YouTube is introducing a number of changes to Shorts, including a new method that allows users to shorten the length of short-form videos.
The platform owned by Google was announced Thursday, Shorts now comes with a setting that allows users to double their playback speed. The purpose of making an already short experience even shorter is to allow users to “absorb information faster or find your favorite place faster,” the platform said.
In an apparent bid for a more positive web, YouTube has also dropped the dislike button for Shorts. Instead of disliking a video, users will now have to rely on the “I’m not interested” and “Do not recommend this channel” features to discourage certain types of content.
Likewise, instead of clicking a button if they like a video, users will now have access to a heart emoji.
Finally, YouTube is also introducing a new “Clear Screen Mode,” which is designed to temporarily hide “all icons and text from the playback view,” giving users a clear, distraction-free view of their content.
All of these changes were made in the service of creating “a more intuitive Shorts experience,” the company said. It’s not exactly clear when the updates will go into effect. The company said the features will roll out over time, but didn’t give exact dates.
TechCrunch has reached out to Google for more information.
YouTube was late to the short-form video space (it launched Shorts in 2024, several years after TikTok and Instagram Reels), but it’s managed to attract an audience ever since. YouTube Shorts to average 200 billion daily views by June 2025 CEO Neal Mohan he said in his keynote address in Cannes last year. (We may qualify this impressive measurement with the context that YouTube counts a “view” the first time a video is opened.)
A report earlier this year showed that Shorts were increasingly being watched on viewers’ TV screens — and that an estimated 2 billion hours of such content were being consumed each month.
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