# So long, YouTube shorts! Is that time of the year where I commit to being better, to be more present, to do more, to procrastinate less... you know... the whole New Year deal. One thing I want more of is more control over my time and social media doesn't help me do that. Specially short format videos like TikTok, Instagram Reels or my ultimate nemesis: YouTube shorts. I manage to avoid the other two because I don't use TikTok and I download Instagram about once a month, check what's been going on with my friends and delete it again. But Shorts... damn Shorts. They pull me in and, even though I try very hard not to fall into their trap, I fall more often than I like to accept. So to help me tackle this, I created a ridiculously simple browser extension for myself that simply removes Shorts from YouTube so I have the old school YouTube browsing experience. I won't go into too much detail into how extensions work –I learnt the very very basics to get this going [here](https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/develop/concepts/content-scripts)– but for anyone else wanting to stick it to the man, here's the code. Stick all of these into a folder: A manifest: ```json { "manifest_version": 3, "name": "Shorts Blocker" "description": "An extensio to block YouTube Shorts", "version": "1.0", "action": { "default_popup": "ui.html", "default_icon": "default_icon.png" }, "content_scripts": [ { "matches": ["https://*.youtube.com/*"], "css": ["styles.css"], "run_at": "document_end" } ] } ``` A CSS file: ```css /* styles.css */ a[title="Shorts"], [is-shorts], #shorts-container { display: none !important; } ``` An HTLM file for the UI: ```xml

Shorts blocked!

``` And an icon. You can get one in the link above to the Chrome docs. That's it. Now there's no visual queue to pull me into Shorts and if I navigate to `/shorts` it autoplays the first one but doesn't display anything and doesn't let me navigate. Hacky? Sure. Effective? 100%. You can install this in any browser. I added it to Safari (docs [here](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/safari_web_extensions/developing_a_safari_web_extension)) and to Chrome (docs [here](https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/develop/concepts/content-scripts)).