There is a new Skip shorts switch in the list selector, alongside Skip watched and Skip ignored.

The problem it solves is arithmetic. A channel that posts one long video a month and a Short every day ends up with thirty times more Shorts than videos in your pool, so a random pick from that pool is overwhelmingly a Short. You did not subscribe for a different ratio than the one you got, but random sampling does not know that.

The switch belongs to the list, like Skip watched and Skip ignored, so you can keep one list that includes Shorts and have everything else leave them out.

Update, 26 July: now on by default

Skip shorts shipped as opt-in, switched off. That was the cautious choice and it was the wrong one — a setting nobody knows about is a setting nobody uses, and the whole point of RandomYV is to hand you something worth twenty minutes.

New lists now start with Skip shorts on, and it was switched on for every list that already existed. That includes lists where it had been deliberately turned off, and the previous setting was not recorded, so if you had Shorts on on purpose you will need to turn the switch off again. The alternative was lists quietly behaving differently depending on whether they were made before or after today, with no way to tell which was which.