To promote engagement, recommendation algorithms on platforms like YouTube increasingly personalize users’ feeds, limiting users’ exposure to diverse content and depriving them of opportunities to reflect on their interests compared to others’. In this work, we investigate how exchanging recommendations with strangers can help users discover new content and reflect. We tested this idea by developing OtherTube—a browser extension for YouTube that displays strangers’ personalized YouTube recommendations.
OtherTube embedded inside the YouTube homepage. 1 Show or hide the embedded content. 2 Browse different strangers or different recommendation sessions from the current stranger, and pin the current stranger. 3 The stranger’s profile. 4 YouTube recommendations collected from this stranger. 5 Link to a daily survey. 6.The user’s own YouTube recommendations, which OtherTube collects
How OtherTube works. Each day, OtherTube collects YouTube recommendations when users access the YouTube
homepage. Users have until the end of the day to remove items they do not want to share. Users can browse recommendations collected from others as recently as the previous day
homepage. Users have until the end of the day to remove items they do not want to share. Users can browse recommendations collected from others as recently as the previous day