Google is changing the “likes” and “views” counters on YouTube so that they will refresh automatically when a video is viewed. Currently, if you’re watching a video on the platform, the number of likes and views won’t change while you are viewing the clip. But with this update, those two metrics will rise and show a cool animation of a rolling numbers counter whether the video is being played or is paused. And the animation will be played even if you switch to another app and return to YouTube.
Android Police came across this new behavior on YouTube and couldn’t find any reference to it except for a post on Reddit from back in October from user nonotan who wrote, “I’m watching a video, and I keep getting distracted by an animation where the view counter is rolling over to a new number as if it were a physical click counter. I have not seen this behavior before today, and I’d like to disable it.”
Red boxes show the number of views and likes of this video rolling higher in real time
The same Redditor was so bothered by the effect that he added the following line to his filters which stopped the animation and the count from advancing in real-time: https://www.youtube.com/youtubei/v1/updated_metadata*.
Others also had similar posts about the feature such as Reddit user Reyh who said, “Distracting indeed and imho not beneficial at all. Saw it on Tuesday for the first time, using Firefox. The first few times I only noticed some sort of movement at the bottom left of the videos. I wondered if it was in the video itself. Then I observed the area for a while and saw the new counter animation.”
It seems that this feature is being tested with the help of a very limited number of YouTube users globally. Those who see the feature will notice the number of views and the number of likes rolling up on the screen to a higher number while they are viewing the video. Google calls this progress and for some of you, it may be.
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