Indeed, I find YouTube's recommendations are the most relevant and _interesting_ after navigating through a small number of videos within a focused theme in a fresh session. Any watch history, especially in multiple subjects, just seems to make for increasing blandness and disappointingly little connections between topics.

Some prompt crafting-type technique of seeding the recommender with deliberate sequences of videos is probably possible. Youtube's system really is remarkably responsive to this kind of logged-out browsing, unlike most others.

Tangentially, there's a lot of praise for TikTok on HN, but I've never found anything compelling there myself.