FocusTube: A Chrome extension that hides YouTube Shorts
127 comments
·October 23, 2025nomilk
ivan_ah
For a more thorough block list, see: https://gist.github.com/robleh/583165b8e3da40ad0f04154aefa75...
drops the hopepage recommendatios completely, and also suggestions from the right sidebar
make youtube pull-only ; no push
Quarrelsome
Speaking of which, what the fuck is wrong with product managers at big tech these days?
When I try to express:
> I don't want to see ANY shorts
instead, I get:
> show me fewer youtube shorts
when I want to say:
> NO
I'm only allowed to say:
> mAyBe LaTeR
Do the people behind these design decisions not realise they're monsters by gagging their users into only being able to express notions that appease them?
OneDeuxTriSeiGo
This is the point. Youtube mobile has even started opening straight into shorts on occassion rather than opening to the home screen. Intentionally dragging users into shorts ups engagement and watch time. Letting users opt out or avoid shorts is exactly counter to their goals and metrics.
al_borland
From what I can tell, if you close the app while a short is playing, you’ll be dumped back into shorts when opening the app again. I’ve made it a point to always go back to the home tab before closing the app, which seems to avoid the issue.
I assume their goal is to make YouTube feel like TikTok, for those who want that.
Personally, I think there should be a setting so I can pick which page the app opens up to. I’d like it to open up to my Watch Later list, or subscriptions.
ibudiallo
This is what hostile software looks like. When you dominate a space, the choices you give to your users are: "Yes" or "OK". Choose wisely.
verdverm
Same with AI at the top of search, I just want to to go away permanently. I will go to an AI app when I want to use AI
FridgeSeal
“We have invested in the ai, so the peons will _use_ the ai and we will get that ROI” - the PM’s, I imagine.
raincole
And YouTube doesn't really provide the option of showing less shorts. Try it. See if it really shows you less shorts there months later. Spoiler: it won't.
BizarroLand
itS Our PlatfORM, wE do wHAT We waNt
Timwi
It doesn't matter whether they realize it. Even if they do, they just don't care. Most corporate leaders have high degrees of psychopathy. They are exclusively focused on their profits and nothing else. If gagging their users makes them more money than not gagging their users, they will gag their users and they will spare zero thought on how the users might feel about being gagged.
PaulDavisThe1st
For a while last year and into this, NextDoor would allow you to reset your "presentation preferences", with the proviso that they would reset them back to their default every month or thereabouts. WTFF!?!?
verdverm
Gonna need to expand it for the new "Ask for videos any way you like BETA" section
Appreciate the UBO share!
stormbeard
This didn't work for me after importing.
ed_db
Make sure you're adding it to the "My Filters" section, not the Import section under "Filter Lists". This fixed it for me.
siavosh
I wish there was something for the app. I haven't tried it recently but you could kind of stop the shorts being displayed for a brief period of time before it re-asserted itself. And I already pay for ad-free youtube wish it was at least a premium feature but obviously makes no sense from corporate point of view.
dotnet00
For Android, you can hide all shorts stuff by patching the apk via ReVanced Manager.
360MustangScope
Not to worry, you soon won’t be able to do that in the next version
lelandbatey
Not quite true AFAICT. You'll have to register as an android developer and use your own signing keys, or use some sketchilly acquired/disseminated signing keys. The apps don't have to be actually published/acquired through the app store, but their authorship signature has to be able to be tracked back to _someone_ in Google's big DB. Someone may even just decide to include their keys into Revanced manager to allow it to keep working; we don't know what Google will do if someone just brazenly says "sure, I'm a registered android developer, and yeah, my signing keys are used to sign tons of apps that all seem to be named 'Revanced' on many people's phones. What of it?" Maybe Google will try to ban them, maybe they won't. They've not released any explanation of what they'll actually do once all apps have to be signed.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, that was how I understood the recent announcements.
al_borland
I wish there was something for the app on the AppleTV.
I’m a Premium subscriber as well. In theory, they have nothing to gain from pushing shorts on me or increasing my engagement. It should be all about making the user happy. Yet paying users seem to have to deal with these decisions that are driven by ad-funded users.
I tend to want videos that are about 4 minutes long (what used to be the norm). Now it seems like most of the videos recommended to me are 10-60 minutes long, with the average one being 15-20 minutes. When I’m looking for something shorter it seems like Shorts are the only option. However those are usually either too short, or too long to be in the Shorts format without having control over the video on the TV.
