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Comment by glimshe | Hacker News Reader

YouTube is as good as you make it. If you watch a lot of a type of content, it does a great job at finding similar content, including relevant things that you didn't know existed. If you just watch random popular stuff, then yeah, it's pretty trashy.

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Unfortunately, it'll pick up recommendations from watching one thing one time, so watching that one video your weird uncle sent you is enough to pollute your algorithm with his weirdo shit.

> Unfortunately, it'll pick up recommendations from watching one thing one time, so watching that one video your weird uncle sent you is enough to pollute your algorithm with his weirdo shit.

* Copy URL

* Open new private window

* Paste URL: trim pp and/or si parameters, which are a form of tracking

You can mark a video as not to influence your recommendations or delete it from your YouTube history.

Yes but you have to go and do that. GP was making it sound like GGP was watching crazy uncle videos to make the algorithm do that, when in reality, one errant click will pollute your suggestions unless you know to go and delete it.

New prank on someone that left their laptop unlocked. Open YouTube to something they hate and then close it before they get back.

You do need to take care in pruning videos you don't normally watch. Either remove from watch history, mark as not interested, or just thumbs downing the video.

But at least you still have that ability compared to most platforms.

Isn't the thumbs down only from a third party extension? Does YouTube recommendations pay attention to it?

You can still thumbs down a video. You don't get any feedback nor metrics from it, but you can still do it.

I haven't paid close attention to the effects, because I don't thumbs down too many videos. But it did feel like I generally don't get that channel as much after thumbing down a video from my recommended feed.

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