YouTube promises custom feeds and a lot more AI later this year
Ars Technica Ryan Whitwam ● Covered by 5 sources
YouTube is adding custom home feeds and letting people post GIFs in comments. More AI is coming too, but these are the changes users may feel first.
Based on reporting by Ars Technica, Ryan Whitwam — read the original for the full story.
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YouTube used its annual Made on YouTube event to preview what’s coming to the platform over the next few months. The mix is familiar by now: a lot of AI, some creator tools, and a few non-AI changes that may matter more day to day than the flashy stuff does.
The biggest user-facing tweak is Custom Feeds. You’ll be able to add new tabs to YouTube and shape them with a short description of what you want to see. YouTube will then fill in the feed, and you can keep nudging it by refining that description and rating the videos it suggests. Google says multiple feeds can be saved, though it didn’t say how many.
This one is rolling out soon, and it’s coming to the US on web, mobile, and TV. That matters because the homepage feed is one of the most complained-about parts of YouTube, and this is the first real sign that the company is willing to let people steer it instead of just arguing with the algorithm.
YouTube is also finally adding GIFs to comments. The company says people have asked for it for a long time, and the comment box will let users search for popular animated thumbnails to post under regular videos and Shorts.
Direct messages are getting a group chat option as well, though that launch is limited at first to the US, UK, Singapore, Brazil, and some European countries. So yes, there’s still plenty of AI in the pipeline. But the more interesting update is that YouTube is slowly admitting that giving users more control is not a bug fix. It’s the product.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the rare platform update that sounds like a concession to reality. People don’t want another lecture about personalization; they want fewer surprises from the machine. YouTube finally seems to understand that if the feed is going to be weird, at least let users pick their flavor of weird.
Read more about this at: Ars Technica