Comment by eimrine

I haven't really try cleaning all the history but I have 2 points of why I consider cleaning the history as futile.

1. Youtube obviously grabs some info not only from Youtube but it also grabs all history from Google search and most of all some random words from Gmail, cleaning that all just for the sake of experiment might be not handy.

2. If some video has got deleted it obviously disappears from history. But there is a man I really fond of, his channels are regularly get banned after a month of activity, than the man finds a new channel with new author/interviewer. Somehow I am among the first ones to get recommended about new interviews with the man.

> "I REALLY bet I can get this person interested in Lego videos because they watched one 4 weeks ago and I have a ton of Lego content they've not even touched yet"

I can share another anecdote. Ten years ago there were a music video "Wintergatan - Marble Machine". I used to watched it dozens of times almost every day. Now if I scroll the feed to the end (Yt is not a doomscrolling) I have 90% probability of receiving the Marble Machine in the very last line. I have not touched it even once in the last several years but it knows I used to love it earlier. BTW it doesn't remember what I loved 15 years ago when most of the videos required Adobe Flash.

> The only thing the algorithm is really good for is finding videos it thinks will suck up your time.

Isn't that how a really great teachers teach? Forget about the teacher's interest, the teacher exists until the fellow pupil is interested.

> The curation is ultimately down to how much work you put into it, which isn't all that unique to YouTube.

That's a lie because FB and other rivals have nothing except the engine (no useful content). Just consume it responsively. The only reason to not use yt's algo is when you are so fond of your work that you have the chair glued to your arse and every second spent to someone's wise thoughts means a lost penny. So pity I have typed a lot of text but noone has asked me to share all my hacks to shape the algo towards one's satisfaction.