YouTube’s custom feed could finally fix your algorithm

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YouTube has apparently realized that its home feed sometimes feels less like a personalized video buffet and more like a chaotic yard sale, so it’s experimenting with a new feature called “Your Custom Feed.” 

The idea is simple: instead of letting the algorithm wildly guess your personality based on one late-night click, you get to tell it, directly, what you actually want.

For years, YouTube’s recommendation system has had a habit of taking mild curiosity and turning it into a lifestyle. 

Watch two Disney clips? Congratulations, you’re now trapped in an endless scroll of princess trivia, park vlogs, and 4K castle walkthroughs. 

The platform knows this is annoying, and “Your Custom Feed” is its attempt to apologize without actually saying sorry.

In the current experiment, some users will see a new button sitting next to the regular Home tab. Click it, and YouTube lets you type in prompts describing what you want more of. 

Cooking tutorials? Retro gaming? Videos of people restoring rusty tools in satisfying silence? Just type it in, and the feed adjusts itself around your requests.

Instead of passively doomscrolling and occasionally smashing the “Not interested” button like a digital whack-a-mole, this feature puts a little more control back in your hands. 

You’re no longer just reacting to what the algorithm throws at you. You’re steering it, gently, like a frustrated parent guiding a shopping cart with one broken wheel.

It’s unclear how many users will get access to this test or how long it will last, but the idea itself feels like a big shift. 

Rather than assuming it knows you better than you know yourself, YouTube is, for once, asking.

And of course, YouTube isn’t the only tech platform trying to give people a bit more algorithmic control. 

Threads has reportedly been testing its own way for users to fine-tune what they see. 

X, never one to be left out of a tech trend, is also working on a system where you can tag its AI chatbot, Grok, to influence your feed.

Whether “Your Custom Feed” becomes a permanent feature or quietly disappears like so many Google experiments remains to be seen. 

But for now, there’s hope that your homepage might finally stop acting like you’re a hardcore Disney adult just because you clicked one Goofy compilation at 1 AM 

Your recommendations might finally reflect you, not your sleep-deprived curiosity.