There are countless ways to waste time online, and scrolling your way through a never-ending selection of Shorts on YouTube is one of them. If you are someone who has found you have lost hours to the content served up by the platform, there is some good news.
A new digital well-being tool is starting to roll out that lets users set a time limit for the daily viewing of YouTube Shorts. While far from perfect, it may prove helpful for anyone who tends to lose track of time.
This is not the first time we have heard about a time limit on YouTube Shorts – it is something that was spotted in APK teardowns earlier in the year. The company said at the time that it was working on such a tool, but then went rather quiet on the matter.
Now, as reported by TechCrunch, it is back.
Users can jump into Settings and set a limit on how long they would like to be able to watch YouTube shorts each day. When this time limit is reached, videos are paused and a message is displayed.
Why is the system not perfect? There are various reasons.
The first is that time limits are self-configured so it is easy to set very loose boundaries. Secondly, there is nothing to stop users from ignoring the prompt and continuing to watch as much as they want.
Thirdly, time limits only apply to Shorts, so there is no way to limit the watching of videos in other sections of YouTube.
So what is the point?
For now it is really little more than a way of having YouTube keep track of time for you so you don’t have to. You might tell yourself you would like to spend 10 minutes watching Shorts, and a pop-up telling you when this has elapsed can be helpful.
There is also the issue of Parental Controls. At the moment, the time-limit on the watching of YouTube Shorts is not integrated into Parental Controls, but this is going to change. This means that parents or guardians will be able to set their preferred length of viewing time for their charges. And for these younger viewers there will be no option to dismiss the prompt; when the time limit is reached, that is the end of viewing for today.
While some people will welcome the addition of the feature to help remind them of the time and nudge them into tearing away from the screen, it is a flawed system that will probably just be ignored by the people who would benefit from it most. Of course, there is little that YouTube could do to change this, but it ends up making the time-limit feature feel like a box-ticking exercise and something of an empty gesture.
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