Sometimes a YouTube video deserves something more extravagant than a mere comment or thumbs up. It’s not like the comments say anything sensible anyway. Emojis make far more sense. This is handy, because YouTube began testing time-specific emoji reactions in their videos today.
This means some users may share a reaction at a set moment in a video. These emoji reactions consist of “tears of joy face”, “heart emoji”, “shocked face”, “keep it real 100 sign”, “question mark”, “celebration emoji”, “Eureka lightbulb”, and “screaming cat face”. Cool. 🙀
Whenever part of a YouTube video calls for one of these emojis, viewers can throw them up there for the world to see. Much easier than commenting, “1:05 OMW Screaming cat face emoji”. 👍
Think ‘Twitch’
Viewers can see how other users reacted to YouTube videos via the reaction panel. Similar to Twitch, a separate reaction panel in the comment section of each YouTube vid will display emoji reactions.
According to Meaghan at Team YouTube, if you’re one of the lucky guinea pigs, you can see crowd reactions by tapping on the reaction panel in the comment section. The test will also show users which moments others are reacting to. These reactions will be anonymised, so emoji-ers (?) won’t know who else is giving that specific moment in time a great big 🎉.
“We’re testing multiple sets of reactions and will add or remove reactions based on how the experiment goes!” said Meagan.
Just where the experiment is destined to go isn’t certain. Testing doesn’t necessarily mean acceptance, but it’s likely to be less mentally stressful than accidentally scrolling to the average YouTube comments section.