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The YouTube situation is weird. YouTube is competent platform, and has some good content on it.

Meanwhile when I watch YouTube I get a stream of: "5G blocking beanies", highly questionable medical products, gross out ads about poo and etc ...

It really degrades my view of YouTube / Google.

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Do you have watch history off? I have never experienced anything like this, but I pay for Premium.

Yes, I have watch history turned off. I suspect that gets me a different selection of ads.

Maybe it's a dark pattern to punish you for turning off personalization.

It seems plausible that if they can’t tie it to the user they have a batch of “garbage ads” that just run, cheap stuff that the worst kind of folks pay for.

They do select cheap ads if they don't have any personalization data. Companies who pay for targeted ads don't want to pay for impressions on users that don't meet their criteria.

The poo ads will continue until I comply I guess.

Advertisers are generally driving this. They don't want to pay any money for someone they can't target.

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