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Comment by x187463 | Hacker News Reader

I obviously don't know your personal experience, but your description is still how YouTube works for me. For example, over the holidays I would occasionally put on a video from a channel that plays holiday music with various videos of this guy's model train setup in the background. I immediately started receiving model train videos, which, of course, I had to click on and now I know a little bit about trains and building realistic environment models.

That being said, occasionally I do have to go into my Google data and clear/clean the watch history to reorient my recommendations.

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I don't think thats the case. Don't confuse homepage recommendations with end of video queue recommendations. It used to be end of video recommendations were heavily weighted on the current video or chain of videos you just watched. Essentially you could keep going to the next video and go down a weird hole of obscure videos. Now the algorithm will quickly circle you back to your profile homepage of videos as opposed to the video you just watched.

Oh, I see. I suppose I do recognize more of the 'general recommendations' in the post-video grid rather than basing those solely on the video itself. That being said, I don't use that mechanism generally and tend to rely on the homepage-refresh and side bar to discover additional videos.

Thats exactly it. My best example of why I dislike it is you may be watching videos of live salsa music, the next two videos will be salsa and then all of a sudden the third video to play will be The Wiggles (an aussie kids singing group). I have a kid, we definitely will dance to The Wiggles but if we are watching Salsa I don't want to be recommended it.

Same, and now I've spent the last two weeks trying to convince YouTube that I don't need several different videos of Christmas music playing over a fireplace.

Feels a whole lot like the dumb emails I get from places like Home Depot, where because I bought a table saw they feel I should know about all these other table saws they have.

Agreed. This is still how YouTube still works for me. It's great.

> That being said, occasionally I do have to go into my Google data and clear/clean the watch history to reorient my recommendations.

Can you elaborate on this? What effect does this produce for your specifically?

If I find I am receiving recommendations in which I am uninterested and are clearly based on a handful of videos I watched previously, I can clear those from the history and the algorithm doesn't use them for future recommendations. The simplest example would be watching videos for a one-time use case such as repairing a specific home issue. I definitely don't need more recommendations to fix that/related issues, but YouTube is likely to spend a little time sending them my way. I can fix that quickly by removing the original videos from my history.

personally I just open up these videos in private mode

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