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Comment by ipsin | Hacker News Reader

I uninstalled TikTok because it turned into a time-wasting attention sink.

I'm fine with YouTube proper, but YouTube Shorts is essentially TikTok in a trenchcoat.

There really, really, really needs to be a way to banish YouTube Shorts in your settings, because for me the alternative is uninstalling YouTube.

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Yup, I've written about this a couple times[0], I cancelled my YouTube Premium subscription—I was otherwise a happy customer!—and switched to NewPipe on Android because I couldn't turn off YouTube Shorts.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36593028

>the alternative is uninstalling YouTube

I assume you're an iPhone user. In Android we don't even have that alternative (at least not out-of-the-box)

You can disable the YT app on Android. The effect is the same as uninstalling the app. YT links open in the browser, the app tile doesn't show up in the Apps menu. This is what I ended up doing to get over my YT Shorts addiction

I'll be damn. Thanks!

You can block shorts on the web with this:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hide-youtube-short...

Alternatively, you can change shorts into regular youtube format:

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

I hate YT Shorts with a passion. But, I understand that I'm not the typical YT consumer. I use it as a tool for learning and not consuming.

You can banish YT shorts by clicking the X in the top right corner of the shorts row.

And yeah they’re pretty stupid. YT took a bunch of normal videos and cropped them to phone camera dimensions, lol. You can click the author’s name to find the original in their YT page. It’s just idiotic.

It comes back for me. Super annoying

They have disabled that x in my region. I can’t even turn them off temporarily anymore. They are probably rolling out the change in stages to see how much angry feedback they get and how many people cancel.

I've seen the same thing - it's really tawdry and desperate, isn't it?

As I'm running an ad blocker anyway, I created a custom block rule to remove it.

I can't wait for the DMA to come into effect in the EU. I want to install a third party YouTube frontend with SponsorBlock and no shorts.

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