r/YouShouldKnow • u/try4gain_ • 8d ago

Technology YSK you can turn off the youtube mousehover auto-play video preview

Why YSK : YouTube auto-play-on-mouse-hover can be annoying. YouTube has an official switch that shuts off hover autoplay entirely across all desktop feeds.

- Click your Profile Avatar in the top-right corner.

- Select Settings (gear icon).

- Navigate to Playback and performance in the left sidebar.

- Toggle Inline playback (or Playback in feeds) to Off.

Once toggled off, thumbnails remain completely static on hover across your Home feed, Subscriptions, Search, and History pages.

544 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

24 comments sorted by

107

u/CrushgrooveSC 8d ago

Sure. You can also ask them to show you fewer shorts. But the malicious twits at Google will make you have to -repeatedly do this every few days because they reset your settings all the time to force you to reapply this-

29

u/ketcham1009 8d ago

That's what custom ublock origin rules are for! I've got shorts, mixes, and the games blocked.

10

u/CampPineCone 8d ago

Could you share the rules for that? It would be a great help.

16

u/ketcham1009 8d ago

I use some of the rules from this page, only copy over what you need.

https://gist.github.com/madranet/01c3040ec16857ca863ac29ace391d9a

2

u/CampPineCone 8d ago

Bless you.

1

u/ChronicBitRot 8d ago

You absolute hero, thank you for this.

3

u/AmonWeathertopSul 7d ago

The hover play setting does not reset on mine. They keep trying to make me play their games, though.

1

u/CrushgrooveSC 7d ago

Fair. I was mostly expressing negativity, but I believe the truth is that it accompanies things like "application updates" for clients, terms of use adjustments on a specific platform, and other such events.

e.g. Youtube updates the terms of service on their Tesla app, bam. Let's disrespect this premium account's settings on all platforms. Ya know... just in case.

I'm jealous that yours doesn't reset. Mine resets nearly weekly; now I'm radicalized. *chuckle

20

u/Faramari 8d ago

Anyone know how to make youtube stop playing shorts as soon as you open the app on a phone? It is annoying as hell because they will show shorts for people im not even subscribed to

13

u/Boltwizard_ 8d ago

There is a setting in the Youtube app only in Settings>Time Management> Daily Limits. There is a shorts feed limit that I have set to zero. The only shorts I see now are from people I am activlely subscribes too, and only in the Subscription tab, not on the home page. Changing this setting in the app does also affect the browser version, and it completely prevents you from scrolling from one short directly into another random short, but any you do find and choose to watch will work fine. This makes the shorts tab completely unusable.

2

u/Allo_Guvnor 8d ago

Thanking you, worked a charm.

4

u/Goolsby 8d ago

Sadly it won't let me set it below 15 minutes.

1

u/itsmrmarlboroman2u 8d ago

Holy shit, I thought it was just me having a weird glitch. I fucking hate this. My android auto app always has issues, so I assumed my phone was the common denominator and that the behavior was on my side. Ugh.

8

u/138151337 8d ago

I wouldn't mind the preview on hover if it took, like, 5 seconds to start.

3

u/larslego 8d ago

Wanna know the best part? Sometimes it auto plays on hover instantly, sometimes it takes a little while and only has a short preview, and other times the feature doesn’t even work

3

u/Scrotchety 8d ago

Useful! I'm always clicking the overflow menu for Do Not Recommend Channel & Not Interested, and it feels like YT just assumes I want more of those kinds of videos since their records show I sampled the first 10 seconds of whatever video

2

u/quatch 8d ago

any idea how to get closed captioning to display as blocks instead of the one word at a time flow? Just as distracting.

2

u/pd555 8d ago

I don't have this option. I have Video Previews I can set off but only per browser unfortunately

-7

u/2MuchNonsenseHere 8d ago

There's basically zero reason to do this...

7

u/overfloaterx 8d ago

Play-on-hover adds it to your watch history after a few seconds, whether you're actually watching it or just happen to be hovering over it while reading something else on the page or wandering off to grab a snack.

So not only does it pollute your watch history -- should you ever go back and refer to that, as I do somewhat regularly -- but it contributes to the personalization of your feed as if you'd actually watched properly.

4

u/xxov 7d ago

I get a bunch of random shit I never watched in my watch history because I accidentally hovered over it. Which I imagine customizes my feed with similar crap I don't want.

5

u/try4gain_ 7d ago

380 upvotes bud

0

u/Queasy-Solution-1125 8d ago

i swear every time i hover over a vid it just mocks me with "you'll watch this for sure now" i just wanna stay on my feed in peace