YouTube acknowledges that there is a problem with its algorithm and is testing a button that allows you to make changes to your homepage.
YouTube is aware that its homepage can occasionally be a total mess. If you watch even one video outside of your regular routine, you will be inundated with irrelevant content for weeks and recommendations will spiral out of control. The platform has started testing a feature that lets users manage and personalize their homepage in order to address this.
The news comes from Android Authority, who discovered a new experimental feature called "Your Custom Feed." It's a button that appears in the navigation bar, and when pressed, it launches an automated chatbot. The idea is simple yet effective: instead of fighting the algorithm or clearing your browsing history, you tell it exactly what you want to see, and the system creates a customized, infinite scroll for that specific topic.
What's interesting is the change in the way things work. Until now, the only way to manage suggestions was to manually mark videos as "not interested."
This move is part of a broader influx of content generation technology into the user interface. We recently saw AI arrive on YouTube to improve search results and even generate automated summaries for long videos. The difference here is that this technology is being used to curate content, attempting to mimic the experience of other social media platforms that already use chatbots to filter out unwanted content.
Currently, as is often the case with these new features, the rollout is very limited. Only a small number of accounts have access to the button, and there's no guarantee it will be available to everyone anytime soon.
It remains to be seen whether this layer of artificial intelligence will solve the fundamental problem or make it more complicated.