Blocktube and Enhancer for Youtube are Firefox extensions that can hide all of that shit completely. Mine has all shorts disabled, and I’ve removed the recommended videos panels from the right hand side & ends of videos, plus disabled any non-playlist autoplay. There’s still crap on the Home tab, but I don’t use that so I’ve never needed to look into ways to improve it, I just use the subbed tab and playlists. My YT shows me exactly what I ask for and nothing else. The Blocktube extension settings can be password-locked.
Yattee is an app on iOS that might work, though I haven’t tried it. Also on iOS, one of the Invidious website instances (3rd party YouTube front end) in Safari or installed as a PWA.
On pc, using an Invidious site with the YouTube domain filtered out through your router or Pi-hole, could also work.
Disabling watch history and deleting all previous history stops the shorts from being recommended. You can still search for individual shorts but you can’t scroll infinitely. I’m not sure if you can lock that setting with parental controls or not, but may be helpful.
Is that YouTube trying to compete with Tiktok for the no-attention-span brain rot market? I never saw the appeal.
Tbh YouTube is even worse.
I want my kid to watch YouTube in moderation, there are good content creators in there.
BUT there is no way for me to block their access to the brain rot shithole that is YouTube Shorts. None, zero, nada. No parental controls work.
With TikTok I can just block it completely with parental controls, no problems.
3rd party YouTube clients such as NewPipe, LibreTube and Freetube offer such options, if available on your device.
I want them to offer it on my kids devices, without giving them the ability to re-enable shorts.
I’m pretty sure they can’t do that, especially not on iOS and even less on desktop computers where they can just browse to the website
Blocktube and Enhancer for Youtube are Firefox extensions that can hide all of that shit completely. Mine has all shorts disabled, and I’ve removed the recommended videos panels from the right hand side & ends of videos, plus disabled any non-playlist autoplay. There’s still crap on the Home tab, but I don’t use that so I’ve never needed to look into ways to improve it, I just use the subbed tab and playlists. My YT shows me exactly what I ask for and nothing else. The Blocktube extension settings can be password-locked.
Yattee is an app on iOS that might work, though I haven’t tried it. Also on iOS, one of the Invidious website instances (3rd party YouTube front end) in Safari or installed as a PWA. On pc, using an Invidious site with the YouTube domain filtered out through your router or Pi-hole, could also work.
Disabling watch history and deleting all previous history stops the shorts from being recommended. You can still search for individual shorts but you can’t scroll infinitely. I’m not sure if you can lock that setting with parental controls or not, but may be helpful.
Use a software like newpipe with a subscription feed only. There are no ads, no recommended videos, and no shorts.
Nebula has mostly quality content and no “shorts”, where as YT even without shorts has mountains of garbage.
There is a browser plugin “YouTube enhancer” that lets you disable shorts, comments, recommended videos and other crap.