I've had an ad blocker on my computer from day one on my work computer. From watching exclusively programming conference talks on my work computer their algorithm has seemed to guess I'm a guy so I get recommendations for programming videos, action movies, and things featuring large breasted women. Its pretty annoying for that to constantly show up when I go to the youtube homepage on my work computer when I've only ever watched conference talks.

I worked for a content provider who used to market their search as better than Netflix. Behind the scenes the execs would provide a daily list of what must be the top X results for specific phrases. Sometimes it was make sure some title exists as #1 in any relevant searches.

What I’m trying to say is maybe YouTube’s recommendations are very loosely based off your viewing habits, but they would rather you watch Doug demuro’s highly monetized channel over randomjoeschmoe’s excellent non-ad enabled review of a 10 year old car

The recommender used to work, before they decided it was more important to show you what they want you to watch, as well as not to show you what they don’t want you to watch. Whether you call that “broken” or not is a matter of taste.

Welcome to the world of being stereotyped. The gestalt “you” is not what you respond to; it’s what people like you are.

Stereotypes exist for a reason. But that reason isn’t optimal - it’s just convenient.

>I don't really get it.

You get it perfectly. They'll try to make any connection they can between what you want and what they want to show you, but they'll just throw it in randomly if they can't.