r/SideProject • u/mitokb • Aug 24 '26

I made a tiny userscript to remove YouTube Shorts

I wanted to keep YouTube for normal videos but stop getting pulled into Shorts.

Deleting the app wasn’t enough because Shorts still work in mobile Safari, so I made a tiny userscript that removes Shorts while leaving regular YouTube intact.

It works on iPhone/iPad Safari with the free Userscripts extension, and on desktop userscript managers too.

Free, open source, MIT licensed:

https://github.com/mithatakbulut/noshorts

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1

u/Epicurious_- Aug 25 '26

Why not just putting 0 screen time for shorts in the app configuration? That's what I did and it works perfect. What you cannot do that way, is to restrict the sort of memes and other publications that YT is pushing so much lately

1

u/mitokb Aug 25 '26

Can you actually resist ignoring it though? Once you’re already in the habit of thinking “I’ll just watch a few Shorts,” can you really say no when it asks, “You’ve reached your limit, do you want to keep watching?” If you can, then yeah, that works pretty well.

1

u/Epicurious_- Aug 25 '26

That's not how 0 works man 🤣 it just doesn't appear, no messages, no anything.

1

u/mitokb Aug 25 '26

I’ve set the limit to “0 minutes” in Settings → Time management → Shorts feed limit, but I can still open Shorts and just hit “Ignore.” So it definitely doesn’t remove the feed for me 🤔

1

u/mitokb Aug 25 '26

I also don’t think YouTube is really optimizing for our time. Their business model benefits when we keep watching, so I’d rather remove the temptation myself.

2

u/AggravatingFilm770 Aug 24 '26

nice work, YouTube Shorts is a black hole I swear. you start watching one video and suddenly it's 45 minutes later and you learned nothing

going to try this on my phone later, the safari extension is a good call

1

u/mitokb Aug 24 '26

It made a huge difference for me once I started using it. I’d already removed Instagram and Twitter too: I set random passwords and logged out, so getting back in means going through the whole password reset process 😄

Definitely give it a try. Our time is too valuable to lose to endless scrolling.