YouTube Shorts gets option to create comment based video

YouTube Shorts is testing a way to turn comments into videos. The remarkable thing about this is that the creator of the video has no control over this (unless they disable the comments completely, which will rarely happen in practice). This creates a TikTok-like system, where such a thing is already possible.

Reaction videos on Shorts

The idea is that when you watch a video on Shorts and look in the comments, you can make a new video based on those reactions. The resulting video will then appear in the Shorts feed and on the channel page of the creator of the reaction video. That’s nice: it won’t be placed with the original video to which those comments refer. What is special is that the people who wrote the comments do not receive a message that their comment has been used in a video.

Google writes: “Creators can already respond to comments (posted on their own content) with a short, but we want to explore whether we can also offer viewers the ability to create content based on comments. Creators cannot prohibit their comments from appearing in a Short unless commenting on their video(s) is disabled.”

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While it now sounds like a loose cannon for creators and commenters, it also offers a new, creative way to make videos. The idea is not so much that you make nasty videos about negative comments, but rather that you use comments that you find very cool and creative to make a new, positive, cool video.

Viewer questions

How exactly it works is still unknown, but it will probably be something like on TikTok. There you can tap a comment and tap the video icon on the left to create a video around it. That’s how creators answer “viewer questions,” for example.

At the moment, the option is only available to a handful of Android and iOS users worldwide.

What do you think: is this a nice development or should a creator have more say in the video? Leave it now in the comments.