Guide
How to hide YouTube Shorts
YouTube gives you one real control over Shorts, and it is temporary. Here is what that setting actually does, what it doesn’t, and how to remove the shelf for good — on desktop and on your phone.
1. YouTube’s own setting (temporary)
On the home feed, find the Shorts shelf, press the ⋮ menu on it, and choose Not interested. On some accounts this reads Hide Shorts instead.
The important part nobody mentions: this lasts about 30 days. YouTube hides the shelf temporarily and then brings it back. It is a snooze button, not a switch, and it only affects the home feed — Shorts still appear in search, in the sidebar, and in the left-hand rail.
2. Watch history off (the blunt version)
At myactivity.google.com, pausing YouTube watch history strips the home feed back to almost nothing, Shorts included. It works, and it costs you every recommendation, your Continue watching row, and the history the rest of this site is built on. Worth knowing about; rarely what people actually want.
3. An extension (permanent, desktop)
A browser extension can remove the Shorts shelf, the sidebar Shorts entry and the reel rows outright, and keep them gone. Our free extension does this with one switch, alongside the home feed, watch-page recommendations, comments and end screens. It makes no network requests of its own and needs no account.
Unhook and similar extensions do the hiding half well too — the difference is what happens next, which is the section below.
On a phone
There is no honest good answer. The YouTube app allows no extensions, so the only options are the ⋮ menu above, YouTube Kids, or a browser like Firefox for Android that supports extensions and using youtube.com rather than the app. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.
Hiding is not the same as fixing
Worth saying, because it is the part every guide skips: hiding Shorts changes what you see, not what YouTube thinks you want. The algorithm still believes Shorts are for you, so they come back on every surface you have not covered, and on any device where the extension isn’t.
Actually changing the recommendation means feeding it different signals — “Not interested”, “Don’t recommend channel”, and watching the things you want more of through to the end. That is what our report works out from your own history: which channels you open and abandon, and the specific taps that retrain the feed.
Free either way
The extension hides Shorts today. The report tells you what else the feed is doing to you.
Next: what counts as clickbait