Hacker News Reader

Comment by cesarvarela | Hacker News Reader

I would love to be able to hide Shorts for good instead of having to do it every 30 days. I wonder what technical issue is preventing them to accomplish such task.

View on HN

If you use Chrome, YouTube Shorts Block [1] is a good extension for that, and removes (mostly) Shorts videos. Not perfect, still leaves some traces (e.g. empty spaces, channel titles in subscriptions), but it helps to declutter your user experience.

And while we're talking about extensions to customize your YT experience, here's three more that I really enjoy:

- Clickbait Remover [2], to remove the usually clickbait-ish video thumbnails

- Unhook [3], to remove the recommended videos entirely. This extension helped me reduce the time spent on YT. I now browse recommendations on my phone much more quickly, add what I want to check out to Watch Later queue, so on desktop I only search, check subscriptions, or consume my WL queue

- Video Speed Controller [4]. This one is super popular, so probably you already have it installed.

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

[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clickbait-remover-...

[3] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-yout...

[4] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed-contro...

Do we have equivalents for Firefox as well? I'm struggling to find them.

I use Enhancer for Youtube (https://addons.mozilla.org/en/firefox/addon/enhancer-for-you...)

Allows hiding(*) and converting to normal video.

(*) "Firefox 103+ and layout.css.has-selector.enabled set to True - Experimental CSS feature not fully working on Firefox, some rendering issues may occur"

I created this uBlock Origin rule that will remove all Shorts without any cosmetic remnants. Seems simpler and more secure than installing an addon.

youtube.com##:xpath(//ytd-thumbnail-overlay-time-status-renderer[@overlay-style='SHORTS']//ancestor::ytd-grid-video-renderer)

Fantastic list, thank you. I didn't know about most of these. What's the benefit of the video speed controller over the playback speed controls provided by YouTube?

more fine grained speed levels, can go up to 4x, plus it works on ALL videos on every page not jsut youtube

For android BlockerHero [1]

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blockerher...

There is also

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/enhancer-for-youtu...

- you can tweak several things by one extension

Isn't installing extensions considered extremely dangerous?

What's your threat model?

The thread model is that maintainers of popular extensions get offers of several thousand $ all the time to pass over ownership. And there have been several incidents in which the new owners added trackers to the extension itself, tracking the user across all domains.

These extensions usually have full access to the DOM, so they can do everything they want to.

So their question is very much warrented: installing as new extension should always be well considered.

That's not a threat model, at all.

The threat is what's important. Nobody will give you a six slide c-level powerpoint presentation.

I mean... I don't really have a response to this. This is security modeling 101. To different threat models, this is a varying degree of a threat - anywhere from "not a threat" to "unacceptable threat".

You cannot universally answer the question "how much of a threat are chrome extensions".

I understand that this is a pet peeve of yours. But what exactly stops you from learning what kind of data chrome extensions have access to (they can see everything on any page you visit and send it to perpetrators) and assuming the worst?

oooo..... are you talking about chrome store that has adware filled garbage duplicates of good quality extensions?

firefox addon store is very much better in that regard. Anyway, this makes me feel like you don't know about gorhill and UBO? that is actually recommended for sane internet browsing on any browsers.

As i often say, surfing the internet in a browser without UBO feels like having unprotected sex. Fun but dangerous.

You forgot the by far most important: sponsor block

Its an ad blocker for the in-video sponsorship segments

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-y...

It's also available for other browsers.

This is a great addon. works on most channels.

I personally do not use it though as I do not have a problem with advertising in general. As long as there is no data collection and targeted ads, I am good to sponsor with my time.

I doubt it's a technical issue. The current YouTube CEO, Neal Mohan, has made a big push for Shorts. This is almost certainly a business decision.

it's a business decision that makes sense. Short form entertainment is a huge market that TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat have been cashing in on. It may be annoying to users but to those that adopt, YouTube stands to gain a lot from it

Yup. Hate shorts. Hate the "mix" things that appear in the middle of my feed also.

There are a couple of blocker addons for firefox (eg youtube-shorts-block) which I'm going to try out.

To the far more experienced HN audience, is there a viable technical reason for this to not stick past 30 days?

I would cynically assume it's a solely dark pattern, but I have never built at such a scale as youtube.

Shorts is a growing format on YouTube. The inventory of videos is increasing over time. If someone clicks the X button indicating the recommended shorts are not relevant after 30 days there will be many more new videos. Potentially some of these new videos will now be relevant enough to show the user. Additionally the X button is not labelled unless you o haver over it after which it says "Not interested." If it were permanent people may accidently click this button and then they will never be recommended shorts even if they enjoy them. People's opinions about shorts way change over time. After a month they may actually want to engage with the format. Having to go search through some menu buried somewhere to enable shorts on the home page again is not user friendly.

Being able to do exploration is an important part of recommendation systems. Allowing a user to do just exploitation is going to lead to a worse experience in them long term.

How many times users has to click "don't recommend shorts" before youtube decides it is not for them? By that logic, no user setting should be permanent.

  Growing format

Hard for it not to considering youtube tries its best to mark videos as short. Some of my older videos are now shorts and I can't convert them

Tiktok makes big money and is a direct competitor to YouTube, so YouTube is pushing the format to capture that audience back. It’s a far more engaging pattern that what existed before. Remember when YouTube forced autoplay on everyone? Doesn’t make for a better experience, but if users are more engaged that’s all that counts for execs at YouTube

Personally, I think it is primarily a way to sneak a Tiktok-esque experience to further addict the children that use YouTube, without their parents realizing their kids are watching neurodegenerative content.

No there's no reason that would arise from a systems architecture standpoint. This most definitely was an additive thing, that requires more code than less, in order to reactivate after 30 days (not much more code, but it's not some side effect of some system).

The only reason I could think it's like this for a technical reason is if they put the opt-out "ticket" into some high availability cache system that was hard coded to eject old entries after 30 days, but that would make no sense given YouTube has infra for persistent user configuration already.

I'm not sure, I mean I'm no Dennis Ritchie, but I feel like if I got into the code I might be able to push it out to 45 days. Waddaya say, Google?

there's a ublock list that specifically hides shorts : https://github.com/gijsdev/ublock-hide-yt-shorts

I created this uBlock Origin rule that will remove all Shorts without any cosmetic remnants. Seems simpler and more secure than installing an addon.

youtube.com##:xpath(//ytd-thumbnail-overlay-time-status-renderer[@overlay-style='SHORTS']//ancestor::ytd-grid-video-renderer)

There is no technical issue, they realized that shorts make them more money, so they are pushing that.

How do shorts make money?

I thought shorts is just a way for YouTube to make sure everyone knows tiktok exists. They all end with an ad for tiktok

I doubt it's a technical issue. You will never watch shorts if you hide them for good. But if every 30 days you see shorts maybe one day you'll stop hiding them.

classic PM rejection sensitive nonsense imo

Assuming this is a serious question: it’s a marketing decision not a technical limitation. They want you to watch shorts, hence every month they reappear.

In addition, it would be nice to create a separate RSS feed for the shorts and of course remove them from the original. In the early days it was easy to filter out because of the #short tag, but nowadays it's not mandatory in the title.

I wrote a personal browser extension that hides them. They are obnoxious.

Definitely... I built a mobile app for android to block me to go to Shorts and waste hours of doom-scrolling... I will release it on the Play Store if someone need it as well.

In my experience with big tech, there's almost never technical issues with this kind of preferences. It's a business decision.

None lmao - a PM who wants shorts metrics to go up is vetoing that suggestion.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com