You enter by accident
Nothing warns you that you are leaving ordinary videos.
Chrome extension
The loop starts before you decide.
One thumbnail, one card between two search results, and you are in a feed with no end. Twenty minutes later you are still there, and you never chose to be.
Nobody decides to watch Shorts
The feed has no end
The next video starts before you decided to watch it.
Willpower is too late
The fix is never being offered the first one.
So the entry points are removed
- Shorts shelves on the home page, subscriptions, search and the watch page
- Shorts cards mixed into search results and suggested videos
- The Shorts tab on a channel
- The Shorts button in the sidebar — hidden by default, and you can turn it back on
Your feed goes back to videos that end, and that you picked.
It closes the doors; it does not lock the room
The extension hides interface elements on desktop www.youtube.com. Direct Shorts links still open and the player still works.