As a new experiment today, YouTube has started letting its users make comments-based Shorts on the platform without seeking permission from the creators.
YouTube says it won’t inform the creators – from whose videos the comments were borrowed for making new Shorts, or the commentators, in this experiment. It wants to drive more engagement by offering another way of creating Shorts, although it’s a limited test for now.
Shorts of Just Comments
YouTube is a sea of entertainment where you can find videos of all kinds. These may be exciting, disturbing, or just the reposting of others’ content with their permission. Adding on top of these, the platform now allows users to make Short videos based on the comments from others’ videos – without their consent!
This concept isn’t new, though, as TikTok and Instagram have already embraced it for years. Viewers on the platform can craft a simple Short video based on the comments from others’ videos, often by not informing them.
And this right is guaranteed by YouTube now, as a new support page of this feature says that neither the original video creators nor the commentators will be informed of this – letting viewers make comments-based Shorts without their permission.
Well, this feature is rolled out to a limited group of YouTube Android and iOS users, named “viewer-created Shorts featuring comments“. Shorts created of such kind will appear on the viewer’s channel home page aside from the standard YouTube Shorts feed.
There were no screenshots shared of this new experiment, so I don’t know what this feature looks like. Hoping to see it similar to that of Instagram’s or TikTok’s counterpart, YouTube says creators can turn off comments to their videos if they don’t want their followers’ words to be featured in others’ Shorts – hinting that it’s the only way you can restrict this feature.
