The best way of not playing this game is to, well... not play it. Why should you pay any attention to what YouTube "suggests" you should watch? I just treat YouTube as a service that hosts videos, with a mediocre search feature, and I have no interest in what it thinks I should watch.

If a real human mentions a video that piques my interest, I may watch it. If I'm interested in finding a video on a particular topic, or a specific scene from this-or-that film or TV show, I will search for it myself. If am interested enough in a certain producer's content, I may "subscribe" to them, but I will be the judge if I want to watch the latest video they uploaded.

Not playing is even worse, I used to live near a less financially developed area of the city and youtube would promote dreadful videos either musically or societally if not logged in.

I did it for a couple of weeks to see what was being promoted by youtube algorithms in terms of content and ads to the more financially challenged parts of the society. Gangsta and sexually inuendo videos in neighbourhoods that although poor do not have a crime problem and young people don't dress like that. But it seems the algo is working on it. Note: This is in a European country

> Why should you pay any attention to what YouTube "suggests" you should watch?

There is one advantage: some obscure music videos. There are some rare pearls with the comments section almost exclusively thanking YT algorithm for taking them there. Happened to me so many times that I have a separate browser instance and a Google account for YT and I'm very careful what I click when I use it.

Yes 100%. I have to plug this channel that came up like that a few months ago. It has a lot of obscure rock and a lot of it is really good!

https://www.youtube.com/c/TerminalPassage/videos

I didn't even know there was a Jazz/Fusion rock scene in Japan in the 70's for instance. I never would have heard of this band without YouTube suggestions but really enjoying their work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20eVtt1VJyg

This brings us right back to square one: are the benefits of the recommending algorithms worth the downside? We can make that choice.

True, you do have a point there. I'll admit I have discovered a few bands/musicians by just leaving YouTube on autoplay, after having searched for specific artists I already knew to concentrate while working (before lo-fi hip hop was trending!).

This is the correct answer.

Use Firefox multi-account containers and the temporary containers add-on. Now your YouTube starts fresh with every new tab. It's actually nice, it means you get to build a new set of recommendations each time you open a tab, and because YT doesn't have that much data on you yet, the recommendations are directly linked to the thing you're currently watching, similar to how it used to be before the whole tracking extravaganza.

Or use different folders of portable Chromium so you have any semblance of sandboxing + security.

Temporary Containers is a pretty amazing sandbox already, as it uses a builtin Firefox feature.

You can just have multiple profiles on chrome. One logged in and one logged out.

How Chrome and Chrome-based browsers work with profiles, and push the user to log in, I have a feeling they never fully log out and there's some kind of a supercookie hanging around. Trust issue.

More or less. Sadly, they still suggest a ton of stuff based on geolocation.

I'm in germany so i always get asinine videos recommended about what americans think about germany and what germans think about what americans think about germany