I’ll be direct here. I hate YouTube shorts. Not only is it a time waster, but it’s also a time waster of brain rot that makes you feel bad afterwards. Luckily, you can finally remove this from your feed with a new update that YouTube is rolling out.
The feature builds on a Shorts timer that YouTube first announced in October, which allows users to set a daily scroll limit between 15 minutes and two hours. Once you reach your limit, YouTube will ask you to stop.
You can now set your Shorts timer to zero minutes, which will effectively delete the Shorts feed from your YouTube homepage.
So what actually happens when you set the value to zero?
Setting the timer to zero will completely remove Shorts from your YouTube homepage. You won’t see them staring at you every time you open the app. However, it is not a complete block. Short films will still appear in your subscription feed and you will be able to watch individual short films if you come across one and want to watch it.
If you try to scroll anyway, YouTube will display a full-screen notification informing you that you have reached your Shorts limit for the day. It puts the decision back in your hands.
Who is this for and when will you receive it?
YouTube confirmed to The Verge that the zero minutes option is already available for parents and is currently rolling out to everyone else with a regular adult account. The option is in your YouTube account settings and may take a while to appear if you don’t see it already.
Parents also receive a stricter version of this. With parental controls, you can’t hide the limit notification, meaning kids can’t just tap past it and keep scrolling.
Apps like Instagram and TikTok offer similar Screen Time tools, but this zero-minute option gives YouTube a slight edge for people who want a harder stop without deleting the app entirely.
