Comment by chias
7 years ago
Quoting astrocat from the previous thread:
PSA: Watch in an private/incognito tab/window. If you are currently logged into your google account, this WILL pollute your watched history: https://www.youtube.com/feed/history
7 years ago
Quoting astrocat from the previous thread:
PSA: Watch in an private/incognito tab/window. If you are currently logged into your google account, this WILL pollute your watched history: https://www.youtube.com/feed/history
Turns out, even before you click on "OK" to start watching, it's doing it in the background - my watch history is now full of hours of this junk :(
You can click X on them and quickly remove them. If there's truly way too many (you left it open for hours), you can go to your Google's Activity page, filter youtube and delete everything from today with a button.
https://www.youtube.com/feed/history
Good idea to do a full reset periodically anyways to reset your recommendations.
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Clicking X on them automatically adds your name and reference to the video into a bucket labelled "investigate further" :-)
Also consider using Firefox and enabling `privacy.firstparty.isolate`, which will separate the cookies for third-party embeds from their own domain, thereby preventing this (as the embed doesn’t see you as logged-in).
Or, just pause viewing history; YouTube has a control for that.
Will that pause recommendations and everything else with the already weak algo?
they probably log a 'shadow view' but recommendations seem to be directly based on your watch history since your recommendations are lost when you completely clear it.
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The recommendations will mostly be derived from the videos you have saved in playlists. And the front page will always shows Youtube Mixes about the last song you were listening to, at the time of turning off the watch history.
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Why would someone who is concerned about their watch history have watch history enabled at all?
Some like me actually appreciate the youtube recomendations based on the previously watched content, but need to be extra careful when watching some kind of content that is likely to be weighted a lot by "power users". Example, I do not follow videogames, but I do enjoy watching speedruns of old games ocassionally, so I need to watch it on incognito mode so I won't have my recommendations flooded with videogame videos.
Ever seen Summoning Salt’s documentary videos? https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCtUbO6rBht0daVIOGML3c8w
Firefox containers are also a great way to manage the yt recommend list. (Just choose a different container and open the link in that)
Essentially with all that data, YouTube still hold a bad recommendation engine.
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I always watch youtube from a privacy window so most suggestions are related to what I'm searching at the time.
Because a lot of people care of recommendations? If you watch news on yt then maybe recommendations are garbage but if you watch videos related to some niche activity or music then recommendations are a godsend.
Because they want useful recommendations and astronaut is feeding Google bad data?
Oh, you think you can actually disable it? its just an UI setting, Google keeps tracking you anyway. Go ahead and try it, disabling does nothing to the recommendations.
Others are suggesting practical reasons for having watch history enabled, but I would think that the vast majority have it enabled simply because that is the default.
In the same way that most people have a nose because they're born with it. It also happens to be useful.
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history augments memory when searching for specific things one remembers. having it polluted by random videos embedded on third party might not be great. history also drives recommendations, so again having random video views will ruin coherence of the home page suggestions
I wish you hadn't told me that. I thought I saw something suspicious when I resumed switching and yep, that's a bunch of topless elementary schoolers at a pool party. I suppose it doesn't technically violate YouTube's policies but jesus I did not want to see that.
Why not? Pedophilia is not a communicable disease.
Interesting, it didn't add anything to my watch history on Safari; is this a browser thing?