Vertical Hold — Block YouTube Shorts

Vertical Hold removes the YouTube Shorts feed from YouTube. Shorts reach you three different ways, so Vertical Hold blocks three different ways: • Pasted or bookmarked Shorts links are redirected before anything loads. • Shorts clicked from inside YouTube are caught too — those never make a network request, so a second layer watches for them. • Shorts you would otherwise see in passing are removed from the page entirely: the homepage shelf, the Subscriptions shelf, the shelf wedged into search results, the channel Shorts tab, the sidebar link, "Shorts remixing this video", and the mobile web equivalents. A Short someone sends you is still watchable. The blocked page offers to play it as an ordinary video in the ordinary player — one video, then it ends, with nothing to swipe to. GETTING BACK IN Hold a button for fifteen seconds and Shorts unlock for five minutes, after which the block silently re-arms. Releasing early resets the timer to zero; it does not accumulate. Both durations are configurable, and you can choose which surfaces get cleaned up. There is deliberately no unlock button in the toolbar popup. The cost belongs at the moment of the decision. This is friction, not a wall. Anything you install, you can uninstall — the point is to make the easy path the one you actually wanted. PRIVACY Vertical Hold collects nothing, sends nothing, and makes no network requests. It has no servers, no analytics, and no third-party code. Your settings and the unlock timer are stored by Chrome on your own device and nowhere else. The name is the knob on an old television that stopped the picture from rolling endlessly. That is roughly the job.