Sometimes a YouTube video just needs a lot more feedback than just a comment or a thumbs up or thumbs down button. So today YouTube is now testing time-specific emoji reactions for a small group of users. When a user resonates or likes with the creator says they can react with an emoji in real-time. Users will be able to see how others reacted to the video in real-time, it will be a separate reaction panel in the comment section of every video.

If you are watching a video part of this experiment, you will be able to react and see crowd reactions by opening the comment section of the video and tapping into the reaction panel. The test will also show you which moments other viewers are reacting to, which will be anonymized and they won’t show who sent the reaction. Although Google normally does experiment with YouTube a lot, these features don’t always end up becoming permanent. YouTube did test letting users time their comments according to specific points in a video, and also hiding the dislike button (Which was a bold change) So it does seem that YouTube could make this a real thing.

Emoji reactions have been a thing on a lot of other social media platforms, as Twitter did experiment with emoji reactions to tweets last year (Although it didn’t work out) But it’s a different thing for Video content. Creators will also receive more detailed user feedback via emojis, which will help them improve. Currently, YouTube is testing these features on a small number of people or channels to start, but they will expand the feature depending on how people like it.