Their perverted incentive structures created this mess. They should just have the one normal format for videos, have auto-play that people can opt-in to if they’re into that, and let people making videos of whatever length is best for the content without forcing videos to either be artificially long or short in an effort to optimize for the monetization algorithm.
captainkrtek
If you turn off history and disable the few toggles under privacy related to your usage, it disables recommendations (including shorts)
jonplackett
I’ve had to do this but miss recommendations now.
I don’t get shorts at all. They’re just such a bag of shite. Like at least reels and TikTok have decent content sometimes. YT shorts are always so crappy.
SchemaLoad
Yeah Shorts seems to be the most filled with AI slop, its not even the funny/edgy AI slop. But mundane fake stories.
amanzi
YouTube has gotten so bad recently, I started to watch it in Firefox mobile instead. On Android, I have Tampermonkey with GoodTube installed, and it not only blocks ads, but also removes Shorts, and a few other annoyances.
zip8370
I've installed ScrollGuard a month ago. Great success in preventing doomscrolling.
thousand_nights
seriously. there is nothing more infuriating then an app (which you pay a subscription for) gaslighting you into feeding you more slop even if you click "i dont want to see this" a thousand times. nice placebo button.
i can imagine the smug face on some manager at google that gets himself off to engagement metrics at night because his life is so miserable. i wish these people could be named and shamed, but they hide behind a faceless corporation
loloquwowndueo
Begs the question - why don’t you stop paying for it?
thousand_nights
i think my situation is quite niche - i host a lot of social gatherings for friends at my place and most of the time we like to play music videos on the TV either in the background or actively sharing our music tastes with each other
adblocking YT on a TV is a PITA. i'd rather have it just work, to not interrupt the vibes
add-sub-mul-div
Right, at some point shouldn't we shame the people giving money to these companies, enabling them?
peacebeard
“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.”
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It
kadoban
The heedless luxury and "no good activity" are some of the better parts of life.
Personally I live for the every day, I'm not worrying too much about what I will regret for a few hours on my last day(s) if I even make it there.
PaulDavisThe1st
Then consider what you may regret for the last 10 years of your life, when your mobility, sight and hearing capabilities are all degraded either a lot or a little, and you look back and realize that you spent 3000 hours on youtube shorts.
kadoban
> Then consider what you may regret for the last 10 years of your life, when your mobility, sight and hearing capabilities are all degraded either a lot or a little, and you look back and realize that you spent 3000 hours on youtube shorts.
I don't watch a lot of shorts, I don't find them that compelling. But I do watch a lot of shows and youtube videos, both of which many people would put in the same bucket. If I'm old and my sight and hearing suck, I'd hope I'll be happy that I watched the shows and movies I could while I had the chance.
To be clear, I don't even disagree with the original quote, I just think that there's many (hopefully mistaken, but I don't know the author) interpretations of it that come down to "no having fun, you'll regret it!"
yoyohello13
If All my senses have been significantly degraded for the past 10 years I would probably regret not living in a country that allows assisted suicide.
mastazi
As a teen I attended a school with a curriculum focused on classical studies (Italian "Liceo Classico") and reading your comment I immediately thought "Oh, this commenter must be from the Epicurean School" LOL
Some quotes by Epicurus:
> Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.
> The present moment is the only moment available to us, and it is the door to all moments.
And this absolute banger:
> Death, the most dreaded of evils, is therefore of no concern to us; for while we exist death is not present, and when death is present we no longer exist.
PaulDavisThe1st
Death is not a concern. Dying is. For most of us, dying is an extended (often multi-year) process, not some instantaneous transformation from existence to non-existence.
peacebeard
You are your own judge of what activities are worthwhile. Spending your time on those activities which you value is not a given.
null
paulcole
Bro never spent 2 hours watching Margin Call in 35 second chunks with a weird filter on top.
_dain_
We are streaming to willing viewers at the current fair market price
lurk2
2000s Era Historical Bro Movie Edit with a film grain filter and nu metal hip-hop music imploring the viewer to embrace the opportunity to die in battle and then you scroll down and it’s a Peter Explains Subway Surfers video.
LambdaComplex
YouTube shorts baffle me, in a way. "We've spent 20 years developing the perfect user interface for watching videos...now let's throw it all away and remove almost every feature so that it's more like TikTok."
wvenable
Youtube Shorts are apparently very popular; so even if they aren't our cup of tea, you can't argue with success.
