YouTube recommendations is one of those filter bubbles which I've learned to use heavily to my advantage.

I consume a lot of video content and I've learned to curate my watch history (what to watch/search for in incognito versus watch logged in; what to delete from my history etc) so that my youtube homepage actually consistently has a lot of high quality discovery.

One thing I systematically do is avoid videos that are anywhere between 10m00s and 10m20s in length: those are almost always videos that have been arbitrarily lengthened to meet some ad length milestones. I've even seen videos slowed down by some percentage just to fucking get to 10 mins.

Also apparently youtube's changing the milestone to 8 minutes soon, so I'm going to watch out for those too…