X has launched an updated History tab for iOS, which separates engagement history into different content types to help users keep track of what they’ve seen and liked in the app.
X’s updated activity display separates content into different content categories, so users can easily find previously viewed videos and articles. There’s also a separate listing for liked posts.
As explained by X’s head of product Nikita Bier: “Bookmarks, Long Videos, Articles and Likes will live here — so you can always come back and continue watching or reading. The Timeline moves fast, so we hope this creates a better place for catching up on long-form content.”
Long-form content has become a bigger focus for X of late, due to the value that longer posts can provide for xAI’s projects.
A key challenge for xAI’s products, such as its Grok chatbot, is that its artificial intelligence tools are powered by X discussion. That’s good for real-time news, but not so much for expanded context and in-depth insight.
Getting more long-form content posted to the app would help to address this. X has been working to encourage longer posts by making its long-form Articles option available to all Premium subscribers (previously this was only available to Premium+ users). The company has also provided financial incentives for long-form creators, including offering a $1 million top article prize in February.
Those efforts have had an effect, with Bier recently saying that X Articles have grown 18x over the last three months.
Of course, a lot of that growth would have come in February specifically, when every AI enthusiast was likely pumping out long-form posts, in an effort to win that $1 million prize.
Even so, X’s efforts to get users posting longer content have seemingly driven some activity, and this new bookmarks option, with its focus on Articles, could help to further encourage long-form content engagement.
That’s assuming X users realize it exists. X’s product announcements are now fairly limited, and it seems likely that a lot of users won’t even realize that there’s been a tab update.
X’s overall usage is also declining, so while X might want to encourage long-form engagement, it’s hard to say how much of an overall impact this update will have.
However, it could be a handy way to find posts users have seen in the app, which could be valuable for some X users.
