‘New’ YouTube Shorts Now Stand Out In A Sea Of Algorithm Suggestions
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Summary
- YouTube is introducing a “new” label on Shorts for both Android and iOS users to distinguish recently uploaded videos from older, algorithmically suggested content.
- This new feature offers a degree of chronological visibility within the Shorts feed, which has never been purely chronological, providing users with an option to focus on the latest content.
- YouTube could further improve the Shorts experience by allowing users to filter by subscriptions or sort by various metrics like upload date, likes, and views.
YouTube’s short-form video content, aptly named Shorts, isn’t necessarily the platform’s bread and butter, but with increasingly short user attention spans and the desire for instant dopamine hits, we can’t really blame the streaming giant for constantly experimenting with the format.
This year alone, the short-form format on YouTube has gone through several changes, with a few notable ones being a new and minimalist design change, new tools to make it easier for creators to make and edit Shorts, and an upcoming change that would allow users to set a usage time duration to prevent Shorts doom-scrolling.
Related
Now, in a bid to offer some sort of ‘chronological visibility’ to the Shorts the platform highlights on its home screen, the streaming giant is rolling out a new label that highlights just that — which Short was uploaded recently, and which one is relatively old.
The labels, which literally read ‘new,’ are showing up on my Premium and non-Premium accounts, and on both Android and iOS (Version 20.15.36 and 20.15.1, respectively). The labels haven’t made their way to YouTube on the web.
A hint of chronology
The labels offer a distinct visual cue that differentiates old videos that are just algorithmically being pushed to you vs. the ones that have recently been uploaded and might be of interest to you. In my experience, the ‘new’ label showed up on Shorts up to two-days old. More often than not, though, the label showed up on videos that were uploaded a few hours ago.
YouTube Shorts has never presented content in a purely chronological order, so the introduction of the ‘new’ labels does offer users the option to only view and engage with the freshest content. Ideally, YouTube should offer a dedicated Shorts feeds that can be filtered and sorted. Imagine a feed where you can tick ‘my subscriptions only,’ and YouTube only surfaces Shorts from your favorite creators. Alternatively, sorting by upload date, likes and views, or ever relevancy could also be solid additions.
Have you spotted the new labels on your YouTube app? Do they influence your viewing habits? Let us know in the comments below!
