Creator Weekly: YouTube Playlist Voting, TikTok Animation, Threads Links

Author

Peggy K
May 17, 2025

Hello readers! 

This week there are updates from YouTube, TikTok, X, Adobe, Threads and more.

Google was a bit quiet this week, which is not too surprising given that Google I/O is just days away. Expect plenty of announcements next week. 

Top news and updates this week

  • Top news and updates this week

    • Collaborators can upvote (or downvote) videos in YouTube playlists.

    • For Global Accessibility Awareness Day, Google (Android and Chrome), Apple, TikTok and Meta announced new accessibility features.

    • YouTube launched weekly Podcast Charts in the US.

    • YouTube updated the mobile miniplayer to pause when it’s hidden.

    • YouTube announced new advertising opportunities at Brandcast, including placing ads where videos are most engaging.

    • TikTok announced AI Alive, a tool that turns a photo into a short video.

    • In response to user feedback Spotify will only display Plays publicly for major milestones. 

    • X now supports 4k video uploads for Premium subscribers.

    • AdSense deprecated the ad choice control for European privacy messages. 

    • Mail Online claims Google AI Overviews have killed the click-throughs from search.

    • Google Photos Quick Edits lets you quickly enhance or edit photos before sharing. 

    • Adobe renamed Creative Cloud All Apps to Creative Cloud Pro. There are more AI-powered features, at a higher price.

    • Fedica now supports scheduled posting to Tumblr.

    • Threads now lets you add up to 5 links on your profile and is showing new post metrics. 

    • Pinterest acknowledged that mass bans were due to their error.

    • Audible will be using AI-powered audiobook narration and translation, and narrators aren’t happy.

    • More reading: why your cursor blinks, AI spammer targeting “older” women, Android’s design changes, creators at Cannes Lions, and what’s happening at the copyright office.

đź—“ Ten Years Ago This Week: Discord Opens Chat to Gamers

To celebrate 10 years of Creator Weekly, I’m sharing highlights from 2015. 

Discord launched in May 2015. After a decade of mostly steady growth, it currently has 200 million monthly active users, almost all of which game in some form. 

To Do & Try

Discord is 10 years old this week. They are asking people to submit their memories (with a tease that there may be some reward) and are running sweepstakes from their X and Instagram accounts.

Google I/O is May 20-21. You can register to attend virtually for free. The keynote is live on Tuesday at 10AM Pacific time (set a notification). I’ll be watching, and I may live stream during the session. Check in on Tuesday morning. 

Just for fun: 900 People Are Collectively Driving an 'Internet Roadtrip' on Google Street View. Everyone votes which way the car should go every few feet, with live chat via Discord. You can listen to local radio stations as you slowly cruise. As I write this it’s traveling through Ellsworth, Maine where the consensus is to visit the marina. Check it out.

The Eurovision Song Contest is live on YouTube. If you are in the US, UK, Australia, Lithuania or Greece you cannot watch live, but recordings will be available after the show. Watch the final.

Upvote and downvote videos in YouTube playlists

YouTube playlists now include (optional) video voting. Upvoting moves a video up in the list and downvoting moves a video down in the list.

This is available for both collaborative playlists and regular playlists.

  • Voters must be signed in to vote. 

  • Each account can only vote once per video. 

  • The votes are anonymous. 

You can limit voting to everyone with a YouTube account or only playlist collaborators, and you can choose to turn the feature off.

Voting is enabled for collaborative playlists by default, and limited to collaborators. Change that by clicking the edit pencil to update the playlist settings.

You can manage your playlist settings either in the YouTube mobile app or on desktop. On desktop you need to be sure you are managing the playlist “On YouTube” rather than in YouTube Studio to see the edit options. 

Get instructions in the YouTube help center. Watch a short demo.

Global Accessibility Awareness Day

Google announced a number of new and updated AI-powered (of course) accessibility features for Android and Chrome.

  • TalkBack: The screen reader for people who are blind or have low vision can provide descriptions of images, even without alt text. With new Gemini integration people can ask questions about the image as well. Enable TalkBack.

  • LiveCaption Expressive Captions: LiveCaption provides real-time captions for most media (and phone calls). Expressive Captions adds more labels for sounds (like whistling or throat clearing) and has a new duration feature. If a sports announcer is excited they may say it was an “amaaazing shot” or if someone is upset they may say “noooooo”, rather than “no”. This is available in the US, UK, Canada and Australia, in English. Enable Expressive Captions

  • Project Euphonia: This launched in 2019 as a way to improve speech recognition for “people with non-standard speech”. Developers can now access the project’s open source repositories.

  •  Face Control for Chromebooks: Use facial gestures and head movements to control your Chromebook.

  • You can now use a screen reader to interact with PDFs in Chrome.

  • Page Zoom for Chrome on Android: Increase the size of the text on a web page without affecting the page layout. Use Page Zoom.

Apple announced accessibility features coming to the Mac, iPhone, Apple Watch and other devices in the near future.

TikTok added the option to include alt-text for photos, and is testing AI-generated alt-text. They also have added a setting to increase color contrast and now have bold text support. 

Meta celebrated GAAD by touting their Ray-Ban Meta glasses with Meta AI for the vision impaired (it can describe what’s in front of you) and expansion of their Call a (Human) Volunteer for help with everyday tasks. In the metaverse, they are providing live captions and live speech. And WhatsApp has a bot that can translate American Sign Language.

Video Creator and Live Streaming Updates

YouTube launched weekly Podcast Charts with the top 100 podcasts in the US ranked by watchtime. It does not include playlists with mostly clips and Shorts. Find the list at charts.youtube.com/podcasts.

