A better way to watch YouTube

I don't really get the point of disabling Youtube history just to never visit the main page again anyway. That said, recommendation algorithm is actually a valuable asset and it doesn't seem wise to discard it entirely instead of learning how to use it.

Imagine for a second, that you only care about watching cat videos, and arrange your viewing behavior accordingly. The algorithm will be quick to realize your preferences, and your entire home feed will be filled with nothing but kittens. Occasionally it will try to feed you some dogs and such, but Youtube is generous enough to provide "Not interested" and "Don't recommend channel" buttons on every video in recommendations, which are a great tool in shaping the home feed, or forming a nice little information bubble if you will. As for all the horrors of mainstream recommendations described in the article, they would look so out of place in your feed it won't take much mental effort to ignore them (or get rid of with aforementioned buttons).

Occasionally, you might want to watch something other than cat videos, or get sent a link in a personal message. For everything you don't want the algorithm to get the wrong idea about, use separate browser context or private mode.

Now, let's say you're got diverse tastes and like both cats and heavy construction videos. With two topics the Youtube algorithm might still manage to stay on track, but if you try to add more, the feed will quickly degrade to a mess. There is, however, a way around it: don't mix different topics in a single Youtube account. Youtube allows making multiple users on a single Google account, and with container tabs it doesn't even require switching between them.

Of course, and this is one part of the article I can agree with, use the subscribe feed if it fits your workflow, but certain kinds of content are made mostly by small channels on irregular basis, and the algorithm is a valuable tool to discover new ones.