YouTube is auto-launching Shorts, and users aren’t happy

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YouTube has a tendency to push Shorts in as many different ways as it can. You’d often find the top three, sometimes four, rows on your YouTube home page dedicated to Shorts. Sometimes, Shorts show up as recommendations under long-form videos instead of comments. Similar experiments don’t stop at YouTube, but there’s a recent one that pushes vertical content and particularly seems to annoy many users.

Several posts across Reddit highlight how launching YouTube sometimes opens Shorts without a warning. That’s usually the case when you might have shut the app on a Shorts screen, but some people say that it persists even when the app has been closed on another page. Some even say YouTube opens Shorts on startup, even when they don’t watch vertical videos at all.

“This drives me insane too,” another user rightly says. Another one notes how they woke their partner unknowingly because the phone was connected to their earphones, and YouTube blasted a Short right away.

As many folks irked by the behavior note, this also happens even when the YouTube app is killed and relaunched later. I can confirm that this happens, and that appears to be by design — a poor one, admittedly. However, the app launches on the home page if I kill the app outside of Shorts, and that’s how I would expect it to be for others, but that does not seem to be the case for so many others.

The issue appears to have been lingering around for a few months now, with initial reports going back as far as four months ago . Many more people appear to have begun facing similar issues over the following weeks and months. Since the behavior isn’t consistent for all users, it doesn’t look like intended behavior. If it is, it might be a test with a small set of users.

Unfortunately for those experiencing this issue, there’s no explanation or a fix other than culling Shorts completely. You can completely remove Shorts from your home page and other recommended feeds by setting the daily time limit to zero. You could work with it by choosing the Ignore Limit option when you see the full-screen reminder, but be prepared to be reminded frequently, which could interrupt your scrolling streak.

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