The removal of public dislike counts late last year was done with the best interests of creators at heart, but it's hard to ignore that the move has been a huge letdown for regular viewers — they can no longer tell apart the deceptive, spammy content from the good stuff. That's why when we heard that Google's latest experiment with the platform was about a new way to express our feelings on videos, we totally ate that up. A couple of months back, YouTube had announced that timed emoji reactions for videos had come into testing and, now, it looks like they're starting to show up for more people.

According to 9to5Google, a new floating panel has begun to appear in the expanded comments section of select videos on the platform. This panel contains five or more emoji reactions, which when tapped, will pop on the current point of the video progress bar with a slick little animation — think of them as the recently rolled out emoji reactions on WhatsApp fused with the timestamp-specific responses SoundCloud supports. These reactions are completely anonymous, though, meaning others will not be able to tell they're yours.

While the screen recording shared by 9to5 shows a select group of emoji on the floating panel, YouTube had stated with its initial announcement post that they're testing others, too, and will add or remove reactions based on how the experiment goes. Unfortunately, just about every reaction we see has a positive vibe to it and we still don't see anything akin to the dislike button — a thumbs-down emoji would be pretty great to help throw in negative feedback where necessary.

Again, all of this is limited to certain channels only as of now and for only some users at that. The latest version of YouTube could be enabling the feature for more users than before, but it's still far from being rolled out for all. Moreover, it also seems that it's more of an opt-in thing rather than something that's everyone gets to see — creators selected for the experiment will have to manually enable timed reactions for them to appear — so there's that.