I will be blunt here. I hate YouTube Shorts. Not only is it a time sink, but it’s also a brainrot time sink that makes you feel bad afterwards. Thankfully, with a new update that YouTube is rolling out now, you can finally nuke this from your feed.
The feature builds on a Shorts timer YouTube first announced back in October, which let users set a daily scrolling limit anywhere between 15 minutes and two hours. Once you hit your limit, YouTube would prompt you to stop.
You can now set your Shorts timer to zero minutes, which effectively wipes the Shorts feed from your YouTube homepage.
So what actually happens when you set it to zero?
Setting the timer to zero removes Shorts from your YouTube homepage entirely. You won’t see them staring back at you every time you open the app. That said, it’s not a complete block. Shorts will still appear in your Subscriptions feed, and you can view individual Shorts if you stumble upon one and choose to watch it.
If you do try to scroll anyway, YouTube throws up a full-screen notice letting you know 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 get it?
YouTube confirmed to The Verge that the zero-minute option is already live for parents and is currently rolling out to everyone else with a regular adult account. The option lives inside your YouTube account settings, and it might take a little while to show up if you do not see it yet.
Parents also get a stricter version of this. For parental controls, the limit notification will not be dismissible, meaning kids cannot 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 bit of an edge for people who want a harder stop without deleting the app entirely.
