YouTube is rolling out an option that will allow users to set limits on how long they watch shorts each day. Is Google acknowledging that shorts are affecting viewers’ mental health?
Social media has influenced people’s reading comprehension and writing habits. IYKYK. They may be designed for entertainment, but they do more harm than good. When was the last time you read a book from cover to cover? Smartphones have made people fool. Even AI is making people lazy, as they have started trusting summaries instead of reading articles. TL;DR.
Short videos, or as I like to call them, brain rot, are a real problem. Brain rot is a term officially recognized by Oxford. Actually, it was from Oxford word of the year in 2024Short videos have affected people negatively. It is a common sight in trains, buses, planes to see people just moving here and there, without any end. Some people lie in bed staring at their mobile screen and scrolling through their feed aimlessly. “YouTube Shorts are now averaging over 200 billion daily views”, were the words of YouTube CEO Neil Mohan. He said that in June 2025. This is not good.
The good thing is that YouTube is addressing the problem, even if it won’t say it outright. An announcement was made on YouTube’s support community stating that it was introducing an option to allow users to set a daily limit on how long they can scroll on the Shorts feed on mobile.
How about a setting to disable shorts completely? Short-form videos are probably YouTube’s biggest money-maker right now, so don’t expect them to go away. A timer to limit the amount of video you watch, or more accurately, how long you watch. This is not a bad start. Well, anything that helps rot the brain is good.
There are no screenshots or videos that explain how this feature works. The announcement says Users can set and adjust daily limits on scrolling on the Shorts feed from Settings.
Lifehacker report A similar timeline feature exists on Instagram and TikTok. Sadly, the option to control the time limit isn’t available to me yet on the YouTube app for iOS or Android. It’s worth noting that YouTube says the prompt is dismissible, it pauses the feed once the user reaches the limit, so it can be bypassed. This is where self-control matters, if you want to quit doomscrolling, you’ll need to be disciplined. Break reminder feature is already present in YouTube, the new option is different. YouTube also plans to bring this Shorts feed time limit into parental controls later this year. And this option will be a non-dismissable setting for children and teens.
On the other hand, it looks like YouTube’s redesigned video player is being made available to more users. It’s now available to me on the web version, not that I asked for it, on an account that’s not logged in. Firefox extensions like BlockTube, Improve YouTube continue to work, so at least the redesign didn’t break them.
Do you watch short videos?
Thanks for reading..
