I disabled watch history, which appears to disable most personalization features, and my suggested videos are mostly sensible. (This disables the "Home" page entirely, but the chronological Subscriptions feed is still fully functional)

i.e. the suggested videos in the sidebar will always be relevant to what I'm currently watching, whatever that is, rather than stuff youtube thinks I might like in general.

I know it's doing something good because youtube keeps nagging me to turn watch history back on again.

For me, it's just constant cable news cycle clutter on my home page. At least with cable TV I could change the channel to Food Network and all I would see was Food Network stuff. With Youtube, even though 90% of what I watch is cooking content and travel shows, every time I launch that app on my TV there's a high chance the recommended carousel on the first screen I see will be full of violence overseas, suffering refugees, crime, etc. Even when my recommended carousel is only full of stuff I actually watch, YouTube will simply insert another row of videos titled [Outrageous News Topic of the Day].

And just like you, I'm sitting down to eat dinner. It makes me, sad? Hard to say what the emotion is. But I feel something when I sit down at the end of a day to watch content I like on a device I own, the only content I ever watch on a platform I subscribe to, and I am forced to see violent, emotionally outrageous, troublesome thumbnails instead because some metric says that for someone statistically "good number go up get performance bonus" if everyone gets that shoved in their face. Oh, you want to relax and watch SortedFood? No - you will feel rage, you will feel sorrow, you will feel stress, YouTube demands it of you. This specific word is hyperbole, but I feel abused by big tech these days.

I've been recommended the deformed baby video a few times recently - it's somewhat reassuring, though worrying, that others are seeing the same thing. I'm especially frustrated about it, as it'll show up inline with search results for otherwise "normal" things (product reviews, music videos, woodworking, etc).

Yeah! Seeing blackhead popping thumbnails for this stuff in my crafting/hacking/cooking feed of videos is absolutely terrifying, especially as someone with mild trypophobia. I cannot believe that these are surfaced for me given the amount of data they have or that they are surfaced for anyone without explicit searches given the content - even if considered medical/educational in nature I wouldn't expect surgery or animal dissection videos to be surfaced likewise.

Nothing this extreme on my end. Mind you, the recommendations have gone completely off rails. I will give them that, it's no longer the same popular stuff everyone sees and I do see content from small time creators who have less than 500 views and whatnot, which is good(I do occasionally find something good in there). The big channels I am subscribed to have really dropped the ball when it comes to quality or outright abandoned youtube altogether.

But on the subject of blocking, I have two things going on: ad blocker, courtesy of Brave and a plugin that removes youtube shorts, which I hate with a passion.

I've never seen these; perhaps you need to scrub your watch history as well as use "never recommend me this again" and reporting content. It's possible that it's counted a mouseover preview as a "watch" on one of those, and now you're doomed to get more of them.

(I note that if you go to youtube .com in incognito and refuse cookies, you get no suggestions at all, not even the default homepage.)

I do wonder what, if anything would happen about reporting this stuff to OFCOM; https://variety.com/2023/tv/global/ofcom-media-bill-streamer... if we're going to have an overly intrusive regulator we might as well use it against things that are genuinely bad.

Doesn't sound familiar, no, but I have my watch history off. So I don't think I get "for you" recommendations.

I just searched for chicken tikka masala on the android app and got nothing but cooking/recipe videos.

So try turning off your watch history? Or at least start it over?

The other suggestion I have is check the videos you "liked" to make sure you didn't accidentally hit "like" on one of these videos. Especially if you don't use the "like" button.

Honestly, no. Lately I regularly get videos with less than 100 views (sometimes as few as 1) usually someone’s homemade music or lately someone driving a car on a track. It’s not the majority of my recommendations at all, but I’d never see stuff like this recommended before a few months ago.

Instagram does this too on the Explore page. Really graphic things like you mentioned. I'm guessing they're tricking the algorithm by being "high engagement" since, for Instagram at least, you have to click the offending post to hit "don't show me this".

I have noticed this too, its not just you. They do it in search results too; I search for airplanes or trains and get mostly relevant results except for a single medical gore video. What the hell. I never watch that kind of shit. I don't even mouse over it.

Not a single popping or gore video in my "Home" page, both logged in and in a private browser window. Is it possible someone else in your home is looking at this stuff? Or like other users have mentioned, perhaps sharing an IP via a VPN or the like?

