I have the same problem. We watched the videos about those 13 Thai kids that were stuck in a cave. Since then, YouTube has assumed that I'm into cave diving and mountclimbing, so my feed has filled up with videos of related topics. I've never cave dived, never will, and mountain climbing makes my palms sweaty.

But all of that pales in comparison to their Tik-Tok clone attempt of short videos. Talk about "chum"! They're clearly highly optimised to pull people in and get them hooked.

Luckily, I know digital drugs when I see them. I was one of those freaky people that could recognise the "hooks" in games like World of Warcraft and simply stop playing before the "endgame" mechanics sucked your life down the drain just so that Blizzard can get their recurring revenue.

Seems like this data driven optimisation for addicting people to low-quality content is the mental opiod epidemic of the current era...