I carefully curate my youtube viewing by using lots of incognito windows to view things I don't want showing up in my recommendations. All it takes is one errant click to throw the whole thing off. Oh why did I not incognito that terrible comedian?

You can remove videos from your watch history: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/95725?co=GENIE.Pla...

I presume this also removes them as a factor in your recommendations.

> I presume this also removes them as a factor in your recommendations.

You presume too much!

/humor

That is helpful to know. I too have run into the errant click problem in YouTube. Drives me nuts.

I've noticed that watching literally part of one video will cause youtube to recommend a lot more of that category of content.

For one recent example, there was an article about Elon Musk and his girlfriend who releases music as Grimes. I clicked play on one of the embedded music videos and watched about half of it. Ever since then youtube has recommended tons of Grimes videos to me.

I've also noticed that videos my wife or kids watch get recommended to me sometimes.

This is probably true.

See "Mozilla project exposes YouTube's recommendation 'bubbles'" https://www.engadget.com/mozilla-youtube-bubble-200045382.ht... (and many others, I'm sure)

Just open an incognito and count the van-life videos. Zero. It's all popular lowest-common denominator videos until you start clicking and teaching Youtube about your preferences.

My work and home gmail accounts get completely different videos because of how I use them. At work it's all background music and albums and at home it's more fun stuff.

yes, but now it is finding much better content especially those from up and coming channels relevant to you