Yes. In particular, the single most important thing to do is to click the three dots next to a video and then click "Not interested": https://i.imgur.com/1CQzOy6.png

Literally any time you see a video you don't like, do this. It only takes one or two "Not interested"'s to dramatically improve your feed.

This.

My youtube recommendations are incredible. I've spent a lot of time liking and subscribing to things that interest me, and now my feed is full of videos about history and trains and machining and woodworking and science and all kinds of stuff that I could watch for days.

I tried something similar and the results are a mixed bag at best. When the algorithm decides to recommend a video from a creator that I don't follow, it is usually something worth my time. However I cannot seem to stop getting recommendations for videos I have already watched despite diligently clicking the "not interested because already watched" boxes.

A lesser issue is that if I don't watch the videos from a certain channel or genre for a while, the algorithm decides that I must have lost interest and stops recommending those content altogether when that's not really the case. And the "related videos" on the side bar never goes beyond a list of videos from the same channel.

I get that issue as well, i think YouTube has a high emphasis on rewatching stuff which is not usually something i do there.. but it's easy to ignore and the rest of the recs are stellar so I'm not sure it's a problem. Plus the videos it recommends rewatching are still excellent and sometimes i even do rewatch them.

This is super helpful but also very interesting. When technology fails to adapt to people and meet their needs, people must adapt to technology and meet its needs.

I think the level of expectation is just far too high. It's an ML algorithm, feed it some high quality training data and it'll give you some good results. Out of the box it'll give you some very default generic crap.

That’s exactly I was thinking. Why do people on HN keep hating YouTube recommendations. I want to learn electronics and now YouTube is recommending some amazing stuff. I’m absolutely amazed by the quality of content it recommends. Then again my echo chamber is mostly gaining new skills. I avoid watching trash on YouTube.