Watch History Tab: X Tests and Insights

Highlights

• Feature: X is developing a new watch history feature to enhance video discovery.
• Engagement: The new “Seen” tab will track videos watched, improving user experience.
• Updates: Recent changes to the Following feed prioritize relevant posts over chronological order.
• Impact: These updates aim to increase user engagement within the app.

X is working on a new watch history feature, which would make it easier to find that one video you saw that one time, but now you can’t remember the details of, nor who posted it.

As you can see in this screenshot, shared by X’s Head of Product Nikita Bier, X is experimenting with a new “Seen” tab option, which would track all of the videos that you’ve watched in the app.

It’s not clear at this stage whether this will be a full log of every post that you’ve viewed, nor how far it will go back. But like similar history tools in other apps, the idea is that this will make it easy to get back to posts that have lodged in your memory, but not enough to recall the details.

What are the new user engagement features on X?

The new presentation includes bubble icons highlighting users you follow who have replied to posts. This feature aims to enhance user interaction by promoting engagement with friends’ comments.

These additions to X’s UI are still in testing, with Bier exploring more ways to keep people scrolling and posting in the app.

How does X’s ranking update affect feed visibility?

X recently updated its ranking for the “Following” feed, ensuring that users see the most relevant posts based on their past actions in the app. This means the Following feed is no longer in chronological order.

So you can’t set the Following feed as your default, and you won’t see any display in reverse chronological order, unless you manually switch over to such each time that you log in.

These two updates are significant, because they enable X to get more engagement from users by keeping them scrolling in the For You feed, which it can populate with a broader range of content, as opposed to the user-defined Following stream.

I can say with some confidence that X’s AI-defined For You feed has improved over time, ensuring more relevant posts are being displayed to each user each time that they log in. But at the same, the Following feed is now worse, because it’s harder to keep up with the latest posts from profiles that you’ve chosen to follow.

In the end, X would prefer you use its Grok-powered For You feed either way, but it’s impossible to predict what the long-term impacts of these changes will be, especially without access to any internal metrics.

X’s updates to its other functions are smaller, but align with that same push, to get people spending more time in the app, and coming back more often.

Will that work?

I don’t really see X growing in any significant way, unless there are some major change in the app, while Threads also continues to embed itself as a viable alternative for many communities.

Improved AI recommendations may increase scroll time, but it also still feels like X gives disproportionate exposure to posts from its owner, and his own pet peeves and projects, which could impact ongoing engagement.