The YouTube Shorts experience is a bit like Instagram Reels and TikTok. You watch a video, you scroll to the next one, and then you rinse and repeat until you’re in a never-ending doomscroll. But in a recent announcement on its blog, YouTube has announced some changes to the YouTube Shorts experience with new features like clear screen, playback controls, and more.
YouTube Shorts updated with new clear screen feature and more
Just like TikTok and Instagram Reels, when you watch a YouTube Shorts video, you’ll see various icons and buttons that can sometimes feel a bit distracting. But what if you wanted to hide it? Thanks to this update, YouTube Shorts gets a new clear screen feature that will hide icons and text to give you a more immersive experience.
According to the blog post, “Sometimes you just want to watch a video without overlays getting in the way. We’re introducing a new Clear Screen mode that temporarily hides all icons and text from your playback view. This strips away the clutter, giving you an immersive, distraction-free view of the content.”
YouTube isn’t the first to come with a distraction-free feature. Instagram Reels has a similar feature, where if you pinch to zoom, it hides the icons and text too. But if you’re someone that spends more time on YouTube, this will be useful.
What else can we expect?
In addition to clear screen, YouTube is giving users more playback controls for Shorts. This includes the ability to double the playback speed. Users can also mute videos by tapping on the video to pause it, then tap the mute icon to silence it completely. This is useful if you’re watching videos in public. Plus, more videos these days come with built-in captions, so in some cases, you will still be able to understand what’s going on.
YouTube has also ditched the use of the thumbs-up icon in favor of a heart icon. The company also announced that it is retiring the dislike button. Users can now be more explicit by choosing “Not Interested” or “Don’t recommend this channel” for videos they aren’t interested in.
These changes should be rolling out as we speak, so keep an eye out for them.
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