How to hide YouTube Shorts on desktop

Why hide Shorts

Shorts are designed to keep you scrolling. On desktop they appear as a shelf on the home page, mixed into search results, in your subscriptions feed and as a tab in the left sidebar. If you open YouTube to watch a tutorial or catch up on a channel, that shelf is a reliable way to lose twenty minutes. Plenty of people would simply rather not see them.

The built-in way

YouTube doesn't have a setting to turn Shorts off. What it has, as of October 2026, is a dismiss button on the shelf:

1. On the YouTube home page, find the Shorts shelf.
2. Hover over it and click the X (labelled Not interested) at its top right.
3. YouTube removes the shelf and says it will be hidden for 30 days.

That's useful, but limited. The shelf comes back after 30 days and you dismiss it again. It applies to the home page, not to the Shorts that appear in search results or in your subscriptions feed. The Shorts entry in the left sidebar stays where it is. Marking an individual Short as Not interested only removes that one video, and others take its place.

The manual way

There's no complete manual method, but a few habits reduce Shorts:

• Go straight to the Subscriptions page or a channel instead of the home page.
• Use search filters, choosing Videos as the type, which leaves most Shorts out of results.
• Collapse the left sidebar so the Shorts entry is out of sight.

These depend on you remembering every time, which is exactly what a distraction exploits.

Make it permanent with a tool

The reliable fix is to change the page itself. A userscript is a small piece of JavaScript that runs on a website you choose, and one for YouTube can look for every Shorts shelf, every Shorts video in a list, and the Shorts link in the sidebar, and hide them as they appear. YouTube loads content as you scroll and as you move between pages without a full reload, so a good tool keeps watching the page and hides new Shorts as they arrive, not just the ones present when the page first loaded.

ScriptPanda is a Chrome extension that builds that kind of tool from a description. Open its side panel on youtube.com, paste the request at the end of this guide, and it writes the userscript and installs it. From then on Shorts are hidden on every YouTube page: home, search, subscriptions and the sidebar. There's no 30-day timer, because the tool runs every time the page loads.

Hiding things on a page doesn't need AI once the tool exists, so the tool runs as often as you like without using your plan's requests. Building it and changing it later do.

Some follow-ups people ask for:

• Redirect any /shorts/ link to the normal video player, so a Short someone sends you plays like a regular video.
• Keep Shorts from one or two channels you actually like.
• Add a small toggle to show Shorts again for the current page.

Pair it with other changes

If Shorts are the main distraction, recommendations are usually the second. The related guides hide the home page recommendations, the sidebar next to a video, and the comments. Each one is its own small tool, and you can switch any of them off from the extension when you want them back.

Limits

The tool works in Chrome on desktop, on the pages it's built for. It doesn't change the YouTube app on your phone or TV, and it doesn't change what YouTube recommends to you, only what's shown on the page. It hides Shorts after the page draws them, so you may occasionally see one flicker before it disappears. If YouTube changes its layout and Shorts start showing again, open ScriptPanda on YouTube, say what reappeared, and ask it to fix the tool for the page as it is now.