YouTube has the best recommendation system in the world.

Of course it gets lots of complaints. But the amount of fantastic content it has consistently recommended for me, including even pretty small channels, is incredible.

A few points though:

1. I find YouTube to be good for general educational content. I don’t know if it’s as good for specific niches of entertainment.

2. It’s not just plug and play. You need to actively tell YouTube what you like and dislike, remove trash recommendations, and remove terrible videos from your watch history.

Do this, and you will be rewarded with a YouTube homepage full of hours upon hours of absolute gold. When I don’t know what to do, I open YouTube and just let it run. It’s awesome and life changing.

YouTube repeatedly tries to steer my recommendations from the content I'm watching (stuff on terrain making and miniature wargames) to decidedly alt-right content, to the point that at the moment, I mostly watch it logged out and directly searching for the channels I want to watch.

You’re not going to fix it by watching stuff logged out.

You need to hit “don’t recommend this” for a while on creepy videos and it’ll get the hint pretty quickly.

Visit https://www.youtube.com/feed/trending for the non-personalized alternative, based on currently popular videos in your country.

Yeesh. I didn't know about that page. I'm glad I have a customized feed.

That doesn't work so well if you're trying to push a social agenda to people who aren't interested in LGBTQ+ or racial "wokeness". Imagine someone searching for all content that doesn't include some form of LGBTQ+. There wouldn't be much of a catalog to watch.

  > Imagine someone searching for all content that doesn't include some form of LGBTQ+

whats the reason for that?

To me most of the new shows that has LGBTQ+ content, the LGBTQ+ stuff feels incredibly forced to the point of detracting from the story.

I can't help but feel they're just trying to tick a marketing checkbox as I watch it.

I have no problem with well written normal characters, either straight or LGBTQ+. Nor a bunch of LGBTQ+ characters dialed to 11 if that's a plot point.

Netflix had a great recommendation system for their DVD catalog 15 years ago without any ML hocuspocus. The problem now is that their content is mostly mediocre and user driven ratings can't be used effectively to identify similar cohorts. That's why they got rid of the stars.

https://movielens.org/ is the best one I've used so far. I find it almost creepy how good it predicts how I'll rate a movie.

I recently did a trial for Showtime's streaming service. It's set up this way. Choose a category then get an alphabetical list of everything available. I'm not sure it's any better, but worth checking out if that matters to you.