Incognito won't help unfortunately. I've tried this on a few occasions and it still pollutes my suggestions. I've noticed that using Brave seems to blunt it -- I have to watch alot more to notice the pollution.

Can't say more than that, I stopped experimenting and basically stopped using Youtube except for the same music I listen to over and over now. Nothing new.

Wait are you sure opening in an incognito window does work? How would it not?

What kind of person uses Brave? What are you hiding?

/s (for now)

Tor Browser is a good option to avoid generating "inappropriate" suggestions - decouples tracking from both your login cookies (permanent incognito mode) and also from your IP address.

Even better, restarting the browser clears the cookies & other stored data, making tracking across session highly unlikely.

YouTube videos take fractionally longer to load, but it's manageable.

I stay logged out of YT, and clear my cookies every so often when I start getting too many of the same kinds of recommendations. They do match based on IP, since that's all they really have from me. When I delete cookies, though, things start over, basically. Then I get recommendations based on what I've searched for in YT and what I've watched since I last deleted them. It's nice, really. For a little while, YT doesn't know enough about me not to show me both sides of an issue I'm searching for. It's really touchy, though. Two or three videos covering one particular side of an issue in a row and the other recommendations disappear.

Of course, I can't subscribe, like, ring the damn bell, or whatever it is they want me to do in every video. I do use patreon for those content creators I really like.

Invidious (https://github.com/iv-org/invidious) is how I've been using YouTube for the past few months. It takes care of this problem in addition to providing a faster, nicer UI without dark patterns.

YouTube algo is pretty quick to respond. You just click 'Don't show me videos like this' a few times and they won't show you videos like this.

Make sure you don't comment, that shows strong engagement which they like.

I have been marking "not interested" in every "vtuber" related video it has recommended to me, and I don't remember clicking on a single one, but it still hasn't stopped recommending them to me.

Your graph of interests merges with "people who watch vtubers" too strongly, so the recommendation engine keeps pushing that stuff to you.

I'm assuming that a downvote with a negative sentiment comment is the most severe signal you can send.