Hide YouTube Shorts

29 September 2023

Finally, here's how to hide Shorts sections on YouTube.com.

Shorts are Terrible

I wish YouTube would allow an official top-level option for this. But they don't.

Short videos, anywhere from a few to several seconds long, are the junk food of Internet video. As if there wasn't enough junk in that category already! In YouTube Shorts, the platform moves closer to junk food platforms like Snap or Tiktok. They're short, punchy, break concentration, promote surface-level thinking, promote zingers, are repetitive and addictive.

Like hiding ads or cookie banners, hiding Shorts will clean things up and make YouTube better.

Change CSS Per Page

Browsers allow users to set custom CSS on a particular web page, independent of how that web page is published.

To do this for Firefox, you can follow the steps in this superuser article, reproduced here:

  1. Open Firefox, press Alt, then select Help menu, and More Troubleshooting Information

  2. Next to Profile Directory, click Open Directory.

  3. Inside that directory, create a sub-directory, called chrome.

  4. Inside chrome/, create userContent.css

  5. Make per-domain CSS modifications inside that file.

For other browsers, search out similar instructions.

Per-Domain CSS

To make Firefox load the CSS on a particular domain, you wrap it in a Firefox/Mozilla-specific selector:

@-moz-document domain(youtube.com) {
  /* YouTube-specific CSS here */
}

Identify the Shorts

Now, what CSS should we add? Anything that hides the YouTube shorts! Here are some quick finds:

@-moz-document domain(youtube.com) {
  ytd-rich-grid-slim-media {
    display: none !important;
  }
  ytd-reel-shelf-renderer {
    display: none !important;
  }
  ytd-reel-item-renderer {
    display: none !important;
  }
  [title=Shorts] {
    display: none !important;
  }
}

If you have a better selector, let me know!

To see the changes, restart Firefox after the first edit to userContent.css. Thereafter, you can open a new tab and navigate back to youtube.com in order to see your changes. (Just pressing refresh on your current tab will not work.)

Another victory for a Short-less Internet.