YouTube is making major changes to how you browse the site. Each change will give you more control over your YouTube recommendations.
According to a new blog post from YouTube, sortable topics and filtering tools are being added to YouTube’s homepage and “up next” recommended categories. Ultimately, these tools should, in theory, give you more control over what you’re recommended on the site. The tools will allow you to click on certain topics you want to be further recommended. So say for instance you want to see more music videos on your homepage; you can filter videos out to show more music videos. The “up next” feature will have this option, too.
It’s not only about finding videos you want to see
While these filters will allow you to see a lot more videos that you actually want to watch, this should also keep videos you don’t want to see away. There will be a new option called “Don’t recommend channel” out soon that will allow you to hide content from specific creators and brands.
Now, you can still search and find these channels and videos. You just won’t see their content recommended to you on the recommended tab or homepage.
YouTube’s also letting you know why you’ve been recommended certain videos
YouTube is also releasing new transparency tools. They will show people why certain YouTube videos and creators are being recommended.
“Sometimes, we recommend videos from channels you haven’t seen before based on what other viewers with similar interests have liked and watched in the past,” Essam El-Dardiry, product manager at YouTube, wrote in the blog post. “Our goal is to explain why these videos surface on your homepage in order to help you find videos from new channels you might like.”
While these changes may not change YouTube’s algorithm right away, the data YouTube collects could mean more changes to the algorithm in the future.
We should see these tools coming sometime soon, possibly some of them coming out at different dates.
Image courtesy YouTube
