Mozilla wants to study and fix YouTube recommendations. As a result, the Mozilla Foundation has announced a new browser extension called RegretsReporter for Firefox and Chrome. Users often complain about seeing irrelevant recommendations from YouTube.’ Last year, the Google-owned video streaming platform was hit by a weird problem that littered the YouTube homepage with older, irrelevant videos.
Download Mozilla’s RegretReporter extension
In addition to the lack of relevancy, a former YouTube dev Guillaume Chaslot who worked on YouTube’s recommendation algorithm believes YouTube recommendations are toxic. Mozilla now wants to fix this ‘toxicity,’ courtesy of RegretsReporter.
What is RegretsReporter?
The RegretsReporter extension will let you flag ‘regrettable’ recommendations on YouTube. By regrettable Firefox means videos you wish you had never watched. Now how does this happen? Let’s take a look.
Mozilla wants to study how YouTube recommendations work and how flawed they may get at times. After thorough research, Mozilla hopes to fix YouTube’s recommendation algorithm for the greater good.
However, Mozilla can’t possibly decide the relevancy of recommended videos on YouTube on its own. That’s why the company needs your help by having you install the RegretsReporter extension.
According to Mozilla:
“The RegretsReporter extension gives you a way to report YouTube Regrets—videos that YouTube has recommended to you that you end up wishing you had never watched. This extension is part of a crowdsourced data campaign to learn more about what people regret watching, and how it was recommended to them.”
How does Mozilla’s RegretsReporter extension work?
Once you install this extension in Chrome or Firefox, you will find the RegretsReporter icon on a YouTube video page. Clicking on the icon will generate a report form.
The purpose of this form is to understand why and how do you find watching a particular video on YouTube regrettable and how you arrived at that video in the first place.
Addressing privacy concerns
This extension will allow Mozilla to track your usage of YouTube. But apparently, it won’t be able to collect data on videos you watch and search for, Mozilla has confirmed.
“This may give us some insight into how often users are experiencing YouTube Regrets,” Mozilla added.
Mozilla’s RegretsReporter extension is available to download and install in Firefox and Chrome from their respective stores.
