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Comment by jcmoscon | Hacker News Reader

I think worse than social media nowadays is youtube shorts. That thing is so addictive to kids. I wish there was a way to delete shorts from youtube and have only long form videos available in the app.

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If you're on Android, install F-Droid and get one of the apps there that let you watch Youtube. No ads[1] and you can disable shorts.

[1] I'm not fundamentally against ads, but the Youtube ad situation has gotten ridiculous. They're far worse than cable TV ads.

For just the ads, there's also YouTube premium.

If I pay for a streaming service, I'll compare it with other paid streaming services.

Youtube is, for me, the worst streaming experience - by a significant margin. Terrible curation. Terrible recommendations. Terrible UI. No way would I pay for it.

(Oh, and if I paid, can I get it not to show me any Shorts?)

Don't necessarily disagree - I have premium because of Google Music (although the official app is now so bad I use Metrolist).

I don't see YouTube as a streaming service - more as a social(ish) video sharing/Indy publishing platform.

For things like conference talks or training techniques and so on.

If I had to watch ads, I'd stop using it.

I'd be happy with it as a service where I search for a video, and get a decent result, and not see shorts.

In particular, what I don't want to see is a hundred videos where all the person does is use clips from other videos as background and just states talking points. An example is searching for "2026 Ioniq 5 Review". I'm looking for someone who test drove a car, and is reviewing it. While those exist, I get a lot of videos from people who've likely never seen the car, and are just narrating talking points from other videos. The video is spliced stuff from other videos, and the audio stream is that of the narrator.

Pure waste. This happens over, and over again for any review I search.

If I get so much crap when I'm searching, why the #$I&%(* would I pay them money?

> more as a social(ish)

But that's the hook of social media, isn't it? Be media, but make it look social. The most popular YouTube creators get paid millions - it's their full time job and they have a team of staff. That's no different than Netflix.

(Originally it actually was social, but by now, not for at least a decade)

I found a good solution. In the YouTube settings you can turn off your watch history. It’ll want you that your recommendations will not be as good. You can watch a YouTube short, but when you try to scroll to the next one, it’ll tell you that there is no next video because watch history is not enabled.

The Unhook extension on Firefox does a very good job of hiding various parts of YouTube (including Shorts) that you don't want to see/access.

I use the YouTube app very rarely, but out of curiosity I went to iOS YouTube app settings, and I wasn't expecting this, but apparently in Time Management you can set Short Feed limit to 0 and this hid shorts completely from my YouTube app home feed and I can't scroll to the next Short when I open one.

You need 10 million valid Shorts views just to get monetized. That's just shows how little it's worth compared to how addictive it is.

Exactly. And also a way to opt-out of the comment section. It's hard for me to resist looking at the comments, and sometimes commenting.

Delete your HN!

Youtube comments is a junkyard compared to HN.

I find myself, including this thread, reading comments like snacking on junk instead of even opening the actual article. Dodging the long form content that might not be so easy to digest for the familiar site and short form comments isn’t a habit I’m proud of

Nebula has many of the better creators from Youtube.

Nebula has no comments section. I find this to be a big indicator that it is built to enable creators to deliver good videos to their fans, rather than serving some other master.

Indeed, but it shows they're not "innovative" as in not willing to iterate on their platform to maximise user satisfaction. They see it as, essentially, a folder full of mkv files. Which you could also publish, but nobody would actually use it just like nobody uses Nebula. I subscribe to Nebula because I think we need to incentivise that kind of project but I don't actually use it.

Absolutely! I had to sign out from YouTube on mobile (I was only using YouTube via browser anyway, not the app) to reduce the time I spent watching them. After signing out the shorts are so random I lost the interest in them.

I use brave browser on iOS which has a feature to block YouTube shorts. It’s clearly a cat and mouse as YouTube keeps changing the selector but works 95% of the time

Oh, for sure. I have to actively prevent myself from opening one cuz once I pop I really just can't stop.

Agreed, YouTube Shorts and similar pap (e.g., Tik Tok) seem corrosive to a developing mind...the mindless content, automatic looping, serving up one shallow video after another. It's no wonder the tech CEOs insulate their own kids from this stuff[1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/technology/silicon-valley...

There is a way. Disable your viewing history and puff, shorts are gone

100%, Shorts are an abomination.

Not just kids. With one of my friends, even when I'm playing a game together with them, I'll sometimes hear some audio over their headset... there was a dull moment for like 10 seconds and they're already on their phone... "Are you watching YouTube Shorts again?" "No, this time it's Reels!" Shorts, reels, clips, doohickey whatever-the-fucks it doesn't matter what they're called, I hate it.

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