How to block YouTube Shorts without losing YouTube

Why "Not interested" never sticks

You can hide Shorts from your feed temporarily, and it comes back. There has never been a durable off switch, because the format is central to how the platform competes with TikTok.

Any approach that relies on a setting inside YouTube is fighting the product roadmap. Blocking from outside the app is the only version that survives the next update.

Keeping the useful half

This is one of the few cases where a partial block genuinely works, because Shorts is separable in a way that a TikTok feed is not. You can keep the searched-for videos and lose the infinite scroll.

If you find yourself constantly negotiating with the rules, that is a sign to go stricter rather than more clever.

Expect the shelf to come back

A URL-pattern block is the right approach here, and it comes with a maintenance cost worth knowing about in advance rather than discovering as a failure.

YouTube reworks its interface constantly, and each rework can introduce a new surface for the same content: a shelf on the home page, a row inside search results, a swipe gesture on a video, an entry in the sidebar. A rule written against last year's paths will keep working for the paths it names and quietly miss whatever was added since.

The practical response is to expect a check every few months rather than a permanent fix, and to treat the reappearance as a UI change rather than as evidence the approach does not work. If you find yourself patching it monthly, that is a signal to block the app outright and keep the web version, which moves you off the treadmill.

The subscriptions-only setup

There is a stricter arrangement that suits people whose real problem is the home page rather than short-form video specifically, and it is worth knowing because it solves a slightly different complaint.

Block the home feed and keep search and subscriptions. What remains is a YouTube you use deliberately: you go to it with something in mind, or to see what a channel you chose has published. What disappears is the version that hands you something the moment you arrive with nothing in mind, which is where most of the lost time comes from.

It also removes the recommendation loop entirely. Nothing is learning what to show you next, because you are no longer being shown anything you did not ask for, which is a more thorough fix than repeatedly telling the algorithm you are not interested.