YouTube wants to bring a little bit of Instagram to your video experience with timed reactions
YouTube comments can sometimes be awful, but Google’s trying to make them more fun. Recently, the companytested out an option to let users post “timed comments"which allowed you to publish SoundCloud-like responses at specific video timestamps. It seems like that feature got a decent response, and now Google is running a similar test with “timed reactions” on videos.
The feature,which is being rolled outto a small number of testing channels and videos, looks like a natural continuation of the older test, and honestly,with the removal of public dislike counts, we’ll take any option that lets us express our feelings on videos freely. Where the test is active, users will be able to leave a handful of Instagram-like reactions, and these will appear in specific moments of the video.
When watching videos tagged in this manner, it’s possible to see the moments when everyone started jumping in with their reactions, though that’s anonymized so you won’t know who reacted how. As for which reactions will be available, Google says it’s testing a few different sets, all based on popular emoji, and may add or remove some based on how the experiment goes.
If you want to try it out — well, keep your eyes peeled, for the time being, anyway. This will only be active for certain videos initially, and Google hasn’t exactly pointed us in the direction of any just yet. You’ll also probably want the latest version of the app, so make sure that’s updated too. YouTube is making pretty clear that this is an experiment rather than a staged rollout or test — depending on user feedback, we might see further tweaks, or it might get thrown out of the window altogether.
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