Can YouTube Shorts comments be turned into videos?
YouTube Shorts prioritizes the delivery of an endless stream of information in the form of a vertical feed, in a manner analogous to the competing alternatives offered by TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram. In a manner analogous to YouTube’s standalone mobile and web apps, Google often experiments with new features to increase user engagement. The YouTube team just made an announcement about such a new trial version that will be rolled out to a select number of users with Android and iOS devices. In this experiment, viewers have the option to use a comment on the footage they are currently watching to turn it into a new Short.
This new feature is discussed in more depth on a support page maintained by the YouTube team, detailing all recent trials. Officially labeled “viewer-made shorts with comments,” this test has a number of limitations in addition to limited availability. First of all, creators have no control over what comments viewers use when creating a Short, and YouTube adds that creators aren’t notified when new content is generated using a comment left on one of their published videos. The person who made the first comment will also not be notified of this action.
In addition, the user who contributed to the creation of the new Short can find it on their own channel’s home page, next to the normal YouTube Shorts feed. When it comes to the viewing, only a small portion of viewers on mobile platforms such as Android and iOS will be able to actively see this test. In addition, the support page did not include any screenshots of this new experiment; therefore it is unknown what it will look like.
According to YouTube’s support team, content producers have no control over which comments are collected in a “Short”, but they can avoid this issue by disabling comments on their videos. It is still too early to know if and if this pilot feature will ever be made available to a wider audience. Since YouTube makes it pretty clear that not all of its trials are made public, the fact that they are could be interpreted as hinting at a wider release at some point in the future.
Exciting new experiments aimed at users of the YouTube and YouTube Music networks are being conducted by the video streaming company owned by Google. Since the beginning of last week, certain YouTube Premium users have been able to view longer previews on the web while scrubbing through the search bar. While some of these experiments are pretty good, others tend to improve things that don’t need improvement.
YouTube Shorts has benefited from the popularity of short vertical video content, which was mainly popularized by apps like TikTok and quickly introduced by Instagram in the form of Reels. Despite being a bit late to socialize, YouTube Shorts has been able to capitalize on this trend. The vast majority of people who use the internet already turn to YouTube for their daily dose of entertainment, including music videos, game streams, tutorials and even podcasts, just to name a few; hence the addition of Shorts would always be a possibility for the service.
Also check: Discover YouTube’s new ‘Stable Volume’ feature
