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Comment by ihateneckbeards | Hacker News Reader

That's great, I hate when Youtube recommends me all kinds of videos about turtles just because I stumbled over a video of turtle 6 months ago

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I'm actually quite shocked Youtube does that. I know exactly what you mean, and I specifically avoid clicking on some videos because I know Youtube will just spam me with those in the future.

I'm sure in many cases the recommendations give more traffic than less, but I can't help but feel for me personally, it's giving Youtube less traffic. I actively avoid clicking some videos on Youtube, because I don't want that crap to repeatedly show up for me. It's a cancerous feature.

I've found it useful to purge my Youtube history every once in a while. If I click on random Youtube links on irc, they always get opened in a private/incognito session. I'm annoyed this is something that I think about.

It's not terribly useful for people who open stuff from within the browser, but for the past couple of years I've actually had my default browser in Windows set to incognito/private mode of whatever browser I'm using. This way I don't have to think about it, and I also don't have to deal with things like Gmail deciding that I've already seen some emails because my inbox loaded in a background tab.

Heh, a bit like Firefox Focus on Android. That's a great idea.

That is my whole problem with this recent machine learning approach has been taken off in last decade. I don't have anything against AI. But there is got to be a way to sign this off. Sadly google thend to shove it in people throats.

Agreed, and it's one of the reasons I've switched off of everything google I can. Youtube and Google Voice are the only things left. Oh and my Pixel XL phone, but I'll be switching to the iPhone X in Jan / Fed (whenever it goes carrier free).

I hate not knowing what consequences my actions are going to have.

Personally, I think people should never use these services while logged in their Google account. Just keep the logged accounts in another Firefox profile and browse from an "amnesic" one (one which blocks third party cookies, have cookie self-destruct, adblocked to the hell, etc).

This new extension should help with this experience, BTW.

You can delete videos from your history or "tune" what it shows you by selecting "Not Interested" on the video's option menu in the recommendation list.

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