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YouTube will start using your view history to guess if you're an adult
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this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
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There are problems with this. Firstly, people might let their kids watch videos on their "adult" accounts. YouTube's detection would have to be incredibly fine-grained and be able to flip-flop depending on what's being watched.
The second one is a "damned either way" kind of deal: Consider the deletion of watch history; Should it forget you're an adult if you do that? If yes, then you have to go through a different process or watch a load of videos that are not blocked but still sufficiently adult to get your account reidentified. If not, they're storing metadata that you implicitly requested the deletion of.
I have reason to believe that they do keep such metadata and that they may have been taking steps to hide that fact. A permanent "user is an adult" flag would blow that wide open. As such, I reckon this will be the first, "forget" option. And users will have to suck it until the algorithm works out the user is an adult again (or else never delete their watch history; something that would suit YouTube's advertising algorithm just fine).
I know for a fact that the algorithm retains data about your viewing preferences even after deleting watch history. After deleting mine it would still occasionally recommend something I've seen before and can pretty easily corral me back into whatever direction I had previously gone in. After having done this many times the videos became more random, so I think it keeps a few data points to "jump start" your viewing experience but they gradually change. If you reset your history and view as many random new videos as you can, rinse and repeat, they eventually use those those as starting points.
interestingly, when i delete the my history, after watching one video yt repopulates the recommendations almost exactly as it were a few minutes ago. it isn't even trying
if you're not logged in, which i dont, it will try to reccomend controversial videos to you.
Heh. That's also my "reason to believe", but I was trying to get an unruly comment under control and trimmed that part.
Namely, I once took an account right back to no watch history and no likes - either that was a feature at some point or I did it manually - and still got suspiciously familiar suggestions.