Creator Weekly: Discord Age Verification, Threads For You Customization, AdSense Vignette Triggers

Happy Valentine’s Day! Dear readers, I ❤ you all!This week there’s updates for Discord, YouTube, TikTok, AdSense, Threads and more.

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New Tips and Tutorials

If you are in a Google family group with Google One Premium storage, you may already have access to the new Google AI Plus subscription features.

Discord Will Require Age Verification

Discord will use the teen-appropriate experience by default for all users, starting in March.

They do use age prediction, and say “For the majority of adult users, we will be able to confirm your age group using information we already have.” But if Discord doesn’t think you are an adult, age verification will be required to change communication settings, access sensitive content or speak on stage. Options will be "privacy forward" video selfies or document submission.

This has made many people concerned about privacy, but Discord has been trying to reassure users by explaining that facial scans don’t leave your device, IDs are immediately deleted after they get your age, and Discord only receives your age and not your identity.

Customize Your Threads Feed

Threads is rolling out Dear Algo in the US, New Zealand, Australia and UK. You just mention “Dear Algo” in a public post, and describe what you want to see more or less of.

You can also reshare other people’s Dear Algo requests if you see one that looks interesting.

If your submission is approved, your For You feed is then updated for 3 days based on the request. Any content you engage with may affect your For You feed for the longer term.

Posts that appear because of your Dear Algo request are labeled as such.

From my experiments, it’s better at concrete requests (“more posts about Oakland food”) than abstract ones (“less rage bait”).

TikTok (US) Gets a Local Feed

TikTok U.S. launched a Local Feed tab that features local travel, events, restaurants, shopping and posts from local creators and small businesses. It does not include content from under-18 or private accounts.

This requires accurate location information from your device to TikTok, which is off by default. You can enable precise location sharing with the TikTok app in your device Location Services settings.

More AdSense Vignette Ads

There are new triggers for AdSense vignette ads, which you can opt out of. The setting was added February 9th, but the new triggers won’t be active until March 9th.

Vignette ads pop up when users navigate between pages on your website. There are now additional triggers, including reaching the end of an article and start scrolling back up or don’t navigate away, is inactive for at least 30 seconds followed by user interaction (like scrolling), and navigating via the browser back button.

This is opt-out if you have vignette ads enabled (see the linked article for details).

Video Creator and Live Streaming Updates

YouTube will now automatically turn on captions if you mute your phone or tablet. The captions turn off when you unmute. And you can always manually turn on or off the captions. This is not currently available for Shorts.

YouTube Shorts has a new AI-powered tool: Add Motion. This lets you turn a photo of yourself into an 8 second Short using preset motions. You can find this in the YouTube Shorts editor by tapping the Sparkly Icon > Make Me Move. YouTube recommends uploading a full body image for the best result. It automatically adds the required AI disclosure. This is available everywhere except the European Economic Area, Switzerland and UK.

YouTube has simplified the video sharing options on desktop. They have removed Blogger, Tumblr, Kakao, VK, OK, and Mix. Currently you can share directly from the video watch page on desktop to X, WhatsApp, Facebook, Email, Reddit, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. You can also get the video link or embed code (if you want to add it to your Blogger blog or website)

YouTube is running a “small” experiment to improve notifications. Viewers who haven’t recently engaged with a channel, despite getting push notifications, will not receive any additional push notifications from that channel. It will not affect notifications in the YouTube app or the subscription feed.

You can edit your YouTube live stream monetization settings from inside StreamYard. Turn on monetization, and choose the frequency of the ads (Conservative, Balanced, Aggressive). Restream added a similar feature last month. Your YouTube channel must have monetization with ads enabled to use this feature.

The Design Better Podcast featured Nate Koechley, UX Director at YouTube and Matthew Darby, Director of Product Management, talking about designing YouTube and “the algorithm”. “As Nate and Matt explain, what users say they want doesn’t always match what actually makes them happy on the platform. They also discuss their work exploring ways to give viewers more agency and control, including the possibility of using natural language to tune your feed.”

Monetizing Twitch streamers that were grandfathered into a very favorable 70/30 split have been moved to the Twitch Plus Program at Level 2. Unlike non-legacy streamers, they will not have to meet the subscriber minimum requirements to remain at Level 2 (which has caused some confusion).

Twitch streamers and mods can now delete their own chat messages. This is currently available on desktop and coming soon to mobile.

