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It has happened to all of us that you think you will just watch a YouTube Short, and you don’t even realize that an hour has passed. To save people from this long scrolling, YouTube has brought a new feature, ‘YouTube Shorts Timer’. This feature allows users to decide how much time they want to spend watching Shorts in a day.
However, if you wish, you can dismiss this alert and continue watching further. That means this feature does not force you, but gives a gentle reminder to increase your screen time awareness.
Currently, this feature is being rolled out on the YouTube mobile app and in the coming weeks it will be available to all users globally. Currently, this feature is not linked to parental controls, so parents cannot set time limits for their children. But YouTube has said that by the end of the year this feature will also be available for family accounts, so that children cannot watch further videos after the limit is reached.
Why was this feature introduced?
Nowadays, social media apps are considered responsible for increasing the habit of ‘doomscrolling’ i.e. watching content continuously and without stopping. Many researches show that this reduces anxiety, focus and increases problems like stress.
YouTube has already worked with digital well-being, such as ‘Take a Break Reminder’ which advises users to take a rest every 15, 30, 60 or 90 minutes, and ‘Bedtime Reminder’ which reminds to turn off the phone at bedtime.
Now the new Shorts Timer feature specifically targets the area where people waste the most time, the Shorts feed. Now it remains to be seen how seriously the users take this reminder or just swipe and move on.
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