YouTube is two products wearing one icon
One of them is a library. You search for how to bleed a radiator, you watch a nineteen-minute video about a submarine, you put an album on while you cook. All of it ends. The video finishes and you are returned to your own life with a decision to make.
The other is a shelf of vertical clips that appears on the home tab, in the subscriptions tab, and between search results, and which never ends at all. Open one Short and you are in a feed. There is no credits roll, no next-episode countdown, no natural place where the thing stops and you notice the time.
Blocking YouTube to deal with Shorts is like unplugging the kitchen to stop eating biscuits. The library is genuinely useful and most people are not willing to lose it, so they do not block anything, and the shelf carries on.
What people usually try first
Dismissing the Shorts shelf works, and it is worth doing: on the home tab you can hide it for thirty days. Thirty days later it comes back, and in the meantime Shorts still appear in search and on channel pages. Browser extensions that strip Shorts out entirely are effective and only exist on desktop, which is not where the problem is.
A timer on the whole app has a known weakness, and Skerrick has it too. It counts the submarine documentary and the radiator tutorial against the same budget as the shelf.
What Skerrick does, and what it cannot do
Skerrick rations the YouTube app, not the Shorts shelf on its own. It cannot see which part of YouTube you are in. On Android it only knows which app is in front, and on iPhone it only hears when YouTube opens and closes. So when you open YouTube, a clock starts at 3 minutes, and it runs whenever YouTube is in front. A Short, a long video and a search all spend it.
That makes the ration a limit on each visit rather than on Shorts. A few minutes is enough to look something up or put an album on, and short enough that a trip into the shelf ends soon after it starts. It is not enough for a nineteen-minute video. If you watch long videos on purpose, set the ration longer, or watch them on a laptop or a TV, where Skerrick is not counting.
At zero, on Android, a card lands over YouTube mid-scroll and tells you there is not a skerrick left. On iPhone a notification says it, and the card is waiting the next time you open YouTube. After 30 minutes away, the ration comes back.
Why the length of the video is the whole point
A sixty-second clip is not a shorter version of a twenty-minute video. It is a different thing with a different job. Long-form asks you to commit up front and then rewards you for staying. A short vertical feed asks nothing and rewards you every few seconds, which means the decision to carry on is never consciously made. You do not choose the eleventh Short. You simply do not stop.
This is why a screen-time number is such a poor guide. Forty minutes of a lecture and forty minutes of the Shorts shelf appear identically in a weekly report, and they are not remotely the same forty minutes. Skerrick cannot tell them apart either. What it can do is keep each visit short, which suits a quick search and does not suit an hour on the shelf.
Setting it sensibly
If Shorts is currently taking an hour a day, do not start at three minutes. Start at ten, let it become normal, then take a minute off every few days. The failure mode with every tool in this category is setting it so tight on day one that you spend day two turning it off.
Pushing through is allowed. The first time each day costs five seconds, then twenty, then forty-five, then ninety. The ladder resets at midnight so no day begins already in debt.
Free things that help
Turn off autoplay, which quietly removes one of the strongest pulls in the app. Turn off YouTube notifications, or at least the ones about videos rather than replies. Dismiss the Shorts shelf when it offers. Use the subscriptions tab as your home tab, since it is finite by design and ends when you have caught up.
If those four are enough, you do not need Skerrick, and that is a fine result. They were not enough for the people this is built for.