It's not just you, same exact issue here. YouTube algorithm has gone down the drain in the past few years.

The YouTube recommendation algorithm is terrible. I _wish_ it simply recommended videos that are similar to ones you've watched recently. But it doesn't do that. Not even close.

What it _actually_ does is build a demographic profile of each user based on the videos you watch and tries to lump you into a stereotype and then recommends videos that other people in that stereotype watch. I hope the engineers/managers at Google don't try to fool themselves into believing they are "woke" because this is one of the most un-woke things I can think of.

For instance, if I start watching woodworking and motorcycle repair videos (just two of my MANY hobbies), YouTube decides I am a retired rural conservative christian conspiracy theorist, when in fact I am none of those things. I start getting video recommendations of gun reviews, Fox News clips, religious debates, and suchlike.

Oh yes, and girls in bikinis jumping on trampolines. I mean, I am not exactly against the _concept_ of girls in bikinis jumping on trampolines as such, but it's not something I've ever searched for or even watched videos of. But more importantly, it's not the kind of thing I prefer to have pop up on my phone or computer screen when a friend or family member is nearby.

No, not at all, I actually really like the tab because it's basically only stuff relevant to my watching habits.

They have added a button "propose me something different" which will add new topics for you to discover, maybe you accidentally clicked it.

I sometimes use YouTube in a "no cookies" Firefox profile, and holy cow the vitriol and hate that is on the front page is staggering. Shocked that blue chip advertisers are willing to put their content on that stuff to be frank.

What do you mean by lose data?

On mobile you can click the dot menu and choose "Don't recommend channel." I have clearly done this sufficiently to not have any of the issues the other commenters are having.

I've taken to removing videos that are obvious clickbait based on the title using uBlock Origin. Turns out that some words like 'but' pretty much only shows up in clickbait.

That isn't possible on Android and most likely iOS if you actually have the permission off.

Heh, I was playing with modifying YT content using AI a year ago, but for sponsored content: https://butter.sonnet.io

The project is not 100% serious, but I'm starting to think that within the next 1-2 years we'll get tools for purely offline/on-device AI based content moderation. It's sad.

Blocktube let's you blacklist channels and videos like that, the buttons for it are placed in the "..." menu beside each video.

Even better, don't watch LTT? It's the "Big Bang Theory" of tech content and they shovel 3 or 4 ads in there just for fun.

I can't believe I'm going to defend YouTube here, but I don't agree with this.

YouTube Red/ads, and sponsored content in the creator's videos are totally separate things, and should stay separate things.

I'm not a creator myself but I've done some research on the idea and there are basically three ways to make anything like decent money with a YouTube channel, in increasing likelihood of success:

1) Get stunningly popular over a short period of time, a.k.a. Go Viral. This is almost entirely down to luck, so is not a strategy for normal people having a serious go at it.

2) Accept (and generally beg for) donations from subscribers via Patreon or similar. Optionally, lock up some percentage of your videos behind a subscription via Patreon or similar. This only works well if you can generate a significant following that will not also abandon you the instant you decide to start monetizing things.

3) Product placements and sponsored content. Typically this means accepting a significant chunk of change in exchange for a 3-4 minute ad for a VPN or some crap smack-dab in the middle of your video.

Notice that nowhere in this list is "rake in the cash from YouTube ads" because there is no such thing. Yes, YouTube pays creators _something_ for ads, but unless you are the top video creator in your broad field (e.g. LTT -> computers), you are never going to be able to live off it. (And we'll put aside the difficulties that content creators regularly encounter with monetizing their videos through YouTube ads, due to bogus copyright claims, and false positives from the AI thinking it heard something politically incorrect. And to be clear, YouTube will still show ads in demonetized videos, it just keeps the ad revenue to itself in those cases.)

So if you are paying for YouTube Red, you are REALLY only paying YouTube, not content creators. This is why most semi-serious content creators go with either the donation or sponsorship model.

You may wish to know about Sponsorblock, a browser extension that clips out sponsored segments. It only works if at least a few people have marked the sponsored sections before you watched the video. It works a lot better than it has any right to.

YouTubers can and should put whatever they want in their videos.

There are alternatives but none that are generally popular.