228
YouTube will start using your view history to guess if you're an adult
(www.androidauthority.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
228 points (97.9% liked)
Technology
73503 readers
3178 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.