I do the same, and after a day of doing it- they seem to go away for a time depending on the platform, but they always come back and sometimes they come back a lot.

The web-browser is the least aggressive and I think I haven’t even seen them on Apple TV.

The iPhone App is the most egregious offender of not respecting the request though, it seems to almost not care at all, and now the thumbnails on the home screen have started autoplaying (with audio) and I can’t find how to disable it (older instructions seem to be invalid).

They have all the content though; so I have no choice but to deal with this, until a good enough competitor comes along and my favourite youtube channels upload to both places.

False, the YouTube CEO gets a notification that you didn't like it and starts rubbing his nipples.

[delayed]

YouTube search is just broken. Has been for a long long long time. You get 3-4 relevant results and then it just shows you random unrelated crap.

It's not broken from Google's perspective. The results are just optimized for their ad revenue rather than your viewing preference. Even the engagement hooks don't care what your viewing preferences are - just what they've calculated to optimize watch potential * ad revenue.

Same. One I want though is for it to remember to not auto-preview videos. YouTube refuses to remember this setting.

I will update it later down the line as YT changes its layout and for bug fixes... but i think this was not what your question.

I don't think that something super bad can happen with these uBlock filter, they will sanitize the filter heavily.

Maybe a potential attack vector for these lists in general is to hide the body of a few sites but this is more annoying then dangerous AFAIK.

That's an awesome idea — sometimes I really do want to watch a short but not in that interface. Do you know how to set this up in general?

> Seems like a form of protest

Filtering content is not "a form of protest", it is about deciding what content you want to see in your browser and what not. Youtube, even the paid version, does not offer much in terms of customising one's experience (imo the "algorithm" deciding what you should watch based on your history does not count as one) and shorts is a proven addictive pattern that one may not want to encounter online.

It is fine if you like watching shorts, such filter lists are for those who do not want to watch shorts.

Then I shall not look at it at all. Some months ago Facebook gave me the "ads vs payment" ultimatum. I closed the tab and didn't log into Facebook since.

Don't know why you're downvoted. It's exactly a 50/50 likely way to parse it.

I have some lists [1] I use to hide YouTube's constant recommendations of things I've already watched. They also hide previously watched music videos, which may be a downside.

1. https://caleb-vincent.io/post/2025-10-01_youtube-filters/#ju...

That's the benefit of Brave Browser. The YouTube Shorts blocking feature is built into the browser itself and is not from a third party.

The main benefit for me is hiding content I'm actively uninterested in seeing. Shorts are portrait mode content that pretty much never seem to be long enough to discuss anything interesting. I watch on widescreen monitors, so I just don't care for them. There's nothing else to it really.

YT is desperate for me to engage with rage bait news, and I’m not biting.

It’s so god damn annoying, regardless of how often I choose to ignore channels or don’t suggest feedback.

All they care about is vote time…give me content I want to view!

Also, in the evenings, my timeline gets weirdly paranoid phobia centric, like deep insecurities people live with that are triggering and keep you up late. It’s so obvious YT is doing this to try and bait me into watching these deeply emotional and personal content, and again, ignoring it and providing feedback seems to do nothing to my feed. I hate it.

Don't pay for YouTube

I'm also looking for a blocklist for X/Twitter that can remove the "who to follow", News sections, etc.

I'm amazed that they still haven't added any way to organise/categorise your subscribed channels, it's just a big flat list.

Why are you still paying for Youtube? I run uBlock and haven't seen ads in years, don't see any cellphone format crap now thanks to this list, and VacuumTube on my TV defaults to 4K.

Pretty sure shorts disables if you turn off watch history: (https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/08/youtube-update-homepage-wa...)

If you pay for youtube, you are part of the problem

I hate that you can’t block specific channels from showing up in your feed. So much ai slop.

I use this addon for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/fi/firefox/addon/youtube-shorts-b...

That's good, but everyone has only a limited amount of social capital to refuse popular things. School teachers, which are essentially agents of the government, often make your children watch Youtube videos, for example.

Not a blocklist, but for anyone who wants this, Control Panel for Twitter [1] can hide most things you'd want to hide on Twitter. The latest version adds a way to keep using the Dim dark mode variant theme they recently removed.

[1] https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-twitter

YouTube is social media first, even if it also happens to be a repository of useful content. Social media does not want you to navigate with agency. They want to choose what you see because it lets them keep you on the platform longer, which is the entire goal.

What's crazy is that their adtech definitely knows how to categorise stuff down to super specific topics, yet they only use that internally.

I might be wrong, but I don't think people really care about the addictiveness in the first place. As I see it, the shorts were irritating to see, mainly because they were heavily out of tune with the rest of recommendations. But they seem to have tuned them to be more in line with the rest of the videos. Being not that different from the rest of the videos one gets recommended, there is not much point in hiding them? I'm not exactly protecting shorts here. My point is, you can, of course, cut some of the videos from the feed, but the rest would still be affected by the same algorithm. You still don't get to filter anything, really. So what's the point?