OneDeuxTriSeiGo
It's successful in a really unhealthy kind of way though. I'm in my late 20s and in at least one group chat I'm in I've got 4+ friends who together we try to avoid shorts because they are such a time sink.
You don't enjoy your time on it but it's engaging and it's hard to get out of once you get sucked in. My friends literally keep track of how long they've been away from shorts and regularly "relapse" into sinking hours into shorts "against their wills" even when they uninstall the app but eventually end up on the mobile website stuck in shorts.
It's very much intentionally addicting and takes advantage of basically every dark pattern they can to maximize your time spent in the app.
al_borland
Some of it is artificial. If I’m watching a Short on my TV and I miss a word, I can’t go back to hear the word again. I have to finish watching it and watch the whole thing again. People making the shorts do this on purpose so people re-watch.
90% of the Shorts in my feed aren’t original content, it’s some random nobody stealing someone else’s content and clipping it up for easy money, usually overlaying some random other content so avoid a copyright strike. They are the drop shippers of the YouTube world. They add very little value, and just milk it for profit while they can.
Some slight improvements to the main video experience would make most shorts irrelevant. Let me share a clip from a longer video with a start and end time. Then have a way to seep popular clipped content. This would keep the views with the original creator, give the viewer an easy way to keep watching to get the full context, eliminate all these bottom feeder accounts, and unify the experience so YouTube doesn’t feel like two different sites mashed together. This seems like it would be better in every way.
moritonal
They're addictive, they're "popular" in the way slot machines are popular and require controls around. It's just so easy to watch another, which miiiight be amazing!
gtowey
Gambling is also extremely successful but you could argue it's a net loss for society to have it.
The argument that money == correctness is basically what we've been trained to believe by armies of MBAs, but it's not right. It's sad that the state of philosophical and moral discussions in our society has basically been usurped by a kind of thoughtless reductionism.
JoshGG
There was a period of time when Crack was also very popular.
Timwi
I can absolutely argue about what measure of success to apply. If you're only focused on what makes you money, then you're successful according to this one metric, but you're a psychopath and you're hurting your users. And it's millions of users because you're maximizing for that.
If you instead make a great product that is liked by a select audience, and that doesn't cause them brainrot, then you have succeeded on a different metric.
Which metric is more conducive to a successful society?
raincole
Try this: "we've spent 20 years developing the perfect user interface for watching videos, and our users are abandoning it for TikTok. What to do, Product Manager?"
AuthAuth
I dont think Youtube is losing users to Tiktok. I thnk Tiktok is growing with new potential youtuber users and youtube cant accept that and must throw everything away to capture them.
bdangubic
you just described almost ever product ever :) I used Jira when it was first released and it was ridiculously amazing. facebook was fire too… but quarterly earnings are you know, once per quarter… :)
DoktorDelta
You can also hide Shorts from the entire UI with this uBlock script: https://github.com/gijsdev/ublock-hide-yt-shorts
pentagrama
I watch a lot of YouTube, and I also recommend the extension UnTrap for YouTube (Firefox [1], Chrome [2], more [3]).
Besides hiding Shorts, it offers many options that give you more control over the YouTube interface. Specially clean up the search results page from unrelated suggestions, mixes, and more stuff, the current deafult search is horrible.
Here are some screenshots I took for you: https://imgur.com/a/UawBCG5
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/untrap-for-yo...
[2] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/untrap-for-youtube/...
Animats
Shorts are better than many long-form videos. The ones that start with some neckbeard with a big microphone blithering about something. Then there's a demand to "like my channel". Then filler historical material on the subject, probably involving zooming and panning over old public domain stills. Then an ad for NordVPN. Then a bit more historical material. Then, finally, about three minutes of new information. Then a recap of the history. Another "like my channel and ring my bell" demand. Then neckbeard fades out.
Interspersed with this are Google ads. The padded length allows for more ad time and increases revenue.
I can live with the shorts. They just show as stills for me unless I click them.
CaptainOfCoit
I find it slightly ironic that that statements ends with "YouTube Shorts" and not just "YouTube". What in particular makes the shorts so much worse compared to regular videos? If life is short, shouldn't one try to avoid spending too much time on YouTube overall?
codemac
attention required: 10 minute video > 10 second short
When the written word took over with the printing press, the same concern was levied. The amount of attention required to listen and memorize a story/poem is a lot more than just reading it.
