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Ask HN: Block short-form videos on home network?

1•mark13•1h ago
Dad of teens here... and I'm watching where all of us, myself included, are too easily sucked into more and more into short-form video content. To a clear detriment. I have one kid who really tries to keep his time down, as he knows it negatively impacts him. And, like I presume most of us, he has days where the algorithms just get the better of him. And he wants to reduce it!

Years ago my wife and I made a conscious decision to not get on TikTok or Instagram (or let our kids on), and just let our Facebook accounts slowly die, given it seemed everyone had mostly left anyway.

Now Facebook has Reels, when I open YouTube to search "how to fix...", I'm easily distracted by an endless autoplay of YT Shorts, and my decision to give my older kids Snapchat for messaging with friends backfired when they added shorts. Sigh.

So my question ... I know there are browser extensions that help, but that doesn't necessarily extend to mobile easily (we're iOS). My Eero mesh network lets me block entire sites -- e.g., TikTok, Instagram, Youtube. But I'd love to be able to preserve YouTube/IG/Snap non-short content, and just filter out the shorts.

Is this something I can do on my home network setup? e.g., via Pi-Hole?

I understand the moment anyone switches to mobile, all is lost. But given everyone has limited data plans :), just restricting this on our home network would be a material improvement.

Many thanks.

Comments

austin-cheney•38m ago
Nope. PiHole will only block by domain, so it’s all or nothing.

What you could do is add another intermediary device to block sites based on end point rules. If you know all YouTube shorts share a common address pattern simply drop the packets from moving into your PiHole device.

These could be different docker containers on the same machine