
>This is called "appeal to authority" and it's a pretty unintelligent logical fallacy. Do better next time. Maybe read a book or two?
This is called ad hominem, and has no place here.
UnreachableCode
Highly recommend https://untrap.app/ if you want to remove some of the shit from YouTube like shorts, comments or the recommendation bar to the right of videos. It has a safari extension on iOS too (this costs about 3 bucks). Disclaimer: not my software
voytec
FYI: YouTube provides RSS feed for every channel. The URL is as follows:
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNEL_ID
https://cinemaphile.com/watch?v=VIDEO_IDEvanAnderson
Pssst! Keep this on the down-low or they'll take all of this away from us. >smile<
Seriously, though, w/o RSS feeds Youtube would be completely useless to me. I keep waiting for Google to kill them.
eddyg
The excellent “Play”⁽¹⁾ app (available for iOS, macOS, Apple TV and Vision Pro) can also use these feeds, plus give you the ability to conveniently save other videos to “watch later”. Highly recommended!
grobibi
In addition to the main purchase price, this app charges 3.99/month for: -following channels -following playlists -removing shorts and many more features on top of those.
microflash
There’s open source Unwatched[1] if you want something for free.
[1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/unwatched-for-youtube/id647728...
maxglute
Can also use google sheet + app scripts + youtube api to add new videos from channels in playlists. Sheet can trigger every few hours to keep things up to date.
It does get more complicated if monitoring too many channels since execution will timeout due to sheets limit. But can make it to pickup where previously timedout.
Bonus using API gets you video info so you can filter by length (shorts), keywords etc. Limitation is ~150 videos added per day due to API limits.
null
Fiely
In the past several months, I've moved to using an RSS Reader + Watch Later Playlist + DF Tube extension (you could use whatever to nuke parts of the UI you dislike). This has greatly improved how I use YouTube. This method allows me to be significantly more intentional with what I'm watching and how much time I'm spending. The only frustrating part is that YT shorts still come through RSS, but they are much easier to avoid in a reader than YT's UI.
crtasm
You can change the first 4 characters of the channel ID to UULF to only get "Videos" (no shorts)
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/71192605/how-do-i-get-yo...
Fiely
This is very useful, thank you for sharing.
AlfredBarnes
I used this to make a Youtube viewer "application" that lists my subscriptions most recent videos, and i can watch them when i get a chance. Just a list. no thumbnails, no click bait, no random algorithm recommendations, just stuff i want to watch.
entropie
You can use the wonderful mpv player to view videos directly from a yt-url (yt-dlp backend).
avipars
i made a tool to extract the rss feed from a channel too!
iMerNibor
What gets me the thumbnails are now so big, they're blurry since the images need to be stretched to fit now!
The preview is 530x300px on a 1920x1080 screen vs the image shown being 336x188px
How this passed any sort of QA is beyond me
jsheard
They clearly need to conserve bandwidth for the most important assets - the 12 whole megabytes of Javascript.
jmb99
Genuine question. I’m assuming that, since YouTube is owned by one of the largest tech companies in the world that they’ve optimized their delivered JS to only what is necessary to run the page.
What on the YouTube home page could possibly require 12MB of JS alone? Assuming 60 characters per line, that’s 200k lines of code? Obviously ballpark and LoC != complexity, but that seems absurd to me.
titzer
Webpages are dumptrucks for every bad feature anyone ever thought up and are in a constant state of trying to re-framework their way out of the complete mess of utils that get shipped by default. Need a gadget that implements eye tracking via sidechannels? Yeah, they got that. And then justify that with "analytics" or anti-fraud and abuse, and no "click jacking" or whatever crap, and roll it times 1000.
dylan604
>What on the YouTube home page could possibly require 12MB of JS alone?
all of the code that hoovers up your analytics on what's been looked at, what's been scrolled past, etc. maybe I'm just jaded, but I'd suspect so much of it is nothing but tracking and does little for making the site function
jsheard
Fun fact: Googles own web performance team recommends avoiding YouTube embeds because they're so obscenely bloated. Placing their <iframe> on a page will pull in about 4MB of assets, most of which is Javascript, even if the user never plays the video.
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/performance/thi...
YouTubes frontend people just don't care about bloat, even when other Googlers are yelling at them to cut it out.
charlesabarnes
I've recently noticed that the thumbnails on the homepage are higher resolution than the thumbnails on the subscriptions page
cucubeleza
they want more money, less videos more ads, probably the UX/UI team was against it but you know how those big techs are
bryanhogan
The perfect oppurtunity for more AI, image upscaling! /s
Or maybe the next step will be automated AI-generated thumbnails based on the video and the user itself, so each user will be grouped into a different category and gets served a different thumbnail accordingly.
dcchambers
I am BEGGING someone, anyone at Google/YouTube to let me permanently disable YouTube Shorts.
