YouTube will now let you block recommendations from specific channels

Most people who regularly use YouTube would probably admit that the site’s recommendation engine is a little wonky. For every time it shows you something you might genuinely want to see, it brings you something random at best and reprehensible at worst.

While it might take years for YouTube to fix all of its problems, it’s making one change to hopefully make the site better for its users. YouTube outlined a handful of new features that are coming soon to its website and mobile apps on the YouTube blog on Wednesday, including the ability to never see recommendations from specific channels.

That’s only one of the recommendation changes YouTube showed off in the blog post, but it might be the biggest one. Everyone has that one channel they absolutely hate seeing in the “Up Next” column next to videos they watch. Now, they can easily do something about that.

It will give some of us peace of mind knowing we never have to see certain accounts again.

Aside from that, YouTube is sprucing up the homepage and Up Next interfaces with some other features to curate recommendations. Scroll below a video on the mobile app, for instance, and you’ll see recommendations broken out into different topics.

If you want to only see recommendations about baking, YouTube will only show you recommendations about baking, at least according to the example given in the blog post. You can also filter it to only see videos from the channel you were just watching.

Lastly, YouTube will offer a little bit of clarification for video recommendations sometimes. If a video was recommended to you based on the viewing actions of other users with similar interests, YouTube will tell you in a small text box. 

None of these features will fix the central problems with YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, nor are they really meant to. Earlier this month, a fascinating report from The New York Times shed light on how YouTube’s algorithms enabled pedophiles, as an example of how the system can easily go wrong.

Again, it will be a long time before YouTube’s problems go away. But simply letting us rid our homepages of the site’s worst channels is better than nothing, for now.