Is There a Way to Disable YouTube Shorts?

No switch exists, so the question becomes which surface you want them gone from and what each removal costs you.

Updated October 2026

Is there a setting to disable Shorts?

No, and this is worth being blunt about. There is no checkbox in Settings, no option under Playback, no account-level switch that turns the format off.

People look for one because other things on YouTube have switches — autoplay, Restricted Mode, a dozen notification settings. Shorts has none, and the absence reads as deliberate rather than as an oversight.

YouTube does periodically test extra feed controls with small groups of accounts. You can see whether anything is offered to yours at youtube.com/new. Check it yourself rather than trusting a list in an article: what is there changes, and it is account-specific.

What you can do is reduce where Shorts appear. That is a different task from disabling them, and confusing the two is why so many answers here feel like they do not work.

How do you hide the Shorts shelf on the home feed?

On the home feed, the Shorts shelf carries its own menu — three dots or an X, depending on your app version. Open it and choose the option to hide the shelf or to say you are not interested.

That hides it from home for 30 days. Then it returns and you do it again. YouTube does not treat the dismissal as a preference; it treats it as a temporary complaint with an expiry date.

Three things it does not cover. Shorts from channels you subscribe to still appear in Subscriptions. Shorts still appear in search results when they match what you searched for. And the Shorts tab in the bottom bar is untouched.

On a TV app the shelf behaves the same way, and the dismissal is just as temporary. So it works, and it is a chore you repeat monthly.

What actually clears Shorts out of your recommendations?

Turning watch history off. It is the only control with a large effect, and the effect is larger than most people want.

With watch history paused and no significant history behind it, YouTube stops building a recommended home feed at all. You get the search bar and the menu instead of a wall of thumbnails. No recommendations means no recommended Shorts — the surface the problem lived on is gone.

The cost, stated plainly: you lose every recommendation, not only the ones you disliked. Search and subscriptions still work, so you can reach anything you go looking for. You just stop being shown things.

The gentler version is per item. On a Short you did not want, open its menu and use Not interested, or Don't recommend channel when it is the same account over and over. That thins Shorts out gradually, slowly enough that the first week feels like nothing is happening.

Can you open a Short in the normal player?

Yes, on desktop, and it is the most useful trick here.

A Short lives at a URL shaped like youtube.com/shorts/ followed by the video ID. Change that to youtube.com/watch?v= with the same ID and the video opens in the standard player: seek bar, playback speed, no vertical feed waiting underneath to carry you into the next one.

That matters because the Shorts player is not a shape, it is a scroll. Opening a Short the normal way is how you watch one Short instead of eleven.

On a phone the swap is less convenient, since links open in the app and the app sends them straight back to the Shorts player. Requesting the desktop site in a browser is the usual workaround, and it is fiddly.

On a computer, browser extensions can strip the shelf and the tab out of the page entirely — the closest thing to an off switch that exists. It works only in that browser, and it means third-party software running on your YouTube session.

Why won't YouTube let you switch Shorts off?

Because Shorts is not a feature sitting off to the side of the product. It is one of the main surfaces, and it is the one competing directly with other vertical feeds for the same minutes.

A switch that removed it would be used, and used by exactly the people YouTube most wants inside that feed. A permanent, account-level opt-out works against the reason the surface exists.

It is also why the controls that do exist expire. A 30-day hide costs the platform a month of shelf space from one person. A permanent setting costs it that person for good.

None of it is sinister; it is the calculation every platform makes about its newest surface. It is just why your search for a toggle keeps ending in workarounds — you are looking for something it would not be in the company's interest to build.

What the Shorts feed looks like from the posting side

Worth turning the question around, because what makes Shorts hard to escape as a viewer is the same thing that makes them strange to post.

In the Shorts player, nobody chose you. The viewer did not search for the video or click a thumbnail, and has in most cases never heard of the account. They arrived mid-scroll, and the decision to stay or swipe takes about a second.

Very little is on screen in that second: the first frame, any text on it, the account name, and the counters down the side. A viewer who hesitates and glances at those numbers reads them as a rough signal of whether anyone else stayed.

That is the entire job a count does. It changes what a viewer concludes when they look at it, and nothing about which feed the video lands in. Anyone telling you a number moves a video through YouTube is describing a mechanic that does not exist.

So both sides end in the same shape. As a viewer you can reduce Shorts, not remove them. As someone posting them, you can change what the page says, not where the page gets shown.

Questions people ask about turning Shorts off