My YT landing page is completely blank and need to go "subscription" tab to see newly uploaded vids from the ones I subscribe to
It's quite nice not having to view all kinds of random stuff YT wants me to see
What's needed is a global "Hide AI Dreck". Particularly the overwhelming hoard of AI slide-shows masquerading as reviews.
Youtube's automatically applied label will be worse than useless unless they've made some remarkable breakthrough, which I doubt. They'd be better off just using creator-applied labels, and of course if they would label anything that Youtube itself contaminated with automatic translations or its ilk, that would be good too.
Well, theoretically you could build a service providing blocklists, and users could subscribe to such blocklists with a browser extension blocking accounts. Basically Sponsorblock or Blocktogether for Twitter, with individual users flagging accounts for slopaganda, content theft, rage / engagement bait and other issues.
Unfortunately, it's way, way too likely that you'll run into some sort of bot detection on Youtube's side and I've seen more than enough horror stories about people getting fucked over and getting their entire Google account perma-banned with no way of recovery.
Since Google does nothing that isn't based on metrics, we can deduce that they have data to show that giving people settings to focus the recommendations on what they want reduces total watch time. We'll only get an AI filter if it turns out that AI slop offends people so much that they disengage with YouTube altogether, which outside of HN and similar bubbles, I don't yet see happening.
Yes, you can. Click the video's 3-dot menu > Don't recommend channel. Though I have noticed that this only blocks them from showing up in the feed, not in the recommendations sidebar. I also have to run uBlock to hide shorts, already-watched videos, subscriber-only stuff...ain't saying the YT experience is good, not by any stretch of the imagination.
You can click a button that makes a strong "suggestion" to the algorithim, which they will honor for as long as they feel like.
I went through this a few years ago when the channel of a large far right "news" broadcaster kept being jammed on my front page, and the best I could do was keep hitting the button and have it it "temporarily" be removed from my front page before it would inevitably show up again months down the line.
Perhaps it is not deliberate, and merely incompetence. Either way resolved on desktop with an addon because if I wanted to gamble, i'd go to a casino.
As a German, I couldn't think of a more appropriate usage of the word "Dreck".
If you think you can't quit youtube, I used to think that way, and then i did it by deleting my account and using libredirect for invidious. my usage went to just a few minutes or 0 per day.
I highly recommend everyone occasionally do this with social media as it was somewhat eyeopening how much better I felt overall. This was mostly due to not being exposed to the doom scrolling you can eventually get pulled into (despite efforts not to).
I did miss feeling like I was "plugged in" to the stream of news/memes etc though.
YMMV but def recommend.
Just stop paying for Pro. I made it less than one day with the ads.
I'm now experimenting with hiding thumbnails too, and honestly I've been liking it a lot. It's a very curious feeling how my eyes can no longer latch on to something visually appealing, and instead try to look for information in channel names.
Stuff like random recorded conference talks with 3 views. A super enthusiast in Latvia.
It does recommend crap sometimes but on balance I like it.
Along with the empty page, it says "Your watch history is off" in bold then says "... change your setting ... to get the latest video tailored to you"
It sounds as if I'm missing out on latest videos which, technically true, but I wonder if that wording is necessary. It could've just said "Update the settings here to get recommendations". But of course for-profit companies need to make profit :)