YouTube Recommends New Features On What Users Are Watching

In a blog post published on Wednesday, YouTube made an announcement of new developments: New features come after several media reports about the role of YouTube in putting users on a way to online radicalization.

The updated features are going to start shipping instantly as well as announce filtering abilities to not only the Up Next section but also the homepage. Also, these features will allow users to toggle between their favorite topics, like music genre, evening talk shows, and baking videos. Their pre-existing personalized recommendations will decide what users are going to see.

The aim is to select and organize users’ own information more easily, which is in opposition to totally depending on automatic algorithms. Depending on users’ selections, the basis for YouTube’s suggestions will be the videos of the current channels, the clips related to what users are watching and also other areas that may be of their interest. At present, there exists a unique stream of clips in YouTube’s Up Next section.

Especially, users can also allow YouTube to make recommendations of channels at will, by selecting “Don’t recommend channel” in the video’s three-dot menu.

Moreover, users will know the reasons why YouTube recommended a video to them. Depending on your preferences, the algorithm in YouTube will occasionally surface videos and channels that you hadn’t watched before. Afterward, information related to the suggestions will soon show up in a small box located underneath the current video. Then, for instance, it showed you some videos that were watched by other viewers of the channel you were watching. Whereas, most of the time in the past, users were only guessing.

Here is the newest step in the quest of YouTube which will help to tackle the considerable amount of misleading and radicalized content on YouTube. A lot of news organizations have said that YouTube suggestions’ role in making internet users go down the rabbit holes can result in perpetuating conspiracy theories and radicalization. However, thanks to the new features, users can understand what rather complex content put them on a way to worse situations.

The schedule for the official introduction varies. If you are using the YouTube app on iOS and Android, the feature of removing channels is already available. Besides, the ability to search for related content on Up Next function or on the YouTube homepage will be ready for users who have signed in on the Android app version. The feature will soon be released on PC, iOS as well as other languages.

Eventually, the feature of seeing the reasons why a recommendation is made is already available on the iOS app version today, and it will soon appear on PC and Android.