3 Minutes
YouTube Shorts can disappear from your homepage at last. Not hidden, not buried, but effectively gone if you want them gone badly enough.
That is the newest twist in YouTube’s screen-time tools, and for people who have been battling the endless vertical scroll, it feels like a small victory. The company first introduced a Shorts timer back in October, giving users the option to cap their daily viewing anywhere from 15 minutes to two hours. Once that limit was reached, the app would nudge you to stop. Now, YouTube has gone one step further.
Set the Shorts timer to zero minutes, and the Shorts feed disappears from your YouTube home screen. Open the app, and those autoplay temptations are no longer waiting for you.
A cleaner homepage, not a total lockdown
This is not the same as blocking Shorts entirely. If a Short shows up in your Subscriptions feed, you can still watch it. And if you land on one through a link or recommendation, it will still play. What changes is the default experience: the endless Shorts carousel is removed from the homepage, where most users get pulled in without thinking.
Try to keep scrolling, and YouTube will interrupt with a full-screen notice saying you have reached your Shorts limit for the day. In other words, the app makes the boundary obvious. The choice is still yours, but the rabbit hole gets a lot harder to fall into.
Who gets it first
YouTube told The Verge that the zero-minute option is already available for parents and is now rolling out more broadly to regular adult accounts. The setting lives inside account preferences, though it may take a while to appear everywhere.
For families using parental controls, the feature is even stricter. Kids cannot simply dismiss the warning and keep scrolling, which gives parents a harder stop than most social platforms offer.
That is what makes this update stand out. Instagram and TikTok have screen-time controls too, but YouTube’s zero-minute Shorts limit feels more decisive. You do not need to delete the app. You do not need to rely on willpower. You just turn the faucet off.
Leave a Comment