X has changed the order of posts in the home feed, ordering them by like counts as opposed to the order in which they were posted when users logged out. Posts, formerly called tweets, still appear in chronological order on profiles when you’re logged into the social network, but once you log out, they are sorted by performance.
X has made X Pro a subscriber-only product. In order to access X Pro, previously known as TweetDeck, users must pay for a Blue subscription. X Pro is a valuable tool to newsrooms, journalists, researchers and social media consultants, used to track multiple lists and trends.
X owner, Elon Musk, has suggested that the block feature on the site is going to be deleted. He wrote “block is going to be deleted as a ‘feature’, except for DMs, makes no sense.” The post was a response to a Tesla fan account who asked whether there was any reason to use block instead of mute. The announcement was met with backlash from users who expressed concern over removing the safety feature.
X has started rolling out a new feature for paid users to showcase some of their posts through a new ‘Highlights’ tab. X updated its Blue/X Premium support page to include details about the highlights feature, stating “feature your best posts by Highlighting those posts and they’ll appear on your profile in a dedicated tab”. X has been rolling out the new ‘Highlights’ tab to some subscribers but plans to make the feature available to all paid users.
YouTube Music is adding a TikTok-style ‘Samples’ short-form video feed
YouTube Music is launching a new TikTok-style video feed called “Samples”. Each clip in the feed offers a glimpse into the artist and music video of a song recommended to you. As with TikTok, users can swipe vertically in the new Samples feed to discover songs and music videos. This feature is a way for YouTube Music to use short-form video clips to promote the discovery of long-form video content on the platform while encouraging new music discovery.
Threads to launch on the web and give more prominence to reposts
Threads has updated the app to give more prominence to reposts. Meta has dedicated a “Reposts” tab on the profile page, so people can quickly scan through all reposts by a user. Additionally, users can now see reposts in the reverse-chronological “Following” feed as well. Prior to this, you could see other users’ reposts only in the algorithmic “For You” feed. In other exciting news – Meta has responded to the requests of a web launch, which is set to be happening early this week.
Amazon aims to boost its TikTok-like shopping feed by asking influencers to submit videos
Amazon is offering influencers $25 to upload a video to its TikTok-style ‘inspire’ shopping feed. The company sent out an email to select influencers asking them to submit videos featuring two or more Amazon products in the same category. Amazon is offering $12,500 for a maximum of 500 videos, or $25 per qualifying video, according to a screenshot of the email shared online. The company plans to cap the initiative at 35,000 videos, which will cost $875,000.
