How To Block YouTube Shorts From Your Account

While YouTube is full of great features to improve your video experience, including a handful you may not even be aware of, it can also be deeply annoying at times, surfacing content you're not interested in, or bugging you with clunky UI elements. Shorts is a great example of this issue; while YouTube has been trying to shoehorn its way into the short-form content wars launched by Vine and now dominated by platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels for years now, not everyone comes to YouTube to watch short clips.

Luckily for those users, there's a new way to block YouTube Shorts from appearing on your recommended videos page. While there's still no simple toggle to turn Shorts off at the account level, you're now able to adjust the amount of time a user can view Shorts to zero, effectively blocking them from your page. While the move is seemingly intended as a way for parents to regulate their children's access to Shorts, it's also a handy way to eliminate them from appearing on any account.

Curating your YouTube page isn't just a way to improve your recommendations, it can also be a way to signal to YouTube that you're not interested in short form content. If you'd like to reduce the amount of Shorts that appear without eliminating them entirely using the tip above, there are a number of steps you can take.

You can begin by manually signaling to YouTube that you're not interested in Shorts. On the website or mobile app, find a Shorts shelf or a video and click on the three dots, then choose "Not interested." You can also attack the problem at the search level. Whenever search results are returned, you can click on Filters and choose "Videos" in the dropdown menu to indicate that you're only interested in seeing results of full videos.

You can also take steps to gradually train the algorithm to surface Shorts less often. Avoid opening Shorts simply to dismiss them, since watching them can still be interpreted as interest. Removing any Shorts you've previously viewed from your history may also indicate to the algorithm that you're no longer interested in that kind of short-form content. While there's no universal shortcut to sidestepping Shorts completely (aside from the viewing limitation suggested above), these methods will help the content you're interested in consuming bubble up more reliably.