YouTube is testing a heart‑shaped like button on Shorts, removing the dislike button for some users, and adding playful animations, signaling a possible shift toward social‑media style reactions.
YouTube is quietly reshaping the way users react to short‑form videos. In a trial that began roughly a month ago, the familiar thumbs‑up icon that has long represented a "like" on the platform has been swapped for a heart symbol, but only on the Shorts experience.
The alteration is not limited to the graphic; in some test accounts the dislike button has been removed entirely, echoing a plan announced in 2021 when the company said the numeric dislike count would disappear while the button itself would stay visible. The current experiment goes a step further by taking the button off the interface for a subset of users.
Reports from Reddit and other community forums indicate that the rollout is no longer confined to a handful of testers - more people are beginning to see the new heart icon when they tap the like control on Shorts, whether they are on Android, iOS, or the web version of the service. Despite the growing number of anecdotes, YouTube has not issued an official statement, and the change is not reflected in the platform's help pages or press releases.
The visual overhaul is part of a broader effort by Google to make interactions on its video service feel more playful. When users press the new heart, a series of animated transformations can occur, turning the icon into a dog paw, a light bulb, or other whimsical shapes. These micro‑animations are consistent with recent design tweaks seen across Google's suite of products, where subtle motion is used to reward engagement.
Although the heart animation appears to be a simple cosmetic update, it signals a shift toward aligning Shorts with the interaction language of other social media apps such as Instagram, TikTok and X, all of which rely heavily on heart‑shaped reactions. By making Shorts feel more like a typical social feed, YouTube may be trying to capture the attention of creators and viewers who spend most of their time on those platforms.
Independent testing by BGR attempted to verify the new UI across a variety of accounts, including both paid Premium subscriptions and free users, and across multiple devices and operating systems. The testers consistently saw the traditional thumbs‑up and thumbs‑down icons on regular video pages, and only a minority of accounts displayed the heart on Shorts. This suggests that the experiment is still in a controlled phase, perhaps a pre‑launch validation before a wider rollout.
No evidence has emerged that the heart icon or the removal of the dislike button is being applied to standard YouTube videos on desktop or mobile browsers. At present, the change appears confined to the Shorts player, which was introduced in 2023 as a vertically oriented format built specifically for mobile consumption. The platform has been gradually expanding Shorts into its desktop interface and integrating it with recommendation algorithms, and the new reaction system could be part of that evolution.
Whether the heart will become the permanent like symbol for Shorts or will eventually spread to the broader YouTube ecosystem remains uncertain, but the ongoing tests indicate that the company is actively gathering user feedback before committing to a full‑scale deployment.
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