How to Turn Off YouTube Shorts (All Three Places It Reaches You)
Short answer: There is no permanent off switch. "Not interested" suppresses the Shorts shelf for a while and it comes back. What works is treating Shorts as three separate surfaces — the home shelf, the sidebar button, and the player itself — and handling each.
Most advice covers the first one and stops, which is why Shorts always seems to return.
The three places Shorts reaches you
1. The shelf on the home page. Dismissing it through the three-dot menu → Not interested removes it temporarily. YouTube treats that as feedback, not a rule, so the shelf comes back.
2. The Shorts button in the sidebar. The one people forget. Even with a quiet home page it sits in the left navigation on every page, one click away, permanently.
3. The player itself — the vertical, auto-advancing feed you land in when someone sends you a link.
The useful trick for the third one
A Short is an ordinary video in a vertical frame. Take the id out of a Shorts URL and open it as a normal watch URL:
youtube.com/shorts/VIDEO_ID → youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_IDSame video, normal player, no swipe-to-next. The auto-advancing loop is what makes Shorts sticky, and the watch page doesn't have it. When a friend sends you one, this is how you watch that one thing and stop.
Why "Not interested" cannot hold
YouTube's controls are recommendation signals. They adjust what the algorithm predicts you want; they don't create a rule. A rule is what you are looking for, and YouTube doesn't offer one — which is why the answer has to come from outside YouTube.
Feedback fades. A rule doesn't. Everything YouTube gives you here is feedback.
Removing the surfaces instead
Hiding the shelf and the sidebar button removes both entry points without touching your account, subscriptions or history. Watch pages, search, subscriptions and playlists behave exactly as before.
Be clear about what this is: the Shorts are still delivered, you just have no path to them. A barrier, not a block — and the barrier is the whole point, because Shorts works by being one idle click away.
CleanFeed hides the Shorts button and the home feed on YouTube, and can take end-screen suggestions, the recommended sidebar, comments and live chat with them — each on its own switch. Free, no account.