It's crazy, when I remove the YouTube Shorts pane it says "Shelf will be hidden for 30 days".

It feels like a slap to the face by some promotion seeking Google Manager who tells me that he knows better than me. It's crazy. I didn't stop using YouTube like you did but I was darn close. I guess they do know better than me, in a way.

It’s the same in Instagram: removing recommended posts only has an option to remove for 30 days. The consistent enshittification of products with these sorts of behaviours just makes me want to use them less. Unfortunately I’m sure they’ve got data that shows that my reaction is a minority.

Black Mirror anyone? https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=99&v=5P_HqwgDFJM

Fascinatingly this content is narrated by a robot voice...

They also are very slowly "injecting" shorts everywhere. I'm randomly browsing the feed, not shorts, click on something and before I know it, I'm watching shorts. And yeah, they also recently added a shorts "pane" on the side of normal videos.

On Android you can install https://newpipe.net and turn off a lot of things: no more trending/start screen recommendations if you don't want them, you can turn off comments, or "watch next" recommendations.. the shorts show up in the search results like other normal videos, with a slider so you can still navigate it.

I know this is an unpopular question, but are there ads in newpipe?

Nope, there are zero ads in NewPipe. No ad blocker needed!

Shorts are displayed on one single line of the home and subscriptions tab. They’re trivially easy to avoid.

Try YouTube Revanced from https://revanced.net/

this is NOT the actual domain. do not share this around. the only domain is https://revanced.app, and it will redirect to their github.

I'm pretty sure revanced.net is not affiliated with the actual project and shouldn't be trusted. AFAIK there's no prebuilt APK doing everything for you that can be trusted, it's a multi-step process one has to follow front the official source.

The official Github is https://github.com/revanced

The Github is very obtuse about the installation steps, so this guide on reddit gives the procedure more adequately: https://www.reddit.com/r/revancedapp/comments/xlcny9/revance...

I'm annoyed by the inability to hide shorts but I don't really find them addictive. I've watched a few, determined they were as useless as they appeared, and just ignore them. But it's annoying the amount of space they take up, it's a good third of the screen on my phone.