The change with smart phones is just one of access/time spent on these things. There are people who are spending ~5 hours/day watching this content. There is a big difference between someone listening to 5 hours of a single poem, to reading 5 hours of a single book, to reading 5 hours of blog posts, to watching 5 hours of a youtube video, to watching 5 hours of random videos, to 5 hours of <10s videos.
mtoner23
Short form algorithmically curated content is an order magnitude more addictive than long form videos from creators you intentionally click subscribe to
GodelNumbering
I watch tons of long form educational content on youtube and entirely ignore shorts
Aurornis
I don't click on shorts, so removing them from the UI improves the recommendation feed for me. My recommendations are mostly good educational content, but shorts are never interesting.
For some others, shorts are too much of a temptation. You can find a lot of comments even on HN from people admitting that short-form video content on any platform (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok) can pull them into a time warp where they've wasted more time than they wanted to spend on videos. I suppose there are some people who can manage long-form YouTube use but struggle with shorts, but I suspect a better solution for people with self-control challenges is to disable recommendations completely (which will also make YT shorts disappear)
travisjungroth
Shorts and full length videos have similar attributes. Both have good, life enriching stuff (tutorials, performances) and both have the downside of being addictive and often hollow (or downright empty).
The difference is the Shorts format tips the scales. Somebody might want one and not the other.
alecsm
Many shorts are just AI cuts from bigger videos made to draw attention.
And what's worse is the infinite scroll.
johnisgood
Many shorts are just many different moments from a regular video indeed.
FuckButtons
Well, you’ve more or less described the issue yourself. I don’t need YouTube shorts to exist, at all. Youtube itself, is actually helpful for certain things, so I’m happy it exists. Even if it’s incentives don’t really align with my use of it as a sleep aid / radio station / university lectures and conference talk video portal.
raincole
It's a pat on one's own back. "I might be hooked to whatever YouTube algorithm recommends me, but at least I don't watch shorts like teenagers today!"
acegod
Serious question: why is watching YouTube shorts a worse way to spend your time than eg debugging CUDA problems?
The answer is "opportunity cost". But who really believes in that?
I call it the batman fallacy. Many people (young men in particular) say to themselves "if I was more disciplined, I could dedicate my whole life to martial arts (or programming, or art, or w/e) and become batman (or John Carmack, or Van Gogh)". But it's not true, of course.
And it's the same with many managers. "Instead of spending x% on task A and y% on task B, why dont you spend (x-z)% on A and (y+z)% on B?" It's absurd.
Brute attempts to capture opportunity costs are doomed to fail. You squeeze one end (block youtube shorts) and it comes out the other (eg you argue with coworker). It's really much easier to stop punishing yourself for lost time and find happiness in who and where you are.
arkensaw
Are they really that bad? I've seen some great sketches through Youtube shorts. Case in point:
bachmeier
> Are they really that bad?
No, they're worse. Nothing like doing a search for a serious topic related to a class I'm teaching and having unrelated garbage shorts come up over and over, each taking up six times the space of a real video. I'm sure YT has someone analyzing data saying this is better. That person should be fired because they have no idea how to analyze data.
jfengel
So instead of wasting your life 30 seconds at a time, you can skip straight to wasting your life by minutes and hours?
zamadatix
There seems to be something about the "short" approach that makes it easier to actually spend more time than you would with "longer" videos. Too much of anything is bad though, one should try to avoid large amounts of passive entertainment (my reminder to get off HN for today).
I also don't think I could ever spend 2 hours watching shorts and feel like I left with something worth having spent the time on, but I can tell you some movies or long form videos which had enough impact to carry in my memory through today.
noir_lord
Depends how you define waste I guess, I loathe shorts, I enjoy hour long deep dives into naval armour.
It’s all perspective.
kendallpark
I would love a legal policy that requires developers to allow users to opt out of algorithm-generated feeds. A "right to control consumption" or something that like.
null
Add this to your uBlock Origin Lite filter list.
I haven't seen a short since :)
https://github.com/gijsdev/ublock-hide-yt-shorts/blob/master...
How to do it: Click on uBlock Origin Lite extension -> Settings (cog icon) -> Filter lists -> Custom filters -> Import / Export (bottom of page) -> Paste in the list