My feed has just turned to mostly clickbait / smut. It's been getting noticeably worse of late. I see conspiracy theory nonsense, doomerism, mindless clickbait and more. It's really turning to garbage.
This part of their product is actually starting to feel like their search product, which I find has become really quite poor. I'd like it if Google recommended something actually interesting and wholesome but whatever algorithm they have working doesn't seem interested in doing this.
Personally, I'm still not really over the fact they don't display the dislikes, it is really becoming impossible to discern good information from bad. That combined with the crap recommendations is a big turn off.
I don't have a YT red subscription or whatever, I'm definitely interested in purchasing if it improves the experience. Has anyone else become a member and seen an improvement?
You can also subscribe to channels via RSS if you don't want any recommendations distracting you.
If you've clicked on something that Youtube has suddenly decided you like they suggest this:
> How YouTube recommends videos
> Your activity on YouTube, such as your watch and search history, influences your recommendations and can help you find information that you’re interested in faster. For example, if you watch a lot of sports videos and search for 'cricket', we might recommend videos with the sport cricket rather than nature videos with crickets in them.
>You’re in control
> You can influence your recommendations by pausing or deleting your watch history and search history in your Activity controls. Learn more about how you can manage your recommendations and search results.
But I've found just telling it "don't recommend this channel" is usually enough to get rid of stuff I don't want.
My first recommendation is if you want to watch potentially weird/out of the usual videos is to right click the video and "Open in new Private Window". It seems that the new request keeps the one-off from becoming part of your watched record. Also, the private window for topical searches. I made the mistake of clicking on a Diablo IV video, and 2 weeks later there are still 10-12 "recommended" videos in my feed.
As a previous commenter mentioned, I have all of my subscriptions in an RSS feeder so only new posts show up in my filtered list (without thumbnails). This allows quick scanning of titles to see if there is anything of interest. Then I can simply directly open the link without going to the YouTube landing page.
Few months ago, I was quite happy when I noticed the "New to you" label at the top, I used it quite a few times. But since a while it got stuck to like another set of 6-8 channels that I have mostly watched already...
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNEL_ID