‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)

Re:‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked ... by Andrex on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @11:02AM (#25518955)

> Another poster in the thread said you can do this by editing your watch history, which frankly would have never occurred to me as a way to influence the algorithm.

Really, why? (I'm curious.)

> There definitely needs to be a "reset" button on these services

The reset button already exists in this context: Google and YouTube have options to automatically purge your various histories at the 1/3/6 month marks.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/2/20895183/youtube-history-...

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Re:‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked ... by crispyambulance on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @11:14AM (#25519093)

I think we need more than a reset button. We need, at a minimum, a "blacklist" feature.

I would love to be NOT have any video recommended to me that contains certain keywords in it's metadata. I simply don't care what I would miss out on if all videos with the word "Trump" anywhere in their metadata, for example, would simply never be served up for my perusal.

Even better would be some type of "whitelist" feature which only shows me stuff from my subscribed channels and their associated channels.

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Re:‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked ... by Andrex on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @11:23AM (#25519204)

I think a blocklist is prudent for sure, and more likely for YouTube to implement. An allowlist like you propose is already similar to the pure Subscriptions view, and restricting it to only channels related to your subscriptions would kill most of the reason behind recommendations in the first place (virality.) Not saying that's good or right, just that YouTube is less inclined to implement such a feature.

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