How to stop watching YouTube Shorts without deleting YouTube

YouTube is two products sharing one icon. One is a vast library — lectures, tutorials, music, repair guides, documentaries — that you search when you need something. The other is Shorts: a vertical feed of quick videos that starts playing before you've decided whether you want to watch anything at all.

Most people who want to "use YouTube less" don't actually want less of the library. They want less of the feed. This guide is about separating the two. We'll go from the gentlest options to the strongest, with the honest downsides of each.

Why Shorts is different from the rest of YouTube

A normal YouTube video comes with a small decision built in. You see a thumbnail and a title, and you choose to click. That choice is a natural checkpoint: you can ask yourself whether you really want to spend twenty minutes on it.

Shorts removes the checkpoint. The next video is already playing; your only decision is whether to stop, and stopping is the harder decision. Each video is short enough that one more always feels cheap. And because the content changes every few seconds, there's no natural end point where your brain says "that was the episode, I'm done".

So it's not that you lack discipline. It's that the format is engineered to make the default action — keep watching — effortless, and the alternative — leaving — effortful. Any solution that works has to change that balance.

Option 1: Tell YouTube you want fewer Shorts

What it is: On a Shorts shelf in your home feed, tap the three-dot menu and choose the option to show fewer Shorts. On individual Shorts, use "Not interested".

What it does: At the time of writing, this hides the Shorts shelf from your home feed for a while and tunes what you're recommended.

The catch: It's temporary, and it only touches one surface. The Shorts tab stays in the bottom bar, Shorts still appear in search results, and any Short you open still leads straight into the endless player.

Good for: A first step, if Shorts mostly reaches you through the home feed.

Option 2: Change where YouTube opens

What it is: Instead of opening YouTube to its home screen, start from somewhere intentional — the search bar, your Subscriptions, or a playlist you've saved.

How: Some launchers let you add a shortcut to YouTube's search directly. You can also bookmark the Subscriptions page in your browser and use that instead of the app's home.

The catch: It's a habit, not a barrier. One tap on the Shorts tab undoes it.

Good for: People whose Shorts habit starts with "I opened YouTube and something caught my eye".

Option 3: Pause your watch history

What it is: In your Google account's YouTube history settings, pause watch history (and, if you want a clean slate, clear it).

What it does: At the time of writing, if watch history is off and you have no prior history, YouTube may stop showing a personalized home feed and show a prompt instead. We explain this in more detail in Using YouTube as a search engine, not a feed.

The catch: It changes all of YouTube, not just Shorts. Recommendations elsewhere get less useful, "continue watching" disappears, and resuming history brings the feed back. It also may not remove Shorts that appear elsewhere in the app.

Good for: People who mostly use YouTube through search anyway.

Option 4: Use Android's built-in time limits

What it is: Android's Digital Wellbeing (or your phone maker's equivalent) lets you set an app timer for YouTube.

What it does: When you hit the limit, the YouTube icon greys out until midnight.

The catch: The timer doesn't know the difference between a tutorial you needed and an hour of Shorts. Both use up the same budget. In practice, people either set the timer too low and end up disabling it when they need YouTube for something real, or too high, and it doesn't help.

Good for: Capping total YouTube time when you don't use YouTube for anything important.

Option 5: Use YouTube in a browser

What it is: Delete or disable the app and use YouTube through a mobile browser.

What it does: The mobile website is a little clunkier, which adds friction. Some people find that alone reduces their use.

The catch: Shorts exist on the mobile website too, and the friction applies equally to the useful parts. Background playback and downloads may also behave differently.

Good for: People who mostly watch on a computer and only occasionally need YouTube on their phone.

Option 6: Block Shorts specifically

What it is: A tool that recognizes Shorts and closes it, without touching the rest of the app. This is what Reelless does on Android.

What it does: When the Shorts player opens — from the tab, a search result, a notification or a link — it presses back for you. Shorts shelves in your feed are covered so you can scroll past them, and the Shorts tab won't open. Search, subscriptions, long videos and playlists keep working.

The catch: It needs Android's Accessibility permission to see that a Shorts screen is open, which is a sensitive permission. You should know exactly how any app uses it; ours is explained on the Accessibility Service disclosure page. It also only works on Android — on iPhone, no app can do this inside YouTube.

Good for: People who want to keep YouTube fully and lose only Shorts.

A middle path: an allowance instead of a ban

Some Shorts are genuinely good: a quick recipe, a funny clip a friend loved, a 40-second explanation of something you were curious about. If a complete block feels too strict, try a daily allowance instead — say ten minutes of Shorts per day. Reelless can enforce this: the player works until the allowance is spent, then closes for the rest of the day.

The point of an allowance is that you decide the limit once, in a calm moment, rather than renegotiating it with yourself every evening.

Habits that make any option work better

Whatever you choose, a few small changes help:

• Turn off YouTube notifications you don't need. Many Shorts sessions start from a notification.
• Move YouTube off your home screen. An extra swipe is a tiny checkpoint.
• Watch long videos on a bigger screen when you can. A TV or laptop makes watching a deliberate act.
• Notice when you reach for Shorts. Bored? Avoiding a task? Tired? The trigger tells you what you actually need.
• Replace, don't just remove. Keep a podcast, an audiobook, or a long-form playlist ready for the moments Shorts used to fill.

If you want a structured way to put this together, our 7-day plan to cut short-form video time walks through one small change per day.

Which option should you pick?

• If Shorts only bothers you occasionally: start with Option 1 and Option 2.
• If you mostly search YouTube anyway: Option 3 may be enough.
• If YouTube is mostly entertainment for you: Option 4 is simple and free.
• If YouTube is important to you — for work, study or hobbies — but Shorts keeps eating your time: Option 6 is the one that separates the two.

There's no prize for doing this the hard way. The goal isn't to prove you can resist an endless feed through willpower; it's to get your time back while keeping the parts of YouTube that make your life better.