Honorable Mention Award CHI 2022
Authors: Md Momen Bhuiyan, Carlos Augusto Bautista Isaza, Tanushree Mitra, Sang Won Lee
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 allows users to (i) create an anonymized profile for social comparison, (ii) share their recommended videos with others, and (iii) browse strangers’ 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.
