YouTube icon. Image: AFP/Martin Bureau via ETX Daily Up
Is YouTube taking a page from SoundCloud’s playbook? The video platform has embarked on a new round of testing with time-stamped comments.
“Testing new timed comments: We’re currently testing a new feature that allows you to view comments timed to the exact moment you’re watching in a video. This experiment is available on some videos to a small group of people and we’ll consider rolling this out more broadly based on feedback. To see if you’re part of the experiment, go to the comments section on iOS or Android, and tap the Sort button to select ‘Timed Beta,'” explained YouTube on April 29 on its page devoted to the testing of new features.
The principle is quite simple: allow users to display their comments at a specific time in the video. SoundCloud already offers a similar type of display, allowing users to preview each comment by hovering over the audio waveform of the track.
While this feature could prove useful to more quickly detect the best moments of the video that arouse the interest of internet users, it could also prove unreadable if the flow of comments is dense. It is a situation in which YouTubers with a large community of subscribers commonly find themselves. YouTube has not yet specified how these comments would be moderated.
So far, YouTube has only asked a handful of lucky people to try out this new way of commenting on a video, both on iOS and Android. There is no indication of how many people or in which country or countries the test is taking place.
This is not the first time that YouTube has asked its users to experiment with new features. Recently, the online platform proposed to hide the number of “dislikes” of a video. JB
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