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Comment by pimlottc | Hacker News Reader

> That's why I recommend to avoid signing-in into YouTube. Better watch anonymously so you can always clean the cookies and get out of the pit.

There definitely needs to be a "reset" button on these services, or at least a better way for your to actively monitor your algorithmically-determined interests and give feedback (I swear, you watch one SNL video...).

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. It should be a more explicit feature for any sort of recommendation engine.

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The fundamental problem is that these desirable features are likely contrary to google's interests. They have convinced themselves that their recommendation system maximizes engagement, so anything that pulls users away from that is a pottential threat to growth of attention directed toward ads. They will tolerate these power-user style methods as long as they remain statistically unpopular among users. I seriously doubt they would willingly provide a button that negates the fruits of the targeting work at the core of their business model.

You can also click the three dots icon next to the video thumbnail of recommendations and select "Not interested"

Yup, that's what I always do, and unsurprisingly my recommendations are great.

This is useful but it's pretty opaque to the user as to what exactly this does.

It tells the algorithm that you’re “not interested” in videos like that one?

Every few days if you notice the algo giving too many fast-food style videos, it's worth it to aggressively use this to unfollow all these topics. Miraculously, the next time you refresh your feed, all those old interesting topics you used to be into will come back.

Overall the algo is very very recency-influenced. You can watch videos from a niche interest for a year straight, but if you then spend a week watching nascar, you'll never see anything but nascar videos for months unless you say "not interested".

I imagine they have found that for the average user, having a longer history doesn't improve G's metrics.

I wish the algo would instead notice that I always watch every video from particular channels that only publish rarely. I also publish my own videos, and after a long gap without publishing my new videos get no views unless I pay for ads or promote them outside of YT, and even my family members who are only subscribed to my channel don't get my videos recommended.

> 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-...

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.

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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