YouTube updated the mobile miniplayer. You can hide the miniplayer, which pauses the video (unless you have a Premium subscription with background play). When the miniplayer is visible again, it resumes playing.

At Brandcast, YouTube told media and marketers that it is “#1 most-watched distributor of content across broadcast, cable, and streaming in the U.S. since February 2025”. And TV is the primary device US viewers use to watch. New advertising options include: 

  • Cultural Moments Sponsorships: not just sponsoring a channel or a video, but moments like awards seasons or sports championships. 

  • Peak Points: Gemini identifies “peak” moments in popular videos and then places the ad “where audiences are most engaged.” 

  • CTV (connected televisions): Great big Masthead ads on the YouTube homepage and Shoppable ads that lets viewers engage with products.

TubeFilter is taking a look back at 20 years of YouTube, one year at a time. And CBS Sunday Morning posted a 2009 inside look at the beginnings of YouTube from their archives.

TikTok announced AI Alive, a new tool that uses AI to turn a static photo into a short video. This is available within TikTok’s Story Camera.

TikTok is letting some live streamers enable DMs while streaming. It’s called  “LIVE setup for client acquisition” in the settings.

Last week Spotify announced publicly visible Plays stats on podcast audio and videos. After feedback from creators, Spotify revised their plan to show public play counts starting at 50,000 plays and then only update when a specific milestone is reached (100k plays, 1M plays). Creators can see exact view counts in analytics. 

X now supports 4k video (As a sign of how important Creators are to X, this is the first @XCreators post since February). Uploading in 4k is only available to Premium subscribers, but anyone can watch on iOS or the web.

Vimeo updated Showcases, with easier creation, more customization options, and the option to gate your Showcase with a customizable form (to collect leads, for example).

Restream now lets you set the stream latency for Youtube.

AdSense has deprecated the ad choice control for European privacy message settings. If you want to show some users personalized ads, and other users non-personalized ads, you can use asynchronous ad tags.

This sounds bad: Google AI Overviews leads to dramatic reduction in clickthroughs for Mail Online. Their director of SEO notes that there is “content that AI cannot replicate such as columnists and live blogs since chatbots cannot yet keep up with the pace of breaking news.”

Photos and Image Design

Google Photos Quick Edits now lets you edit and enhance photos with one tap before sharing. This is available on Android devices.

Adobe has renamed Creative Cloud All Apps to Creative Cloud Pro. It includes Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro and Lightroom, Adobe’s mobile apps and new Firefly generative AI features. And, of course, the price is going up from $59.99 per month (on the annual plan) to $69.99 per month (on the annual plan).

Social Media

Fedica now supports scheduled posting to Tumblr. With a free Fedica account, you can schedule posts on 9 different platforms, including Bluesky, LinkedIn, X, Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, Threads and Mastodon. Paid accounts can also post to TikTok and YouTube. Also new is the option to require alt-text in all your image posts, so you don’t forget.

Threads is getting linky. It now lets you add up to 5 links in your bio, has added stats for shared links in posts, and gives you a weekly Insights recap to see how your posts and follows are doing.

Taylor Lorenz reports on a new study that shows an “epidemic of scams” on Facebook and Instagram. Meta apparently lets advertisers get up to 32(!) strikes for financial fraud before their account is banned.

After weeks of user complaints, Pinterest finally acknowledged that mass user bans were due to an “internal error”. They say it was not caused by over-reliance on AI moderation.

Communication and Collaboration

If you use the Google Drive app to scan documents on your Android device, the scan buttons have been improved.

If you are using Gemini in Google Drive you can now export responses to Docs or Sheets.

More Gemini tools in Google Sheets: Use Gemini in Google Sheets to quickly add dropdowns, pivot tables, filters, and more. This requires a Google Workspace business or enterprise account, or Google One AI Premium subscription.

More AI Updates and Tips

Google announced AlphaEvolve, “an evolutionary coding agent powered by large language models for general-purpose algorithm discovery and optimization.” It is already being used to help run Google’s data centers more efficiently. 

Google Classroom lets educators use AI to generate questions about YouTube videos. Google has just expanded the collection of YouTube videos available for AI-generated (editable) questions.

Google announced that Gemini is coming to more devices, including WearOS smart watches, Android Auto, and Google TV. It will also be available in Android XRheadsets and glasses, which will be coming later this year from Samsung.

Amazon’s Audible audiobook platform says they will be using AI technology for audiobook narration and translation. This has been criticized by human narrators and translators, noting there is an art to audiobook narration (it’s not just reading). A concern is that even if the quality isn’t great, people will choose AI because it’s cheaper, and that becomes the new normal, with human narration becoming a luxury item.

More Reading (and watching)

Have you ever thought about why your cursor blinks? This is a great article from Inverse: 54 years ago, a computer programmer fixed a massive bug — and created an existential crisis 

This is gross: Futurism reports Slop Farmer Boasts About How He Uses AI to Flood Social Media With Garbage to Trick Older Women. Facebook Pages and AI-generated posts on Pinterest link to Ai-generated blogs with fake authors. The profiled spammer seems to make money teaching other people to use AI on Pinterest. What he teaches:  "Best [targets] are voracious fan bases. Fan boys, fan girls, and an older demographic, where Aunt Carol doesn't really know how to use Facebook, and she's just likely to share everything."

If you have an Android phone, tablet or Wear device (like a watch), design changes are coming with Material 3 Expressive. Click the link for a sneak peek.

Lindsey Gamble argues Why Creators Belong at Cannes Lions  

Thanks for reading! 🌼