https://i.imgur.com/XIRW4U2.jpeg
When opening videos that are sent to me by others, I always use a private window, so my main account is pretty low "variance".
When I find a creator I like, I do a "fake binge", by queuing all their recent videos and some old ones too and playing them unattended.
I also try to minimize my use of the recommendation sidebar, since it usually shows content related to the current video rather than the more general recommendations of the home page.
When something foreign sneaks its way to my home page, I immediately click "not interested", paying attention to not hover the thumbnail.
Overall, Youtube has got me trained pretty well, but at least I get some nice recommendations out of it, so much so in fact that over half the recommendations I get are usually videos I have already watched (even if Youtube thinks I haven't yet for whatever reason).
The other day a little modal appeared on the side of youtube.com desktop saying something like, "Curious for new stuff? Explore content that isn't what you usually watch."
It ended up being sorta like an alternate reality. It was all the topics I usually watch, but with different channels I don't normally see at all. In other words, it was as if all the channels I normally watch don't exist, what else would exist to fill the void.
And is that the main page for you? When I open the website or the Android app I get "Home". "Explore" is a separate tab. "Home" is pretty much filled with recommendations from channels I've watched recently, no corporate stuff (excluding ads).
I do see the issue of recommendations being flooded with one topic you've watched recently, but I generally don't have too much of a problem with it. When the recommendations stop being relevant/interesting to me, I tend to shut off YouTube.
Home page is the one that's being promoted to you.
it should know that I don't want to watch the same things every day over and over relentlessly. There's hardly anything (by topic) I want to watch again the next day, except some news and political commentary which I do watch and it NEVER offers me.
The majority of "independent news" have a highly partisan or highly unreliable tilt (both to the Left and to the Right): https://adfontesmedia.com/static-mbc/
Interestingly enough, most people complain about the opposite: that if you watch some piece of slightly tilted piece of content on YouTube, the recommendation goes wholehog and pushes you towards the same radicalization direction, and so you start by watching someone complaining about Feminist Frequency and before you notice you're getting recommended White Nationalist content.
If anything it's probably good that if you're watching "independent news", that the algorithm tries to moderate you with some mainstream content...
I have never, ever watched one, and I always click Not Interested, or Don't Recommend Channel. But they keep on coming. There seems to be an endless supply of them.
We'll see though!
https://support.google.com/google-ads/thread/10007177/using-...
In the end the core problem with the recommendation system is simply that there is only one list of recommendations, which makes it damn near impossible to switch to a different topic unless you start account hopping. The new topic-bar helps a little, but still offers no way to get rid of an unwanted topic completely.
There are numerous channels I am subscribe to that I haven't seen in months or years, just because I didn't watch them for a week or two and they fell out of the recommendation cycle.
But on a useful note, maybe YouTube needs to provide a function to see a list of random videos that are unexplored or new.
Actually, I think they kind of are trying to do this (in a sense), if you read the article:
> Our system then compares your viewing habits with those that are similar to you and uses that information to suggest other content you may want to watch. So if you like tennis videos and our system notices that others who like the same tennis videos as you also enjoy jazz videos, you may be recommended jazz videos, even if you’ve never watched a single one before.
Imagine if I went to church for the first time in a decade and the next day three monks show up at my door with a cassock and vows.
...that's the YouTube algorithm in my experience. I show a passing interest in one thing so it floods me with every drop of content they have on the subject to the exclusion of things that I have watched every week for years.
There are creators I watch every week or every drop. Somehow the algorithm chooses to not surface their videos regularly and surface 46,123 videos on Terraform because I watched a quick tutorial.