“Like and subscribe” is a familiar mantra to anyone who regularly watches videos on YouTube. But with some new changes YouTube is rolling out to the video streaming platform, the words will do more than just annoy you. As part of the updates, when a creator says the words “like” or “subscribe,” YouTube will add a visual cue over the corresponding buttons as a way to prompt you to actually click or tap them.
Here’s a GIF from Google showing what that might look like — watch the “subscribe” button in the lower-right corner of the GIF.
When I read about this feature, I immediately worried how YouTube creators might take advantage of it; I wouldn’t put it past somebody to make a video that’s just 10 minutes of them saying “like and subscribe” to get the buttons to animate as many times as possible. But according to YouTube spokesperson Allison Toh, there are some restrictions on the feature to prevent people from doing that: either animation will only trigger three times per video, and they won’t appear more than once in a three-minute window.
These all sound like welcome upgrades, especially for the 2x sickos like me. But I’m worried the “like” and “subscribe” flairs are going to get pretty annoying pretty quickly. At least we’ll only see them three times per video.
