Blocking YouTube Shorts but keeping the tutorials

You blocked YouTube, lasted nine days, and unblocked it at 8pm on a Tuesday because you needed the four minute video about which screw holds the dishwasher filter in.

That is not a failure of willpower. It is a targeting problem. YouTube is two products wearing one icon. One of them is the largest instruction manual ever assembled and you genuinely need it. The other is a vertical feed with no bottom, and it is the one that ate the evening. When you blocked the app you blocked both, and then you needed one of them, so you unblocked both, and now you have neither the tutorials nor the quiet.

So the job is narrower than the one you tried. Not less YouTube. Less of one part of it.

The reason this is harder than it should be

Almost every blocking tool on your phone works at a level of detail that is too coarse to see Shorts at all.

An App Limit in Screen Time attaches to an app. It sees YouTube as one object with one name and one icon, and it cannot see that a third of what happens inside it is a different product. A hosts file or a DNS filter works one level lower, at the domain, so it sees youtube.com and nothing finer. Shorts is neither an app nor a domain. It is a path. It lives at youtube.com/shorts/, on the same domain, inside the same app, as the radiator video.

Only the last two rows can do what you are asking, and both of them require you to stop using the app.

Say the trade plainly before you spend ten minutes on it. The app is where Shorts is strongest and you have least control. The browser is where Shorts is weakest and you have most. Every method below moves your YouTube use from the first place to the second.

Method one blocks the app and leaves the website open

This needs no extra software, takes about two minutes, and exploits a gap in Screen Time that usually annoys people. An App Limit does not cover the website version of a service unless you add the domain in the Websites field inside that limit. Normally that gap ruins your block, because you hit the limit on the app and open Safari instead. Here it is the whole design. You put a hard limit on the app, you deliberately leave the Websites field empty, and youtube.com in Safari stays open.

1. Set a Screen Time passcode first, if you have not. Go to Settings > Screen Time > Use Screen Time Passcode. Without one, the limit screen offers Ignore Limit For Today and one tap removes everything you are about to build. With one, you get Block at End of Limit, which is the option that actually holds.
2. Open Settings > Screen Time > App Limits and tap Add Limit. Pick the YouTube app specifically, not the Entertainment category. The category sweeps up things you did not mean to touch.
3. Set the limit to one minute. Not zero, because a limit needs a duration. One minute means the app is effectively shut the moment you open it, and the minute is just enough to close something you opened by accident.
4. Leave the Websites field empty. This is the part people get wrong by being thorough. Adding youtube.com here would close the door you are trying to keep open.
5. Move the app off your home screen. Into the App Library, or just into a folder on the last page. A blocked icon you still see forty times a day is a blocked icon you will eventually argue with.

Now the dishwasher video means opening Safari and searching. Opening the app out of habit means a wall. And the web version shows Shorts less aggressively than the app does, because the app is built around the swipe and the browser is not.

Method two rewrites the link so a Short stops being a Short

This is the good one, and almost nobody knows it.

A Short and a normal video are the same video. youtube.com/shorts/ABC123 and youtube.com/watch?v=ABC123 point at the same file. The difference is the player. The /shorts/ path loads the vertical, autoplaying, swipe for the next one interface. The /watch path loads the ordinary player, which stops at the end and waits for you.

So you do not have to block Shorts. You can defuse them by editing the address on the way in, and a Shortcut does that in about four minutes.

1. Open Shortcuts and create a new shortcut. In its settings, turn on Show in Share Sheet and set the accepted input type to URLs only.
2. Add a Replace Text action. Find /shorts/ and replace it with /watch?v=, acting on the shortcut input.
3. Add an Open URLs action pointed at the result of the replacement.
4. Name it something short, because you will be picking it out of a share sheet with one thumb.

Now when a friend sends you a Short, you share it into that shortcut instead of tapping it, and you get a single video in a normal player. You watch it, it ends, and nothing arrives to replace it.

The limit matters, so be clear about it. This is a thing you invoke, not a thing that intercepts you, because iOS will not let a shortcut sit in front of every link you tap. It works on links other people send you, which is a large fraction of how Shorts reach an adult with a job. It does nothing about the shelf inside the app.

Method three deletes the Shorts shelf out of the page

If you have done method one, all your YouTube now happens in Safari, and Safari is the one place on the phone where you can reach inside a page and delete part of it.

Content blocker extensions for Safari can hide page elements by their selector, and some of them ship a ready made rule set for exactly this, usually listed as hiding the Shorts shelf or the Shorts tab. Install one from the App Store, enable it under Settings > Apps > Safari > Extensions, give it permission for youtube.com, and switch on the Shorts rule.

You get the home page with the Shorts row missing, search and subscriptions working normally, and the sidebar entry gone. You do not get any protection when you type a Shorts link directly, which is what method two covers. Budget five minutes, most of it choosing an extension, then load youtube.com and scroll the home page once. If the shelf is still there, the rule is off or the extension has no permission for the site.

Method four changes the door you come in through

The three methods above are walls. This one is about the fact that you almost never decide to open YouTube. You get suggested it.

Go to Settings > Apps > YouTube > Siri & Search and turn off Show App in Search, Show Content in Search and Suggest App. That stops the app appearing when you pull down and start typing something else, which is the single most common accidental opening on an iPhone. It takes forty seconds and it does more work than its size suggests.

Then change how you start a search. You almost always know what tutorial you want before you pick up the phone, so type the query into Safari rather than into YouTube. You land on a results page instead of a home feed, and never see the shelf at all.

Most people only need two of the four

If you want the smallest change that works: method one plus method four. Six minutes, no downloads, and the app is shut while the instruction manual is open.

If Shorts mostly reach you through other people: add method two.

If you use YouTube seriously in the browser and the home page still catches you: add method three, and accept that you have now spent fifteen minutes on this and installed one extension.

None of it fixes the last gap. Every method here is a wall, and walls share one weakness, which is that the person who built them also holds the key. Method one lasts exactly as long as you do not go back into Screen Time and delete the limit, and that takes eleven seconds while you tell yourself it is fine.

That gap is roughly why Scrappy exists, and it is fair to say what he does not do here. He guards three rules, quiet hours, a daily limit and an open limit, and when you push past one he puts himself in the doorway and gets progressively less polite about it. What he cannot do is this article. He works at app granularity, the same as Screen Time, because that is what iOS lets an app see, and he cannot tell a Short from a tutorial any more than an App Limit can.

What he is for is the eleven seconds. If you want back in, you earn it. A treat is worth five minutes and costs about two thousand steps, and treats are never sold and never will be. Removal lock closes the delete and reinstall loophole, and switching it off takes a day, which is deliberately longer than an urge lasts. So the four methods above are the surgery, and the dog is the part that stops you undoing the surgery at 11pm.