You can now turn off YouTube shorts entirely

YouTube is letting users turn off the brain rot faucet on its mobile app.

The internet's home for all things video started rolling out a new setting in its iOS and Android apps that allows users to set a very strict daily limit for scrolling through the Shorts feed, per The Verge.

Specifically, you can now set it to zero minutes, effectively eliminating the Shorts feed as a viable part of the app. You'll still be able to see individual Shorts on a user's account page, but tapping on the Shorts tab at the bottom of the screen will instantly put up a message saying you've reached your limit for the day, disallowing you from watching Shorts there at all.

YouTube originally rolled out a Shorts feed time limit feature a few months ago, but prior to this new rollout, the shortest limit was 15 minutes. After scrolling for whatever amount of time you set, the app would stop you from watching Shorts for the rest of that day. That option is still available, both for adult users to set for themselves and for parents to set for their kids, but it now exists alongside the zero minutes option.

Shorts have been successful for YouTube over the past few years as a TikTok competitor (or just a place where videos that originated on TikTok also show up), but it's also undeniably become a source of endless scrolling through AI and brain rot content for many people. Giving users the power to turn off the spigot for themselves is probably necessary.