Honestly I really like Youtube's recommendation algorithm. I'm a car guy and so most of my Youtube consumption is in car culture. I think the key to living with it is not to block it and avoid it at all costs, but rather to understand what the underlying algorithm is doing (broadly speaking).

It's funny that once I became a software developer (frontend specifically), things like dark patterns and other UI features that try to keep users on the app is very interesting to me. I will never put something like that in my own code but it's still interesting to pick up dark patterns out of every day apps we use (Instagrams "slot machine of dopamine" is one that comes to mind)

My experience is completely to the contrary. It's just the same videos over and over again. (Apparently, there are just two new videos published on YT over an average week. I wonder, how they are still thriving.) Discoverability is only by text search. If I watch a video, it gets added to the recommendations (as I ought to re-watch it instantly.) It's even worse with the new interface and the "recently added" section gone. – Apparently, my very own bubble is my own past, exclusively. Completely broken.

I've been experiencing this for years and it's worse to a critical point with the notion of recentness gone.

same here. Complete shit show. The videos I watch a lot of relate to retro-computing and programming retro machines. You'd think that's a pretty broad topic to base recommendations on. Nope. It's the same dozen videos over and over in my recommendation list from the same handful of youtubers. It's pathetic and seemingly getting worse.

I never feel like I am in this group, but maybe it's because I frequently search out opinions, views, and beliefs I may not agree with, and add them to my algorithmic considerations.

So you don't have an account on any website?

No, they just use a VPN, incognito, clear cookies, etc. as they stated.

This isn't an either/or situation.

You can also use a very basic rule in, say, uBlock Origin to hide the sidebar completely: youtube.com###related

Even if you do that, whatever YouTube recommends to you will still be selected by an algorithm.

Yes but recommendations will be limited to what's generally popular at my perceived geolocation instead of personalized to search history.

Exactly. And you prefer that? All I see is generic teen pop culture vlog drivel, nothing interesting to me at all.

I get trying to be private and disclosing as little information to Google as possible. However, I've found YouTube unearths interesting content pretty well if you create an account and let it track your preferences a little bit. Especially don't turn off the viewing history, otherwise you'll get the same recommendations over and over and YouTube is kind of useless.

You realise that the Hacker News front page is an algorithm that predicts what you should want?

Haha! Hacker News is a notoriety contest. Obscure doesn't make it to the front page.

Does it? Is it personal?

Yes, by self-selection of visitors.

I just use a shortcut straight to the subscriptions feed, and curate my own content