I HATE Short form video content and no matter how many times I select "show me less of this" I still get them front and center when I open the app or website.
fossuser
The annoying bit is similar to reels, shorts are good for engagement.
It’s similar to why I don’t buy Oreos. I like Oreos, everyone likes Oreos - they’re engineered to be liked, but they’re bad for you. The best way to not eat them is to not have them in the house.
Short form videos are the heroin of media consumption - meta having to pivot instagram to it is because they’re facing competitive pressure. Same with YouTube. You can’t only have vegetables when your competitors are dealing heroin and your revenue is engagement based.
It seems the revealed preference of addicting consumption for engagement is tv with with a novelty button. TikTok and short form videos are that distilled to its purest form.
These companies can’t turn them off - they’re trapped by market incentives, it’s moloch. A few years back when Facebook had a more dominant market position Zuck said they were intentionally going to focus on human connections and friends despite the revenue cost that would cause because it was the ideal he wanted. In battle against TikTok you can’t hold those kinds of ideals unfortunately.
mitthrowaway2
So you don't buy Oreos, and think the best way to eat them is not to have them in the house. I agree. That's why I don't have TikTok on my phone. So why can't I keep YouTube Shorts disabled? I'm telling them I don't want it. If I'm the kind of person who doesn't keep Oreos in the house to avoid eating them, why would I go to a grocery store that insists on slipping a pack of Oreos into every third bag of carrots?
therein
It all checks out if you recognize YouTube clearly doesn't consider the app and the website to be your turf. You are in their home, they have oreos all over the place and they will offer it to you over and over again. You'll ask if they have water, they'll bring it with a box of oreos. You'll ask where the bathroom is, and find an Oreo waiting for you by the sink in case you'd like to indulge.
jackcooper
Summary of the proposed solutions to block YouTube Shorts:
-Enhancer for YouTube extension (Firefox) — mopsi
-Unhook extension (Chrome/Firefox) — jabroni_salad, kelvinjps10
-YouTube-shorts block add-on — timbit42
-ReVanced for mobile — kelvinjps10
-Shorts filter list in Brave browser (works on mobile) — my personal favorite
Arisaka1
Unhook made YouTube actually useful for my friend who has ADHD, since it lets you hide all recommendations in front page + side bar.
Luckily Google hasn't "manifest away" this type of extensions (yet).
s3p
Thank you so much for this. I hate YT Shorts but never thought to look for extensions to block them.
FuriouslyAdrift
Or just view all videos via DuckDuckGo
leptons
None of these workarounds are available on Chromecast, which is where I do almost all of my Youtube watching.
mrandish
I've been running the SmartTube app on my Chromecast (and on a Fire TV) for over a year and it's fantastic. Of course, you'll need to side load it but once installed it'll update itself directly. There are lots of tutorials online covering how to side load it on various Android-based streaming sticks.
eraviloi
[dead]
pier25
Same.
I HATE youtube shorts. Not their content (I've never watched one) but how they've infected the whole youtube experience.
You search for something and half the results are irrelevant... which includes a ton of shorts.
kryptiskt
They are fucking up the product that they are dominating a market with in order to be an also-ran in another market that's hot. It's Windows 8 all over again.
FirmwareBurner
Google is the Microsoft of today.
dylan604
My fave is where something clearly has been cropped from a 16:9 source to fit the portrait mode.
PaulHoule
As a recommendations engineer I've never been that impressed with YouTube, I think they cribbed the YouTube interface from
http://www.sebastianmihai.com/idiocracy.html
and no wonder they write papers about "negative sampling" because they don't collect clean data. I made the mistake once of clicking on a video where a Chinese lady transforms into a fox on America's Got Talent and oh my god I am suddenly scheduled for thousands of AI slop videos where some Chinese girl transforms into something on that show with the same music and with the same reaction shots.
There is an answer to the coldest cold start problem and that is have a hand curated collection of about 100 or so content pieces that are of broad interest and stupendously high quality. Instagram will show you videos that are amazing (like somebody cooking a fine meal under rustic conditions) if you're cold and Stumbleupon did the same back in the day. Now Instagram 2025 and Stumbleupon 2012 are not "cold" from the viewpoint of content the way YT Shorts is, but Google has the money to pay professionals to make something -- but their ideology is against it.
