She’s almost 70, spend all day watching q-anon style of videos (but in Spanish) and every day she’s anguished about something new, last week was asking us to start digging a nuclear shelter because Russia was dropped a nuclear bomb over Ukraine. Before that she was begging us to install reinforced doors because the indigenous population were about to invade the cities and kill everyone with poisonous arrows. I have access to her YouTube account and I’m trying to unsubscribe and report the videos, but the reccomended videos keep feeding her more crazy shit.

  • @djm@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    94
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Sorry to hear about you mom and good on you for trying to steer her away from the crazy.

    You can retrain YT’s recommendations by going through the suggested videos, and clicking the ‘…’ menu on each bad one to show this menu:

    (no slight against Stan, he’s just what popped up)

    click the Don’t recommend channel or Not interested buttons. Do this as many times as you can. You might also want to try subscribing/watching a bunch of wholesome ones that your mum might be interested in (hobbies, crafts, travel, history, etc) to push the recommendations in a direction that will meet her interests.

    Edit: mention subscribing to interesting, good videos, not just watching.

    • BrerChicken
      link
      fedilink
      771 year ago

      You might also want to try watching a bunch of wholesome ones that your mum might be interested (hobbies, crafts, travel, history, etc) in to push the recommendations in a direction that will meet her interests.

      This is a very important part of the solution here. The algorithm adapts to new videos very quickly, so watching some things you know she’s into will definitely change the recommended videos pretty quickly!

      • OP can make sure this continues by logging into youtube on private mode/non chrome web browser/revanced YT app using their login and effectively remotely monitor the algorithm.

        (A non chrome browser that you don’t use is best so that you keep your stuff seperate, otherwise google will assume your device is connected to the account which can be potentially messy in niche cases).