I've been loading the Youtube homepage every 15 minutes for the past week (I've been sick). It's the same videos over and over again. If I scrolled past it the first time, I'm still going to scroll past it the 100th time I see it.
I don't know how Youtube's algorithms work internally, but lately the front page is just so broken that it's baffling. The sidebar recommendations are another discussion -- those are possibly more pernicious but at least not as obviously dysfunctional.
How is it possible to have the largest repository of video content in the world, yet Youtube is only able to recommend me the same videos over and over again (half of which I seen already or quickly clicked out of). There is also a simplistic list of recommended categories, which I would change if I could, and those never change either.
If the front page were just completely random, it would be better than it is now. If I could actually tell Youtube to show me videos with a low-to-moderate view count and a high upvote ratio, then that would be fabulous and I probably would encounter new subjects and ideas rather than getting stuck watching the same garbage over and over. I'll never let my future children spend even a second on Youtube, because the stuff that it recommends to kids is so asinine that it just makes me mad.
I really believe that collectively we are all much dumber because of the Youtube's pathetically bad algorithms.
Someone may say, this would bother others, who saw something interesting but didn't click it this time. For me, it would train me to open those in a new tab or save them to my Watch Later list. Or just make it an opt-in feature, this aggressive renewal of the home page.