I find it relatively easy to use YouTube without exposing myself to their recommendations (not that they're ever particularly good, in my experience).

My bookmark for YouTube is directly to my subscriptions, and it's also possible to create a android shortcut link directly to subscriptions. Occasionally, a flow will direct me to the homepage, but that's rare and I usually organically bounce back to my subs without even thinking about it.

There's always recs below a video, but again, those are rarely very interesting to me or they're things I've subscribed to anyway.

I’ve been using a really nice extension the past couple months called unhook [0] that gives a lot of control over the YouTube UI. I’ve disabled shorts, the homepage, related videos, comments, etc. and now I only see videos I have subscribed to. Much more useful (I subscribed for a reason!) and much less time wasted. Just thought I’d share in case it helps anyone!

[0]: https://unhook.app/

That looks good, thanks.

I block recommendation sections on some site with the ublock element picker (like the "recommendations" stackoverflow puts in the right column from their other sites, completely unrelated to the current page or search terms).

I never got round to trying that with Youtube, this seems a better solution.

I use the following user stylesheet to hide YouTube recommendations for exactly the reason you mention:

    /* hide main page */
    ytd-browse[page-subtype="home"] {
        display: none;
    }

Nice. I'll have to incorporate this little gem for the Linux laptop. Thank you. When I'm home, I primarily watch YouTube on my TV, but I don't use YouTube. Rather, I use SmartTubeNext, which grabs the same videos as YouTube, but has no ads, tracking, kills sponsored content in the video, as well as no YouTube recommendations. I'm very happy with it. I run it off my Amazon Firestick. If you're interested, here is the how-to: https://troypoint.com/smarttubenext/

> When you open YouTube the recommendations are always the first thing you see

There is a brilliant hack to YT's urge to show you some BS. Make a bookmark of YT submissions on HN. Clear cookies. Click on any few random vids. Voila! Now YT considers you enough smart person to be shown a decent recommendations!!! (But the magic quickly disappears if you will click any BS from main because my hack does not affects the main page).

The recommendation algos can be quite good but you need to give them good signal. I doubt many people do this, but clicking 'not interested' on the clickbaity vids and thumbs-up high-effort content can very quickly tune your recommendations to be very high quality.

You can follow Youtube channels via RSS feeds, though, which removes the issue with recommendations.

This is the way.

https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist

I just block the recommendation and comments section with uBlock. No dessert, no temptation.

True, but I exclusively watch YT on laptop and have the link to my subscriptions. It really does help.