It’s hard to believe it’s already been more than five years since YouTube Shorts was first revealed, but the TikTok analogue has indeed been around for a half-decade. As the format grows up, YouTube is enhancing it with some quality-of-life upgrades. Shorts is getting some features that are borrowed from the long-form version of YouTube — including the removal of the “dislike” button.
YouTube’s initial choice to hide dislikes proved controversial, but several sensible arguments informed the decision. Most importantly, YouTube claimed that the dislike button meant different things to different people. Female creators, for example, received a disproportionate number of thumbs down. And some people used the dislike to express their personal tastes, while others saved their demerits for videos with irrelevant information.
To account for those differing preferences, YouTube tested a layout that replaced the dislike with a “not interested” button. That look is now coming to Shorts. The “not interested” button will be paired with a heart icon for beloved Shorts.
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“These options give you more control over what you see and allow us to better understand your genuine preferences, especially since you’ve shown us that ‘disliking’ a video could mean anything from ‘poor audio quality’ to simply ‘not my cup of tea,'” reads a YouTube blog post. “You can of course always still report a video if you believe it may violate our Community Guidelines.”
The YouTube Shorts makeover is not just about dislikes. In other cases, YouTube is borrowing features that are associated with TikTok. In 2022, ByteDance’s video app introduced a “clear mode” that removes distractions from the viewing experience. Now, an option titled Clear Screen brings the same text-free, icon-free look to YouTube Shorts. Third-party tools have offered that experience on YouTube in the past, but Clear Screen figures to be more convenient for most users.
Finally, there are some updates to playback speeds worth discussing. Since YouTube users love to speed up long-form videos, the same controls are coming to Shorts. If you have such a limited attention span that you can’t even sit through a short-form video without doubling its pace, you may have bigger fish to fry, but I get it. If YouTube is going to make Shorts as long as other videos, then the playback speed should accelerate, too.
