'Channels' Solved My Biggest Problem With My YouTube Recommendations

YouTube is a melting pot for everything from music videos and movie trailers to wilderness survival tutorials and funny animal clips. You could quite literally spend all day, every day plugged into the app and never run out of things to watch, or rabbit holes to go down. That's great, but it's also something of a problem—many of us use YouTube in different ways and for different purposes at different times, and that can make organizing and finding new content tricky. Just because you've spent four hours trying to troubleshoot a car engine problem doesn't mean you necessarily ever want to see a vehicle maintenance video ever again. For me, the issue is my love of lo-fi and classical music mixes—vocal-free videos that last for hours, which I put on in the background while I'm working. I watch a lot of them, but I only watch them when I need them. Yet because there are so many in my watch history, whenever I want to actively watch other kinds of things, I'm met with only a screen full of similar chill-out videos for study and meditation. Maybe you don't want all your viewing to count towards all your recommendations. Credit: Lifehacker YouTube Channels lets you keep certain videos out of your recommendation feed There are a few ways to solve for this problem, including using YouTube's built-in incognito mode—but it's only available in the mobile apps, not on the desktop site. Alternatively, I could get my mixes through YouTube Music, but they're harder to find …