Google deserves accolades for making YouTube one of its most successful purchases, but on the flip side, it’s also the video streaming service that keeps getting affected by several issues. The Mountain View tech giant is usually quick to fix them, but when it comes to something deeper and more complicated than usual bugs, the company can take months, or worse, even years, to fix it.
YouTube is currently plagued with many of those serious issues, including the challenge of gaining users’ trust. While resolving the trust issue may take a huge amount of effort, the company has instead decided to focus on something far less complicated: the ‘broken’ home feed, as many would call it.
Google has a new feature to improve your home feed recommendations
If you go by Google’s official wording, YouTube’s algorithm predicts which videos users are most likely to watch and recommends videos accordingly on the home feed. Your watch history, search history, and other Google/YouTube activities can influence the YouTube recommendations that you get on your home feed.
Credit:Â Lucas Gouveia/Android Police
However, YouTube doesn’t always behave this way, certainly not for everyone. YouTube users on Reddit have been complaining about the ‘broken’ home feed for several years, highlighting issues like YouTube recommending the same video again and again, showing videos that don’t interest them. Google hasn’t officially acknowledged the issue, let alone explained what might be the cause.
While the issues appear to be something related to the YouTube algorithm, Google is taking a different route to fix them. Instead of improving the algorithm so that it can make better predictions on its own, Google wants users to get involved in the process and explicitly tell YouTube what they want to change on their home feed.
Google has named the feature “Your Custom Feed,” and it should appear on the Home page as a chip besides “Home” for some users, according to Google. Not every YouTube user can see it now, but for those who do, you can click the “Your Custom Feed” option and enter a prompt, describing what change you want to see on your home feed. YouTube will update your home feed based on what you expressed in the prompt.
This should be a better option than dealing with those watched videos individually by using the “Not interested” or “Don’t recommend channel” option, because the prompt will impact the entire home page. It’ll be interesting to see how often we need to reach this new option for help when it becomes available for everyone.
If we find ourselves using the feature frequently, it may be a clear indication that Google either can’t fix its YouTube algorithm to become more self-reliant or doesn’t want to.
