I would love to block the shorts at home router level. I hesitate to just block the site altogether

If you have a raspberry pi or some device laying around that you're happy to act as an always-on-server you could set it up as a Layer 7 firewall using something like Nginx to act as a reverse proxy for SSL/TLS interception.

Throw this into some LLM on research mode and I'm sure you could get some step-by-step instructions for setting it up.

I suppose it's not much different to a PiHole but instead of filtering out ads you're filtering out shorts.

Don't their shorts go under https://www.youtube.com/shorts/

Maybe you can just block all URLs that falls under /shorts/

Not router level, but "Enhancer for YouTube" has "Hide shorts" in its appearance preferences. Available on Chrome, Firefox, and Edge.

If I was a concerned parent, I'd just install and hide the extension from the bookmarks bar.

The downside being that it doesn't affect native YouTube apps for mobile devices...

I really wish there was a version of YT in Android that did not come with YT Shorts. As a YT Premium user, I should be able to disable it, or at least not make it the first thing it opens when I tap on the app icon.

I mean, a legit app, not a 3rd party one that'll get my Google account banned eventually.

I had to delete it, using:

    $ adb shell pm uninstall --user 0 com.google.android.youtube

It lasted a month for me that way; then I installed it, and after a week or two I fell into the old habit of Doomscrolling and had to nuke it again.

TikTok/Reels/Shorts format is really, really exploitative on the mind.

I've recently started watching shorts. I blink and an hour has passed!

Ridiculous. Adding insult to injury, a significant portion of them seem to be AI generated

If you are worried about your Google account being banned for using ReVanced (not that I saw any evidence for anything like that so far but I agree that there could be a scenario like this some time in the future), for years now I've been using a separate Google account only for YouTube. This account essentially only contains my YouTube viewing history and nothing more. I have yet to see any disadvantage in this separation

There is, I'm a long-time user of ReVanced-patched YouTube. Comes with all sorts of plugins, tweaks and knobs.

In the options, there's a Shorts section, a couple example options: "Hide Shorts in home feed", "Hide Shorts in search results", "Hide Shorts in subscription feed". I do not see any Shorts, ever.

Not only that, apart from not having ads, Revanced YT also has customizable SponsorBlock integration, which skips ads/sponsors in the actual video (community-based feedback).

Instructions on how to install it (no root required) can be found on the revanced subreddit, beware fake sites in the search results, go straight to Reddit or Discord. Highly recommend!

+1 for ReVanced.

It feels like how YouTube felt before the enshittification.

You know, the current best option is not exactly a 3rd party app but an original app with some patches applied to it. Of course in the end you're trusting someone out there, but hey the patches are FOSS so they can be downloaded, reviewed, and applied locally.

The feeling of a cleaned-up front page without addictive shorts or clickbait thumbnails is refreshing... and, ironically (as it usually happens), a much better experience, not to speak mentally healthier for anyone, especially a kid.

As a free YouTube user, I was able to disable the Shorts stuff by disabling watch history on my YouTube account. I can watch shorts from my subscriptions only, on the subscriptions tab, by explicitly clicking on them.

As a premium user I should be able to add content "made for kids" to playlists and see comments as well. It's absolutely idiotic how "save the children" is just an excuse to fuck over everyone else.

People would go to TikTok if shorts were removed.

People who want shorts would go to TikTok. People who keep clicking the "don't show me Shorts" button are probably not using TikTok in the first place.

Even on an incognito tab, the first set of shorts always includes at least one semi-soft-porn cover image for a short that doesn't actually contain that image.

I mean, for one, it's false advertising, but mainly it's pushing this exploitative (in multiple ways, all disgusting) behaviour.

I use ReVanced because there's no other way to get shorts out of my face. It's just great.