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Comment by bonoboTP | Hacker News Reader

> It happens so often on YouTube that I see a video recommended but think to myself "if I click this, am I going to get recommendations for terrible stuff for the next month?

You can remove videos from your watch history. Or you can open the link in a private/incognito window. Google may still be able to connect it but I don't think it will impact your recommendations that way.

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I suggest just turning off watch history/suggestions.

I only use YouTube when I want to watch something specific. If I find something I want to return to, I like it or bookmark it or add it to a playlist.

I feel like the only thing I'm missing is a home page which doesn't tell me I have watch history disabled.

Yes, of course you can, but this sense of always having to curate your watch history and hide from the algorithm is just not there for Nebula. I guess it's different from person to person, but it's remarkable how freeing it feels to me to use a service where that isn't a concern. I'm watching what I want to watch, not what the algorithm is manipulating me to click on.

Maybe it will enshittify like most everything else, but it hasn't so far, and for now I'm a very happy customer.

To me it doesnt feel limiting. I curate it to get good recommendations. I also switch between accounts. One for trash binges, and one for everyday stuff, one for serious technical content etc.

I use "do not recommend this channel" a lot, and click "not interested" a lot. Open the YouTube front page, remove stuff you would prefer not to have there, refresh, repeat, the algo will adapt.

Same hygiene on social media. Add muted phrases, mute people, click "not interested". It improves the experience a lot.

You can also just turn off your watch history completely and use the subscriptions page as your starting point. I did that for a while, but turned it back on when I realized that the algorithm was actually quite good at surfacing content that I learned a lot from -- most of it was stuff that I would never search for on my own (or even know to search for).

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