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Comment by synu | Hacker News Reader

How did you get YouTube to stop recommending videos you’ve already seen?

This is gonna sound pretty silly, but: You gotta scroll down!

The top recommendations on YouTube are often extremely "safe" in the sense that you'll feel bad about marking them as "not interested" because you already like the video and the uploader. This is likely a bug in their reward function, but if you skip the safe recommendations you'll start seeing more more intelligent recs such as videos that have the same presentation style as the ones you like except they were uploaded by unknown creators with 1k subs. Over time the algorithm will learn that you only like to rewatch certain kinds of videos (music videos in my case) and that you like to be surprised.

Note that refreshing the page doesn't help. It will keep giving you new equally-safe recs until you scroll at least 1 page down and force it to generate new recs.

>if you skip the safe recommendations you'll start seeing more more intelligent recs such as videos that have the same presentation style as the ones you like except they were uploaded by unknown creators with 1k subs. Over time the algorithm will learn that you only like to rewatch certain kinds of videos (music videos in my case) and that you like to be surprised.

Why oh why can't you just tell youtube that this is what you want, instead of some elaborate algorithm training dance?

Building an easily tunable recommendation algorithm has been on my bucket list for over a decade. I'm not aware of any serious implementations. I'm sure if you look at the issue trackers for any alternative client for YouTube, you'll find people who strive towards the same goal.

Interesting, thanks for the detailed answer. I’m going to give it a shot.

Don't watch them. I hate that YT recommends videos I've already seen but I also click on them more often than not.

I don’t watch them again, but it keeps recommending them.

Maybe frustration with YouTube somehow drives more engagement, so you'll go looking for new content and stay longer -- like how shops rearrange things to expose you to other goods and so increase sales.

Perhaps you need to change human behaviour so that most people don't rewatch things? (Speculation! Personally I prefer fresh content too.)

Maybe YouTube have found that rewatching items drives people to annoyance with the adverts and gets more revenue?

Would love to know the answer to this as well.

I replied to GP.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com