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Top Updates
- YouTube Shorts with original content will be prioritized in the Shorts feed.
- YouTube Live dual-format streaming has new vertical layouts.
- YouTube is updating its advertiser-friendly guidelines to allow some potentially “Hateful” content in the public interest to be monetized.
- Use your voice to leave comments on YouTube videos on TV.
- Customize caption styles in Google Vids. Plus Vids now has the latest text-to-speech model for voiceovers and avatars.
- The Edits video editing app has an AI assistant for making and optimizing your Instagram Reels.
- Google Search says “it’s critical” to manually factcheck all AI-generated content on your site.
- Reddit is killing its RSS feeds and public API.
- Linktree will dynamically display selected content from your YouTube channel. They also launched DMs.
- Facebook Forum is a new app for Groups, with AI-powered search, topic labels and new Top Voice role.
- Google is replacing Gemini Gems with Skills.
- OpenAI announced Dots, their own AI Agent.
YouTube and Video
YouTube is prioritizing Shorts with original content and reducing the reach of channels re-uploading or aggregating content from other creators in the Shorts feed. If you are using clips, be sure to “add real value” with your own voice, storytelling or distinct point of view. This is consistent with YouTube’s existing Spam Policy.
Dual format live streaming in YouTube Studio has new vertical layouts. YouTube Studio will automatically format your vertical stream (choose from 'fit to phone width', ‘center crop’ or 'stacked'), or you can build a custom layout using your encoder. The dual stream has a single unified chat room, and vertical streams may appear in the Shorts feed. Learn More
YouTube is updating the advertiser-friendly content guidelines for “Hateful and Derogatory Content” and “Harmful Acts and Unreliable Content” to clarify that some content “of public interest” can earn ad revenue. This would include things like congressional proceedings or debates over ongoing government actions.
As announced at the Made on YouTube event, you can now use your voice to leave comments on YouTube on TV. If you have a supported TV, you can use your remote to comment with your voice. Learn more.
You can now fully customize the captions in Google Vids. Instead of selecting from a set style, you can change the font, typography, and animation. And you can customize it for individual scenes. Learn more about how to add captions.
Google Vids also has an updated text-to-speech engine for AI voiceovers and avatars, using the Gemini 3.8 Flash Lite TTS model. This is supposed to sound more natural and generate faster.This is available to consumer accounts with an AI Pro or Ultra subscription and Google Workspace accounts.
Edits, Instagram’s free video editing app, has a new AI assistant. If you have it connected to your Instagram account (which is not mandatory), the assistant can give you a personalized overview of “what’s working on your account, and why” and give you ideas for new Reels. This is based on your Instagram metrics, your audience, and your niche and style.This is available in the US, and free to use with a daily prompt limit.
Instagram published its complete 2026 guide to creating Reels.
Web Publishing
Search Engine Roundtable reports that Google Search’s guidance for using generative AI content on your website now says it’s “critical to manually factcheck and review all AI-generated content.” This includes metadata like title, meta description, structured data and alternate texts for images.
beehiiv announced several updates:
- Improved recommendation marketplace.
- The beehiiv AI Agent now has “Memory” (remembers where your conversation left off) and Subagents for multi-step jobs.
- In Communities, you can now @ mention a name.
- Updated podcast tools, including IAB v2.2 certification with bot traffic filtered out.
beehiiv also is raising its rates and adjusting its paid plans. The Free plan (formerly Launch plan) is still free for up to 2500 subscribers and includes limited access to most features like Communities and Podcasts.
Social Media
Reddit is killing its RSS feeds and public API because of AI bots, including “large-scale scraping, spam networks, agentic account creation, and automated abuse.” Feeds will shut down November 13, and moderators (and anyone else using the feeds) need to migrate to other workflows before then. Public data API apps and bots are moving to the Developer Platform. Access to Old Reddit will also be limited to accounts that have used it in the last 6 months and mods. More details.
Reddit is also limiting newly created communities to using the new Rules Hub and Automations, rather than automod enforcement for Report, Filter, Remove, Mark As Spam and Approve.
