For the past few years, YouTube has been aggressively pushing its TikTok-style short-form videos down everyone’s throats. While some users enjoy the bite-sized entertainment, for many of us who visit the platform specifically for long-form, in-depth content, the relentless promotion of Shorts has been a major point of frustration. The endless scroll can easily clutter your homepage and distract you from the videos you actually wanted to watch. Acknowledging this growing user fatigue, YouTube is finally offering a native way to effectively hide Shorts from your daily viewing experience.
Last year, the platform rolled out a suite of time management features designed to help users curb their doom-scrolling habits. At the time, you could set a daily viewing limit for Shorts ranging from fifteen minutes up to two hours. While helpful for basic parental controls, it did not solve the core issue for users who simply wanted the feature gone entirely. Now, in a much-welcomed update, YouTube has quietly added a “zero minutes” option to that exact timer.
By setting your limit to absolute zero, you are essentially killing the feature before you can even start scrolling. To activate this, you just need to tap your profile icon in the mobile app, navigate to the Settings gear icon, and find the Time management section. From there, simply set your daily limit for Shorts to zero minutes. Once enabled, if you tap the dedicated Shorts tab on your home screen, the app will immediately hit you with a pop-up stating that you have already reached your daily limit, firmly preventing the infinite scroll from triggering.
However, there is a slight catch to this new functionality. This is not a complete, nuclear eradication of the Shorts format across the entire application. The zero-minute timer primarily affects the dedicated Shorts tab and helps clean up the main homepage algorithm. You will still occasionally see short-form videos pop up within your specific channel subscriptions feed, and you can still open and view any direct links sent to you by friends.
Despite this minor limitation, the introduction of the zero-minute timer is a massive win for user control. It does not completely purge the format from the platform’s backend, but it intentionally adds a hard layer of friction that stops you from accidentally losing an hour to mindless swiping. The feature is currently rolling out globally to all users, meaning you finally have a legitimate say in how much of the platform’s short-form content you actually want to consume.
