Mozilla’s New Browser Extension Might Force YouTube to Improve Its Recommendation Engine

If you have ever watched a video that was recommended to you by YouTube, you would probably know just how terrible the video streaming platform’s recommendation engine truly is. In spite of the fact that this recommendation engine is supposed to give you videos that you are supposed to enjoy based on, it only seems to have a surface level understanding of how things like this usually tend to work, often using keywords and other inaccurate methods of understanding individual behavior and running with it.

Not only that but the recommendation engine is often considered quite harmful because of the fact that it tends to facilitate the spread of misinformation since if you have already seen a video that is considered misinformation it will start to recommend videos based on that which is yet another example of how contextually unintelligent this algorithm tends to be.

The people over at Mozilla are trying to make it so that they can compile data about how bad the search engine is, and as a result of the fact that this is the case the company is going to add an extension to their Firefox browser. This is part of their YouTube Regrets campaign, and the extension will basically allow users to report videos that were recommended to them if they are not of a high quality, don’t reflect their actual viewing preferences or if they happen to contain any kind of false or misleading information.

Mozilla’s hopes are that this would put pressure on YouTube to start fixing its broken system. YouTube needs to take responsibility for its algorithm because of the fact that it’s not just giving users a bad experience, it is causing actual harm as well and this is something that is simply unacceptable given the circumstances of the world we are living in today.



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