uBlock Origin can also get rid of Shorts in Youtube, as well as the hover-play functionaliy, and annotations on videos.
Just paste this into your uBlock Origin settings/myFilters:
! Kill YT Shorts
youtube.com##ytd-reel-shelf-renderer
youtube.com##.html5-endscreen-content
youtube.com##.html5-endscreen
youtube.com##.ytp-ce-element
youtube.com###video-preview-container
annotations_module.js$script,domain=youtube.com
/endscreen.js$script,domain=www.youtube.com****
It actually is a ghost town. There’s so little engagement, and even the upvote-counts seemingly aren’t obfuscated, and are super low.
There’s also already a lot of conservative trolls who will flame for “MUH SPEECH” if you suggest that they’re an annoying conservative. “Hey man, I’m just asking the questions”. In a ghost town, they appear louder.
My theory is that people just don’t want to comment anymore. We all learned our lesson. If we comment, we just feed the AI beast. I’m not offering my insights and opinions so that you can scrape them.
Everything in the comment. They’re all pretty well described if you wanted to pick-and-choose.