If you are a YouTuber and use Linktree as your "link in bio", you can use Rules to show different content to visitors from YouTube versus social media. It updates automatically to show your latest video, specific playlists, filter between Shorts & long form content, sort by recency or popularity. Rules requires a Premium plan, some other features may require a Pro plan.
Linktree also launched Messaging, so visitors can send a message from your page. Fans who message can be added as a subscriber to “stay in touch” in the Audience Manager. To make sure you don’t miss a message, there’s Spotlight that “surfaces messages that may need attention” and Stacks that consolidates similar messages so they can be responded to in one go. The message in your Inbox shows where the person leaving the message arrived from (like a YouTube video).
This is free to all Linkers.
The Facebook Forum app syncs with your Facebook groups. It’s been in testing since May, and this week Facebook added new features and is rolling it out more broadly.
The Forum Ask chatbot searches Groups posts and comments, can create a recommendations list, and will suggest questions based on your recent searches. The search results include both Groups you belong to and public Groups you haven’t joined (yet?).
Posts may have topic labels, and tapping a topic will show you more posts on the same topic.There is a new Groups “Top Voice” role for contributors that “consistently create high-quality posts and comments”. This replaces current contributor badges. This is being tested in the Forum app in the US and on Facebook globally.
The app is available in the US for iOS and Android.
Threads is testing a new post media editor on mobile that lets you overlay a Threads post on your photos and videos, add stickers, and split a photo into up to 9 parts.
Tools
Google will be replacing Gemini Gems with Skills, which are reusable instructions.
- Unlike Gems, you can “stack” Skills to use more than one in a prompt.
- This is rolling out in the Gemini app, and will soon be available in Workspace apps.
- You can migrate your Gems into Skills.
- Skills in the Gemini app and Workspace apps don’t sync, so you will need to add Skills separately to each platform.
- Gems will be retired starting in November for consumer accounts, March 2027 for Workspace accounts.
- Skills in Gemini are available to everyone, Skills in Workspace are available to Workspace Business and Enterprise users.
- As part of this transition the experimental Opal app building tool will shut down November 17, 2026. Features will be available in Skills and AI Studio, but Opal workflows won't migrate.
OpenAI announced their own AI agent called Dots, powered by GPT-6 Astra. Like Meta Muse or Google Spark it can work in the background taking actions on your behalf. It requires a Pro, Business, Premium or Enterprise plan (if you are using a personal plan, you need to disable use to train new models). Like all agentic tools, what you use them for will depend on how much you trust them.
OpenAI has poached Patreon tech leaders, including Sam Yam (Co-founder, President, and CTO) as the head of Creator Product, along with Drew Rowny (Patreon Head of Product), and Shannon Ma (Patreon Head of Engineering). It remains to be seen if OpenAI is going to start exploring Creator monetization.
Apple Creator Studio has new features:
- Pixelmator Pro added template collections, including podcast cover images.
- Final Cut Pro and Motion have new ways to add Cinematic mode effects.
- Keynote, Pages and Numbers now let you collaborate on your documents and presentations.
- In Freeform, Writing Tools with Apple Intelligence can summarize and rewrite handwritten notes.
Reading and Watching
Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) explained why he thinks Video A/B testing on YouTube could be a bad thing. What I’m thinking about:
- How will YouTube prevent abuse? Engineers plan on building a semantic analysis model that can comb through the entirety of both videos and determine their similarity. Only videos with a high enough score will be able to run as tests. But will it work?
- Video A/B testing will find the version with the most retention. But that isn’t necessarily the best video.
- Brownlee says: “A lot of what makes YouTube fun is the stuff that is more niched down, that is not mass appeal by definition.”
- “Stand by your creative choices. You made this video. This is the video you chose to make. And now you get to share it, and you put it out, and you learn from it. … That’s the creative process.”
Google Arts & Culture turned 15. The new homepage is all about AI (of course), including conversational search and experiments to let you virtually try on historical attire, or pretend to talk to historical artists.
Finally, if you need some beauty and science in your day, check out this article about cteonphores (comb jellies) in Quanta Magazine.
Thanks for reading 🌼
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Spam and personal attacks are not allowed. Any comment may be removed at my own discretion ~ Peggy