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Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

I am hooked as well.

(But, please, stop with the YouTube Shorts, I'm just not that into you.)

I would love an option in the settings to disable youtube shorts. I don't want them.

If you use uBlock Origin, you can hide any element on any site. If not you could also write an extension. I remember someone saying they wrote one and called it "Eat My Shorts" (lol). Perhaps you could search for that.

its easy if you use the right extension, i demonstrate it here https://www.mattpengelly.com/posts/taming-youtube-2023

There's an unofficial filter list for uBlock Origin to hide shorts videos/links

https://letsblock.it/filters/youtube-shorts

It works very nicely without adding additional browser plugins.

I don't exactly know where this Shorts trend came from (I guess Tiktok?) but it really destroys the generation / has bad impact. My attention span is encouraged to shrink to only 15 seconds.

And "our" generation has already had its attention span reduced, not even on purpose but from e.g. having access to fast internet & multiple tabs. I can't read a book on programming back to back (I don't think I ever could btw), it's good enough for me to google it to find a solution for the one problem I'm trying to solve at this time.

But I do miss out on in-depth knowledge of a library or language that way. But there is no value in gaining said in-depth knowledge when the stack & libraries I work with changes every couple of months or years.

In the 8 bit days there were programming books meant to be read back to back. I loved them as a kid - though I'm not sure that I learned much from that exercse. Even K&R "the C programming language" (first edition, the second edition wasn't as readable from what I remember, though that might be just because it was too repetitive for someone who had read the first edition) could be read that way.

These days that isn't a good use of paper books. There is rarely any reason to start with any one construct, and if you are not a novice programmer you know there must be something that does what you need and don't want the book to assume you understand the syntax of the while loop when you look up the do-while loop.

It comes from YouTube wanting to compete with TikTok, yes. And it's become so ridiculously common on YouTube because the platform pushes the hell out of shorts compared to normal videos; as a creator, I can get 10/100/1000 times more views from a short than a normal video covering the same topic. So a lot of creators ended up jumping on the shorts train as a gold rush.

Of course, it's probably not great in the long term since shorts viewers and longform content viewers are not the same and your CTR can be destroyed thanks to shorts subs not watching your longer videos, but the easy views and subs are still enticing nonetheless.

I'd double my premium subscription fee to remove this feature from the Android app.

ReVanced has that capability.

Watch YouTube through Firefox on Android. You can install an effective adblocker too.

You can use ReVanced and choose every "patch". For example only remove shorts and keep ads etc. That way the creator still get your premium compensation

Random tip, can take short id and put it into ?watch form to view/add to playlist

On the website I just click the X next to that section and it disappears for a month.

Yes it is then honored on the AppleTV app too.

Unfortunately they still clog up the Subscriptions feed.

Strange. On the website, they disappear from everywhere. Your subscriptions feed, suggestions, etc. You just don't see them at all.

Agreed, pretty annoying when I’m trying to upload a unlisted screen cast or something under one minute to send to a specific person, and then, when I send it to him, they don’t have the ability to seek or easily restart the video.

I know it’s possible to change the URL manually, but I’ve seen it not work, depending on the type of client that views the video - YouTube should allow the viewer to switch off shorts even for a specific video

At least on the Desktop you can YT Shorts Block extension:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-shorts-blo...

Not only on desktop. I was entirely addicted to shorts and hated that and my little monkey brain would at some point just click on them despite knowing it was entirely stupid. So I did not only block shorts on chrome but also on safari and safari iOS. You can do this by installing AdGuard and setting custom blocking filters so on the youtube website the shorts navigation button disappears and for subscriptions and suggestions I just set it up so it will show a black page. I couldn't get it stop playing audio but at least I am not seeing anything so I became unhooked. This only works in the browser of course so I uninstalled the YouTube app and I can only open YouTube in safari. I _really_ wish YouTube would just natively allow disabling shorts alltogether in their app and on their website.

hey ive got a short guide for removing shorts and other addictive stuff. Check it out https://www.mattpengelly.com/posts/taming-youtube-2023

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