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YouTube is rolling out a series of changes to Shorts, including a new method that lets users shrink the duration of short form videos.<\/p>\n
The Google-owned platform announced<\/a> Thursday that Shorts now comes with a setting that allows users to double their playback speed. The point of making what is an already brief experience even briefer is to let users \u201cabsorb information more quickly or find your favorite part faster,\u201d the platform said.<\/p>\n In an apparent bid for a more positive web, YouTube has also nixed the Shorts dislike button. Instead of disliking a video, users will now have to rely on the \u201cNot Interested\u201d and \u201cDon\u2019t recommend this channel\u201d functions to disincentivize certain kinds of content.<\/p>\n Similarly, instead of clicking on a thumb\u2019s up button if they like a video, users will now have access to a heart emoji. <\/p>\n Finally, YouTube is also introducing a new \u201cClear Screen mode,\u201d which is designed to temporarily hide \u201call icons and text from your playback view,\u201d giving users a clean view of their content unencumbered by floating distractions.<\/p>\n All of these changes have been made in the service of creating \u201ca more intuitive Shorts experience,\u201d the company said. It\u2019s not exactly clear when the updates will take effect. The company said that the features would be rolling out over time, but didn\u2019t give exact dates. <\/p>\n TechCrunch reached out to Google for more information.<\/p>\n YouTube was late to the short-form video space (it launched Shorts in 2024, several years after the launch of TikTok and Instagram Reels), but has managed to attract an audience since then. YouTube Shorts was averaging 200 billion daily views as of June 2025, CEO Neal Mohan said at his keynote<\/a> in Cannes last year. (We may qualify this impressive metric with the context that YouTube counts a \u201cview\u201d<\/a> as the very first moment that a video is opened.)<\/p>\n A report earlier this year showed that<\/a> Shorts were increasingly being watched on viewers\u2019 TV screens \u2014 and that as much as 2 billion hours of such content was being consumed per month. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/em><\/p>\n