In Star Trek, the villain Borg often say, "You will be assimilated. If I want to see health-related topics, I'll search specifically for the topic I'm researching.
It's just that I like my feed filled with how to stuff, discussions of the latest Star Trek episodes, workshop tours, tooltips, and everything I can watch about 3D printing and other maker stuff. Now that I've watched one video, I don't want YouTube to send me a constant stream of videos about blood pressure, heart issues, etc. On Windows, all the videos in your Watch History will have an X. None of these videos have "X" icons to the right of the title. While I know about blood pressure in general, I bumped into this TED Talk in my travels and decided to give it a watch. I'm of an age when my doctor tells me I should watch my blood pressure. As you can see, there's a video about blood pressure right at the top. Here's my watch history page in Chrome on macOS.
Oddly enough, the very same feature is not hidden and is reasonably accessible on both Windows and mobile devices. My instructions are for the Chrome browser version of YouTube because this feature is hidden when watching YouTube with your desktop browser (Chrome or Safari) on a Mac. To fix it, click History in the YouTube sidebar. It's actually pretty slick - until your watch history gets corrupted. So the more you control your watch history, the better tuned your YouTube Home screen will be to your interests. The YouTube algorithm uses your watch history to create the recommended videos it shows you on your YouTube Home page. Most people don't realize this, but YouTube gives you very granular control over your watch history. Take charge of your YouTube watch history Over a Zoom screen sharing session, I showed her how to clean up her feed. See also: You're in a Zoom meeting and there's no Share Screen button? Try this.Īfter two days, she called me. She searched for other topics she felt more comfortable with and watched those videos, but the terrible videos kept showing up on her YouTube Home. They were now populated with horrible videos about animals that had been hurt or abused.
When she came back into YouTube the next day, she found the video recommendations on her Home screen had changed. Nancy immediately hit the three dots on the right side of the title, selected Report from the dropdown menu, and then chose the option "Violent or repulsive content." Disturbed and shaken, she decided she was done with YouTube for the night. The video showed deeply disturbing images of animal abuse. While the thumbnail showed cute kittens and the headline promised cute cat and dog clips, that was not what the video actually showed.
Unfortunately, someone with a very cruel streak posted one of those results. But in an effort to help folks remove disturbing videos from their YouTube feeds, we think it's important to tell this story. Trigger Alert: The next few paragraphs may be triggering. As you might expect, she was given a big list of results.
In an effort to cheer herself up, she typed "cute animals" into YouTube's search engine. A day or so earlier, Nancy was having a bad day. My friend had been click-baited in the worst possible way. Why don't you take a deep breath and tell me what's going on." And she did. We're good friends, but our relationship is the sort where we have nice chats once or twice a year, tops. Staaaaahp!!" Were the first two words sobbed out, and the last was a plaintive wail in my ear. I rarely get actual phone calls anymore, so I answered. The screen showed that Nancy, an old friend I've known for decades, was calling.
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