The tiny tweak that could change YouTube forever

In the last couple of months, some people have started watching YouTube on their phones to find something a little different: an endless, TikTok-like feed of videos underneath. These weren’t Shorts, but full-length videos, the ones YouTube tends to refer to as “longform.” If you swiped up, instead of returning you to the homepage, another video would start playing. Swipe again: another video.

So far, this is just a small test of a possible feature, the kind YouTube runs all the time. This one has been live since August and is one of several ongoing tests of new ways for users to find content on YouTube. “If you’re a viewer in the experiment,” a forum post describing the test says, “these new discovery experiences could include a mix of video formats including long-form videos where you’d usually see Shorts (example: the Shorts Feed) or new feeds of long-form videos.” When I asked Google about the test, the company referred me to that forum post. “We’re running an experiment with a small group of Android users that allow them to swipe up to discover more videos when watching in either portrait or fullscreen landscape mode,” YouTube spokesperson Allison Toh said in a statement.

Most user tests don’t go anywhere, and I would bet this one doesn’t either. But the fact that it exists at all says a lot about where the platform might be headed. YouTube is trying hard to juice discovery, to make it easier for people to find new and interesting stuff to watch — and to help new creators grow their audiences on a crowded platform — which already has led to new features like Hype and TV-centric things like seasons. But it’s possible that none of those features would fundamentally change YouTube in the way that endless scrolling would change YouTube.

Think about the difference when you open YouTube versus when you open TikTok. On YouTube, you see a screen full of titles and thumbnails. Some of them are likely from channels you subscribe to; others are things YouTube thinks you might like or videos you started but haven’t finished. Your job is to pick one and press play. On TikTok, though, something is already playing. If you like it, do nothing. If you don’t, swipe up and something else starts.

The magic of the TikTok approach — the reason everyone is so desperately trying to copy it — is that it is almost perfectly efficient. The overarching theory of TikTok is that showing you anything is better than showing you nothing, and because the videos are so short and scrolling is so easy, the penalty for TikTok showing you something you don’t like is quite low. You vote with your scrolls, and the algorithm learns.

YouTube is comparatively a mess. Creators have to try and grow their subscriber counts, which is both an important community-building tool and a powerful message to the YouTube algorithm that people like what you’re making. But most people don’t find videos by going to channels or even by opening up the Subscriptions section of the app. That’s all increasingly buried. Now, people mostly find videos on the homepage, in the recommendations sidebar, and in search results.

That’s why, for years, creators have talked about how important thumbnails are. Jimmy Donaldson, MrBeast himself, the most popular name on YouTube and the person you’d think would least need to game the algorithms, once called his obsession with thumbnails “an addiction” and said his team makes hundreds of options for each video. (He also ran a test and discovered that closing your mouth in thumbnails made more people click on them — and suddenly closed-mouth thumbnails were everywhere.) Cleo Abram recently described working with multiple thumbnail designers, making slide decks of her favorite thumbs, and having to develop the “confidence” to not oversell with a thumbnail and just let the video do the work. There’s a whole genre of content and a whole business created around making more clickable thumbnails, and many creators say they plan their thumbnail before they plan their video.

You can see why it would be compelling for YouTube to get rid of all that. It’s the same line of thinking that has led the company to use generative AI to help creators make backgrounds, respond to comments, and even come up with video ideas. What if, YouTube is asking, creators didn’t have to obsess over all the stuff around their videos and could just focus on making great videos? Everybody wins!

But all those changes, and especially this latest endless scrolling test, have one thing in common: they take control away from creators and hand it to The Algorithm. YouTube creators and viewers already have to play lots of algorithm games, of course, but the current state of YouTube at least gives you moves. You can write your own titles and develop a unique thumbnail style. Managing YouTube is a lot of work, yes, but it also gives you lots of chances to put both your content and your channel in front of the audience. And if they watch one video, you have lots of ways to get them to watch more. An endless feed removes all of that in favor of whatever’s next in the scroll.

Inside each new generative AI feature and automatically playing video is the tacit assumption that, actually, what’s best for everyone is just to do whatever YouTube wants. That assumption has been baked into TikTok for years, which is why everyone made dance challenges and then pivoted to hawking stuff from the TikTok Shop. YouTube has always been bigger, more varied, more fun. This one tweak could break that for good.

Already, you hear creators talk about struggling to balance making videos they want to make — that their audience wants — and videos they know will please the algorithm and thus get more views. In an endlessly scrolling YouTube, there’s no balance. It’s just pleasing the algorithm. And as we’ve seen plenty of times over the years, whether it’s political radicalization and conspiracy theories or just platform-dominating genres like prank videos and Depp / Heard trial coverage, the algorithm’s job is not to incentivize great videos. It’s just to get you to watch.

Maybe that’s where YouTube is inevitably headed. Maybe it’s already there, as viewers increasingly rely less on following creators and channels and more on watching whatever shows up on the homepage. But it would be a shame to see YouTube, still the most creator-friendly platform and the place where many creators feel they can actually build a community and a business, deprecate the rest of the platform in favor of an autoplaying feed. At that point, it would just be TikTok with longer videos — though, in a world of endless scrolling, I bet they’d get shorter and punchier and have more music. And probably try to sell you things. The TikTok-ification of YouTube would be complete, and that would be a huge bummer.