Is there a way to 'reset' the interests profile on the platforms and start from scratch?
Google too has My Activity https://myactivity.google.com/ where you can manage your… activity on Google properties e.g. you can disable search history.
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FWIW I have Google history turned off, though I use DuckDuckGo 99% of the time.
Also I’ve reset my Facebook preferences once a couple of years ago. It was a very long process as there was no one button to clear them all… Anyway, I was hoping it would reset my Facebook experience entirely, but I wouldn’t say it did. I revisited the section some time later and found Facebook had built another list. A lot of seemingly random topics, but I suspect they’re weighted. I’m no longer logged in in any of my browsers, only the Facebook mobile app. Also I occasionally report ads for random reasons.
* uBlock Origin I found to be better than Adblock
* The TV ads can be avoided too, by not owning a TV :D (or at least not a cable subscription)
I think all recommendations based on "personal interests" is evil because there are ultimately good things like Mathematics and ultimately bad ones like gossips. But if you will watch strictly 50% of Math content and 50% of gossip content, the recommendations usually offers kind of 90% of gossip and 10% of Math because gossip is way more popular among others and recommendation algorithms considers Math content as kind of boring. What makes the situation even worse that gossip content is way easier to consume for our brains. So we the people use to consume less content like Math if some high-quality gossip content is offered everywhere and maybe the only way to break this habit is to spend time on resources with totally no gossip content.
If I notice one of my friends or subscriptions getting noisy with stuff that doesn't align with my desire to actually know more and enjoy life... that feed gets muted or dropped.
Curation is the key to all of this.
There are 10 posts per week on Fb
I agree its more difficult on other platforms (FB etc.) as they require that you interact with the content. A similar idea that I haven't tried personally, might be to use a headless browser to navigate around and "doomscroll" posts relating to your area of interest.
Two examples though:
1. With YouTube I tell them for certain recommendations not to recommend me those videos or channels. Additionally I clear out any video from my history that’s not something I want to see more of (usually if I mis-clicked on a video of a political or social nature, but sometimes one-off lookups I initiated). YouTube treats a video removed from your history as one you never watched in your life and removes all instances of it from your history. You don’t need to be thorough about it either, removing some of a particular genre will generally shift its rating down enough that going forward it gradually disappears from your recommendations. This happens even if you don’t clear videos out, but just stop watching old types of videos and start watching new ones.
2. Create a new account. I do this once a year with Reddit. Gives me time to reconsider what it’s still good for and at this point that is very little, so that tradition may not be long for this world.
Then search for and surf to topics of interest to seed the algorithms with new interests. No need to actually consume the content, just create hits on pages about what you consider relevant.
The algorithms will start to hear the new you.
Make sure your device ad identifiers are disabled, or clear them periodically.
Or, you know, look into individual platforms data and privacy options. Google, for instance, allows you access to some settings via https://myaccount.google.com/data-and-privacy; presumably particularly in a post-GDPR world, most of the big platforms have something similar.
All depends how thorough you want to be. Reset a few advertising models, or basically join witsec.
I went cold turkey on both Reddit and Quora and have zero plans to ever return to either. I proceeded to delete all posts I'd made in the last 10-20 years. Best decision ever! I could trivially recreate the content on different platforms if I ever really wanted to and it would be better the 2nd time.
I saw how these platforms treated me as akin to being bullied, having the bully demand I apologize for being beat up and then making money on my good will and contributions on top of that.
The obvious answer is to delete it all to deny them any benefit from the content and to stop the beatings and bullying. Life is too short for anything else.