YouTube has taken some controversial decisions in the last few years, inviting resentment from users. One such move was to introduce short-form video content on its platform. If that wasn’t bad enough for users, the company didn’t allow them to disable short-form videos on its platform.
Google didn’t hold firm in its decision not to allow disabling YouTube Shorts for long, though. Last month, the company quietly introduced a way to disable Shorts from the YouTube feed. However, this was in no way an indication that YouTube was reducing its focus on Shorts. In fact, the company seems to be putting more effort into making Shorts content more immersive.
YouTube seems to have started testing a new Instagram-style feature for distraction-free Shorts viewing.
YouTube’s plan to minimize distractions on Shorts
When you play Shorts content on YouTube, you can get plenty of action buttons, such as like, dislike, comments, share, and more. They appear on the right side of the screen. At the bottom of the screen, you also have the username and the caption the creator used. And they all take up too much screen space and obstruct viewing.
Many users on Reddit have been raising this issue for a long time, and it looks like the company has finally started to work on it. As spotted by app researcher Radu Oncescu, YouTube is testing a new option called “Clear Screen” in the Shorts viewer menu. The app researcher hasn’t outlined what the feature can do, but the diagonal outward arrow in the “Clear Screen” feature clearly suggests it’s an option to switch to full screen.
This is already available on Instagram and TikTok. On Instagram Reels, one of the control options is “View fullscreen,” clicking on which removes all the action buttons from the screen. Instagram’s new “Clear screen” option is expected to work the same way, and hopefully, will remove the distractions users have long complained about.
However, it is not clear whether YouTube Shorts will introduce a gesture to trigger the “Clear screen” action. Instagram added a gesture to go full screen when watching Reels, but it removed the feature with an update for some reason.
The “Clear Screen” feature in YouTube Shorts seems to be in the final stages of development and has yet to roll out to the public. So, if you don’t see the option yet, it’s absolutely normal. What’s worse, there is no clarity on when YouTube plans to roll out the new feature.
