OtherTube: Facilitating Content Discovery and Reflection by Exchanging YouTube Recommendations with Strangers

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 refect on their interests compared to others’. In this work, we investigate how exchanging recommendations with strangers can help users discover new content and refect.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 profle for social comparison, (ii) share their recommended videos with others, and (iii) browse strangers’ YouTube recommendations.We conducted a 10-day-long user study (n = 41) followed by a post-study interview (n = 11). Our results reveal that users discovered and developed new interests from seeing OtherTube recommendations. We identifed user and content characteristics that afect interaction and engagement with exchanged recommendations; for example, younger users interacted more with OtherTube, while the perceived irrelevance of some content discouraged users from watching certain videos. Users refected on their interests as well as others’, recognizing similarities and diferences. Our work shows promise for designs leveraging the exchange of personalized recommendations with strangers.