Every time I'm about to click on a youtube link / watch an embedded video I ask myself if it's worth influencing my future recommendations - which are not great, but not too far off either. If the content is outside my core interests or music tastes I opt to watch in incognito mode.
I once made the mistake to play Peppa the Pig for my daughter while signed in, and my recommendations became a mess for weeks.
I do this all the time. Often, I click on "smart" videos, which I have no intention of watching just in the hope I get better quality content in my "feed". But it's hard to find high quality content, yet it's easy to find mindless dribble.
+1 to this. I watched a few Super Smash Bros Ultimate compilations at around the time it was released, and got some recommendations. I don't own a Switch so I don't know the game, plus its a novelty, so they caught my curiosity.
I went down a such rabbit-hole of mindless dribble --endless videos of videogame characters punching each other-- I actually tired myself and am no longer considering buying the game/console. It's such mindless consumption.
> Often, I click on "smart" videos, which I have no intention of watching just in the hope I get better quality content in my "feed".
I need to try this.
Now Youtube thinks my biggest interest is how to replace and repair every other thing on that same model of car, other models by the same make, etc.
YouTube's recommendation algorithm is one of the worst I use. I have to actively manage my subscriptions and many people I know mass click "not interested" on videos to try to improve it. Spotify, Amazon, Netflix, and pretty much every other recommendation works like magic by now.
There's something really wrong with it.
Spotify probably has it a bit tougher, but my guess is playlists play a big role as they are curated clustering of similar music (as opposed to just a "folder" to put all videos in a series, like they are on YouTube). Music itself is also probably much easier to analyze than video: extract the BPM and frequencies and you can tell a lot about the composition of type of song it's from. Video on the other hand-- you can do very computationally intensive CV, but that won't tell you much about the mood, meaning, genre, etc. of video something is.
YouTube many times will have to go off a title, a very vague description and a ton of irrelevant comments.
Edit: Actually, they have captions. I'd assume dialogue could give them a lot of relevant information, who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
On the other hand, searching for "GPL v3" actually gets relevant YouTube results, so they are out there and YouTube knows how to find them if you ask the right way.