Dreaming of a recommendation-free life

December 10, 2017 7:40 AM

I'm really tired of my screen being dominated by "If you like this..." recommendation algorithms, like the right side of the screen on youtube. Is there any way I can live with less of this? I'm dreaming of the recommendation algorithm equivalent of an ad blocker.
posted by umbú to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Best answer: It sounds like you want your entire internet experience to be like this? I don't know how to do that, but for YouTube you can use the Clean.r YouTube extension, which takes away everything but the vid you're watching. (There are similar extensions for Facebook & IMDB which clean up the screen a lot, separate from AdBlocker-type stuff.)
posted by BlahLaLa at 8:25 AM on December 10, 2017 [1 favorite]

Best answer: You can hide them and not see them anymore. uBlock Origin makes this fairly easy and I suppose most other cosmetic blockers do so too.

You can't actually prevent them from doing their thing, unless the companies involved allow you to opt-out and actually follow through on their promise (lol, good luck with that!).
You can probably foil some of their profiling by adopting some combination of privacy measures for questionable results but ultimately you're at their mercy. Even if you're relatively successful in fooling their algorithms, they'll just feed you "wrong" recommendations.
posted by Bangaioh at 8:27 AM on December 10, 2017 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Ad blockers can do this. A blocker like uBlock Origin lets you activate various lists of blocking rules, and the defaults block some annoyances of those sorts. Taboola and Outbrain (recommendations of "related" articles that are anything but) are gone from my life thanks to this.

The existing rulesets won't block everything you are trying to eliminate, but you can create your own rules. uBlock Origin lets you right click on any element in the page to create a new blocking rule for it. You will likely need to understand a bit about CSS selectors to really customize the rules to be exactly what you want, though.
posted by whatnotever at 8:28 AM on December 10, 2017 [3 favorites]

For youtube it's super easy to switch to theater mode (the little rectangle by 'full screen') which expands the video to the full width of the page, and moves everything else (like recommendations) to the bottom, mostly out of sight.
posted by sexyrobot at 10:25 AM on December 10, 2017

Best answer: This exists. I used to use one but then I missed seeing related videos to the one I'm watching showing up there. I would just see a blank white space there on the right side of every video. I wish I could remember how I did it, but it looks like Chrome has extensions that do it. That's probably what I used. Have you tried the extensions?
posted by AppleTurnover at 11:55 AM on December 10, 2017