YouTube has changed a lot over the years as people's interests evolve, yet one addition appears to still grind the gears of many users wanting to return to the good old days in the past.
It might not be the most popular social media platform from a pure numbers standpoint, but it's hard to deny the impact that TikTok has had on the industry since its popularity exploded towards the end of the last decade.
It has forced legacy platforms like Instagram to dramatically pivot into short-form video content, and has completely transformed how a lot of people use YouTube on a daily basis.
What was once the home of long-form video content that sometimes stretched several hours in length now prioritizes 'Shorts' for creators and watchers alike, leaving a sour taste the in mouths of many.
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It probably makes sense from a business perspective – especially considering the official rulings on how long it takes for people to become 'addicted' to apps like TikTok – but many would rather YouTube return to its roots and be away with the vertical videos.
As reported by Dexerto, however, that has now changed as a new update finally allows people to completely remove Shorts from appearing in their feed, ending the years of requests from people who frustratingly had to scroll past them every day — including one of the platform's biggest creators.
These short-form videos will still appear in your search results unfortunately, meaning there's no way to completely eliminate them from the platform, but you'll no longer be recommended the video type on your homepage which is where most people select their content from anyway.
"Took long enough," wrote one relieved YouTube user on X after hearing the news, with another declaring that they're "so happy to finally have YouTube back. Shorts are a horrible feature that ruined YouTube for me."
To remove Shorts from your feed, you'll first want to head into the app's Settings. From there, head to Time Management, then Shorts Feed Limit, and finally set this value to '0'.
Not everyone has access to the feature just yet as it's still being rolled out worldwide, meaning there's a chance you could only be able to set this to a minimum of 15 minutes at the time of writing.
It should hopefully be launched in every country going forward, however, giving people the chance to curate their feed in a way that was previously impossible.
Whether this changes anything for creators is still yet to be seen though, especially as Shorts is where the majority of AI generated content was found and YouTube previously admonished users who exploited this to create 'slop' that holds little to no value.