If addictiveness really is that much of a factor, I rest my case.

i'm the same as you, but YT has started to place its content behind sign-in wall

Anon usage + uBlock and VPN, is a dead man walking

doesn’t work on iPad or iOS? Also not worth my time given how cheap it is

I’ve had watch history off for years and it shows me shorts above my actual subscriptions.

Hacker News commenters: “I don’t like ads. They are evil”

Also HN commenters: “I don’t want to pay for goods and services”

Youtube is far too significant a video collection to risk losing it. Yes there is insane anounts of garbage and yes their history is getting spottier by the day, but nothing else comes close to all of the good stuff that is still on it.

Google needs to get its shit together and give users power tools. YT hasn't improved materially for many years now. I hope they can snap out of whatever governance dysfunction they're in. Not sure whether increasing financial pressure (above what must, no doubt, build up on its own) is the right answer here. It will probably only lead to more enshittification, and a long, slow death and I'm pretty saddened by that thought.

This is not true. You can in fact block specific channels. From YouTube support[1]: > On certain pages, such as your Home and Watch Next pages, find a video from a channel that you don’t want recommended to you.

> Click More next to the video title.

> Select Don't recommend channel .

[1]: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6342839?hl=en

For me, it is about addictiveness. Otherwise, if they were just "bad recommendations", I would probably just ignore them.

No, because it’s that much easier to justify watching “just one more” and totally lose the desire to go to sleep or do some other healthy behavior.

If you’re only “irritated” by them for now, that’s just because the algorithm hasn’t gotten you yet. One day, you will be weak and fall prey.

And how do I pay for a YouTube competitor that's libre or at least won't spy back without losing access to its monopolisticly large catalog?

I pay for plenty of other media (music, games, sports, comedy, books) and even do some Patreon for a few podcasts and YT channels, but I refuse to directly support a publishing monopoly that has had an actively user-hostile interface for over a decade.

Normies who can't figure out the 3 buttons it takes to use ublock pay for such things.

Its a tax on not being smart?

I'm mostly kidding, but I just use ublock and I've never considered buying youtube premium. Try harder google?

>Youtube is far too significant a video collection to risk losing it.

> Not sure whether increasing financial pressure (above what must, no doubt, build up on its own) is the right answer here.

fantastic, an appeal to personal guilt to fund large corporate money making and national/corporate-soft-power efforts.

an acquired predatory advertiser, the worlds #1 inadequate and neglectful child nanny, and world wide cultural trend-setter is also bad at making money? and they need more? and you say they won't squander it?

I think i'll donate to PBS while aiding YT archival efforts.

This is also not true and hasn't been so for years. One can set a preference to "not recommend", but one can not explicitly block any channel.

Depending on your particular "preference constellation's weights" (over which you have no direct control), you can, in fact, be shown videos from that channel again.

I pay for plenty of goods and services. Just not YouTube. As others have noted, YouTube premium makes ads go away, but none of the other engagement baiting and user disrespecting anti-patterns. As far as I'm concerned, Google is in adversarial relationship with its users, whether your paying or not.

With the change in culture here, especially in the last 2-3 years, HN might as well be called Reddit News now. So it's not surprising that most people aren't consistent with their principles.

> One day, you will be weak and fall prey.

I really dislike statements like this. It's not cocaine.

Yes I know that Google just reported YouTube’s revenue is larger than Netflix’s. But I really don’t find anything interesting on YouTube. Every time I try to find an interesting tutorial on for me AWS, if it isn’t produced by AWS itself, it’s usually subpar and I end up just paying for it on Udemy or using my company paid Pluralsight.

I do too. I don’t use YouTube with the one exception of official AWS videos. But those don’t have commercials.

I currently pay for YouTube premium but I'm strongly considering stopping again. For me it's a combination of prices creeping up (small part) and the worsening UX and engagement-bait (big part). It's the same reason I dropped Spotify a few years ago.

I don’t know. But most of the time when I don’t like a service, I don’t use it. I know that’s a crazy idea. I find YouTube like everything Google does a piss poor user experience. I’m forced to only use it to watch official AWS videos and those don’t have ads.

Was HN known for consistency of principles before? I don’t remember that.

Whenever an online community is anthropomorphized as an individual, it looks hypocritical. The only groups that don’t look hypocritical are monocultural backwaters of groupthink, permabans, and self-editing.

Does it make the sponsor sections of the videos go away too?

No, but SponsorBlock[0] is fantastic for that. I even have it setup on my home server[1] so it skips sponsor segments on my Apple TV, which is where we watch most of our YouTube.

[0] https://sponsor.ajay.app/ [1] https://github.com/dmunozv04/iSponsorBlockTV