Twitch is testing pause ads. When a viewer pauses, the ads appear at the sides and bottom of the screen. Pressing play makes the ads disappear. Twitch says, “We'll monitor feedback and may evolve this experience over time as we explore more ways to generate revenue for our creators with less intrusive formats.” There is also an ongoing skippable ad experiment.

TikTok alternative platform UpScrolled is having growing pains. TechCrunch reports that “users have reported the app is not taking action on the creation of usernames and hashtags that contain racial slurs, and hasn’t been able to properly moderate harmful content.”

Restream introduced local recordings a few months ago. The idea is that each live stream participant’s computer captures their own video, so a bad internet connection won’t ruin the show. The files upload automatically and the host can download the audio and video. They just published more details about best practices for recording with up to 4k resolution.

New in the Edits video editor app: Valentine’s Day fonts, presets, and sound effects; speed up clips up to 100x; and Korean fonts.

Substack has added live video scheduling on Android and desktop.

Web Publishers and Search

The Google Search Central “SearchOff the Record” podcast asks Do you still need a website in 2026? (transcript and other platforms). If you know Betteridge’s law of headlines, you know the answer. Google’s Martin Splitt and Gary Illyes discuss discovering new information, monetization, the benefit when “you own the house”, social media and why “it depends”.

Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group at Old Dominion University: How to archive web pages in bulk using the Internet Archive Google Sheets service

Google has made it easier to request removal of “non-consensual explicit images” from Search. In the search results, tap the 3 dot menu icon and select the option to “Remove Result”. You can then select the option “it shows a sexual image of me”. Multiple images can be reported at once.

Bing Webmaster Tools now includes AI Performance insights to show how your content appears “across Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and select partner integrations.” It’s too bad there isn’t one tool that can show webmasters “AI” performance across platforms.

Bing Search Blog: Elevating the Role of Grounding on the AI Web

Beehiiv has a new Media Library which lets you share assets between publications, organize into folders, and find images with advanced search filters. It also has an image editor where you can crop, rotate, resize, adjust colors, annotate or generate an image with AI (they are “testing the latest models to deliver the best possible output for your content.”). Max and Enterprise plans also include Getty Image credits.

Beehiiv has also added native Website Analytics (in beta). It shows unique visitors, page views, traffic sources, bounce rate and session duration.

And Beehiiv has expanded the types of digital products you can sell, including files (ebooks, templates, research reports, guides), links (website access, memberships, affiliate offers), or time (coaching, consulting, 1:1 sessions). You need a paid account, but Beehiiv does not charge any fees.

Substack has improved the home page theme editor and added the option for nicely formatted recipe embeds for posts.

New from The Guardian: Revealed: How Substack makes money from hosting Nazi newsletters. Exclusive: Site takes a cut of subscriptions to content that promotes far-right ideology, white supremacy and antisemitism.

Social Media

Bluesky now lets you save drafts of your posts in progress.

Facebook now lets you animate your profile photo with Meta AI. You can also use Meta AI to restyle images you share to Stories and turn text posts into images with “gently animated” backgrounds (click the rainbow “A” icon when preparing your post).

Social Media Today: Russia Blocks WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram Access

Electronic Frontier Foundation: Seven Billion Reasons for Facebook to Abandon its Face Recognition Plans

Communication and Collaboration

You can now listen to Gemini-powered Audio Summaries of Google Docs files. You can adjust the playback speed and style (persuader, coach, and so forth). This is available for Google Workspace Business and Enterprise (Standard and Plus), and Google AI Pro and Ultra subscriptions.

There is a new Figma for Google Chat plugin that lets you receive notifications, preview files, see and reply to new comments and tags.

Google Meet has a neat new feature that lets you undock screen shared content into its own window, so you can resize it or move it to a secondary screen.

More AI Updates and Tips

OpenAI deprecated GPT-5, GPT-4o, GPT-4.1 and GPT-4.1mini. Current models are GPT-5.1 and -5.2. This would not usually be that noteworthy, except that many people are upset because they were using the older models as friends/boyfriends/girlfriends. The more recent models have safeguards that prevent the chatbot from being so sycophantic, and added reminders that the chatbot isn’t a real person. Discussion on Reddit (and SubredditDrama).

ByteDance (TikTok’s parent company) has a new AI video model, Seedance 2, that uses “multi-lens storytelling” to generate several very short scenes with the same style and characters.

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