AwaAwa
> half the results are irrelevant
Better than the results on google these days, so YT is at least doing better.
polotics
create a new folder, put two files there:
manifest.json
containing: { "manifest_version": 3, "name": "Hide YouTube Shorts", "version": "1.0", "description": "Hides YouTube Shorts", "content_scripts": [ { "matches": ["://www.youtube.com/"], "js": ["content.js"] } ] }
and a file named content.js
containing:
function hideShorts() { const shorts = document.querySelectorAll('ytd-rich-shelf-renderer[is-shorts]'); shorts.forEach(short => { short.style.display = 'none'; }); } hideShorts(); const observer = new MutationObserver(hideShorts); observer.observe(document.body, { childList: true, subtree: true });
add the contents of this folder as a chrome extension
insin
Here's a more comprehensive BYO Shorts-hiding extension which uses CSS instead of running JavaScript every time an element is added or removed anywhere in the DOM, and also supports the mobile version (CSS selectors are extracted from the https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube Hide Shorts feature)
https://gist.github.com/insin/ef93c7d87b1f97f1c9411e6128d520...
neom
This works: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-shorts-bloc...
I also hate shorts, however, if this is to believed, we're for sure stuck with it: https://www.zebracat.ai/post/youtube-shorts-statistics
afavour
Are you still using YouTube despite this frustration?
If yes, then they don't care. Sorry. If you'll tolerate it and some other cohort of users will engage with the site for 0.1 seconds more than they would otherwise, it stays. YouTube is an optimization machine.
louthy
> I am BEGGING someone, anyone at Google/YouTube to let me permanently disable YouTube Shorts.
Absolutely this! I was looking to see if it was an option yesterday. Annoyingly not :/
insin
I make an extension which lets you fix this to your liking (choose the minimum number of videos you want per row, while also fixing the spacing issues overriding the underlying --ytd-rich-grid-items-per-row CSS variable causes), plus many, many more annoyances and what I felt were missing options and features for YouTube, like being able to completely hide Shorts:
https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube
Edit: for comparison with the screenshot in TFA, this is my Home feed on a 14" MacBook. No Shorts, no Mixes, videos which are 85% (configurable) watched or more are hidden, stream VODs from channels which also stream, Movies and TV, and any channels "Don't recommend channel" refuses to work on, can all be hidden for you:
SurgeArrest
Can I also have an option to block/disable all YouTube Shorts on AppleTV and Samsung TV apps? Shorts is the biggest disservice to civilization - promoting time-wasting behaviours.
Also, promoting 10-20 minute videos with 2-5 minutes of content is also wasteful. Most videos are extended to 10-20 minutes just to be recommended by YouTube.
Finally, videos with AI voice, which I hope can be easily detected, need to have a label clearly visible and I want to have preferences to hide those completely.
mrweasel
Also add a "stolen content" option for reporting. There is an insane amount of content that has been blatantly ripped of from others to produce cheap AI generated Shorts. Unless you own the stolen content, there's nothing you can do, even if it's clearly an Instagram video or a Reddit posts run through an AI.
Short form content, especially combined with AI is an abomination foisted upon this world in search of a meagre profit.
My issue with Shorts are that you watch it, conclude that it was garbage and a waste of your time, so you hit "thumbs down". That apparently does NOTHING in YouTube land, because you watched, and hit a button, so you "engaged" with the content. There's so much good, well made, quality content on YouTube, but even if you pay for Premium, the algorithm, tweaked for engagement and ad impression just ruins it and the more YouTube push Shorts the worse it gets.
meltyness
Yeah this is late-stage 'growth.' Hamstring your other products to reconcentrate activity, 'rebalance' usage to Shorts content by making the original offering, long-form content less usable, lower quality, less interesting; and so shall it remain until some congress finally forces these players cut a dividend instead of this moronic buybacks situation, hysterical that <well-liked female northeast senator and presidential primary candidate whose policy positions had been featured here> abruptly stopped talking about this for no apparent reason.
It's kind of conceptually like a Shepard's tone, though, which is maybe interesting.
For a long time the grid of videos on the homepage has been slightly misaligned. I imagine the different rows belong to different teams. This means you can't hover your mouse in the gaps between columns while you scroll to prevent videos autoplaying when moused over.
I find the autoplay so annoying because it hides the thumbnail which was carefully designed to communicate why I should click on the video and replaces it with, usually, a talking head or stock footage. Often the video gets inexplicably added to my watch history, and if I do choose to click on it I have to go back to the beginning because I missed the start of the audio