YouTube · Reviewed

Shorts keep appearing after 'show less', with no permanent disable

Raised by 85 people over 15 years (2012–2026), in 11 of them.

What people report

2012-07
It was very painful to use YouTube because it is packed with things you don't want to see.
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2023-09
you have to turn it off separately on every device and they turn it back on every few weeks anyway
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2024-04
I manually hide them every thirty days
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2025-09
I click on "show fewer shorts" on the homepage, refresh the page, and still see shorts in the second row.
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2026-10
I am extremely bothered that YouTube does not allow me to disable shorts in the app.
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Principle

User control and freedom (Nielsen)

People report that 'show fewer Shorts' and the hide option only snooze Shorts for a while or get reset, so they cannot make a lasting choice to stop seeing a format they don't want.

A fix

Add a persistent setting that turns off Shorts shelves on home, subscriptions and search. Sync it across devices and keep it until the user changes it, and make 'show fewer' actually go to zero, not just a temporary snooze.

Grouping, principle and fix drafted with Claude and reviewed by Justusability. Counts are people whose comment Claude labelled a usability complaint about this issue; see Method for how, and its limits. Something wrong here?

All 90 source comments