YouTube is rolling out a number of changes to Shorts, including a new method that allows users to reduce the length of short videos.
The platform owned by Google announced On Thursday, Shorts now comes with a setting that allows users to double their playback speed. The goal of making what is already a brief experience even shorter is to allow users to “absorb information more quickly or find their favorite part faster,” the platform said.
In an apparent bid for a more positive website, YouTube also removed the Dislike button from the shorts. Instead of disliking a video, users will now have to rely on “Not interested” and “Do not recommend this channel” features to discourage certain types of content.
Similarly, instead of clicking the thumbs up 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 clean view of their content without floating distractions.
All of these changes have been made to create “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 would roll out over time, but did not give exact dates.
TechCrunch reached out to Google for more information.
YouTube was a latecomer to the short-form video space (it launched Shorts in 2024, several years after the launch of TikTok and Instagram Reels), but it has managed to attract an audience since then. YouTube Shorts was averaging 200 billion daily views in June 2025, according to CEO Neal Mohan he said in his opening speech in Cannes last year. (We can qualify this impressive metric with the context that YouTube counts a “view” like the first moment a video is opened).
A report earlier this year. showed that Short films were increasingly seen on viewers’ television screens and up to 2 billion hours of such content were consumed per month.
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