agree. a lot of people I've known who say "there is nothing good on YouTube" either ignore or outright block recommended videos from showing up. there are centuries of videos worth watching on YouTube, and the more you tell YouTube what you like (by watching) the better it gets at recommending things you like.

When I check my recommended feed it's all stuff very closely related stuff to my subscriptions and recent views, and some useless shorts. It's just an echo chamber at this point.

If I'm looking for potentially interesting content outside my core subscription views, I'm better served by turning on FM radio.

I actually want it to stop “recommending” and be a year 200x youtube when you could randomly stumble upon something interesting and follow it. Today’s youtube really feels like a chamber, a very secure one.

it's not an echo chamber unless you tell it to be.

all those videos in your watch history? others have watched those videos, too. youtube will recommend videos that those others have watched and that you have not.

the narrower the focus of your viewed videos, the narrower the focus of the recommendations will be.

I deleted my youtube account last month and started new one because it stuck in a loop of feeding me bs I don’t like. I don’t know where do you find good recommendations there, for me it’s still the same bs. Maybe I am too picky, maybe you just like what it recommends, but I don’t. I guess if an engine makes enough users happy, it may be called good, but not for the other 5%.

For example I watched and subscribed to PBS ST to kick start. It instantly flooded my feed with low-quality sci-pop with “pro voice actors” voices and stupid sensational topics like “shocking alien planet” or “will our sun explode tomorrow? Emoji emoji emoji”. No astrophysics was recommended yet. Yesterday I searched for and binge-watched about hyena clan relationships, today it recommended me two quran surahs for good sleep, few colorful open-mouth-sensation morons (not sure which topic they were trying to “wow”) and a very badly compiled drama about different snow leopards chasing goats. And that’s while I’m holding my finger on “not interested” trigger for weeks.

What am I doing wrong?

I don't think you are doing anything wrong, YouTube is showing you videos that others who have watched what you've watched also watched.

if there is anything you started to watch, but didn't like, clean that stuff from your watch history.

click the "Like" button on any videos you like a lot, and favorite the very best.

sometimes YouTube's skull is very thick, but it will get a bead on you fairly soon if you do what you can to tell it what you like and don't like. that's been my experience, anyway.

Does it really use watch history? I mean when it’s off, it still collects it, just doesn’t show it to me/publicly. I know that because sometimes people watched videos at my work pc and after that I had to clean up this mess.

I tried to turn it on for a while and it didn’t make any difference. Same for likes/dislikes. The only effective methods are channel-wise, i.e. “subscribe” and “don’t recommend channel”, but then the feed becomes 90% of videos I have watched or new videos (from these channels) in which I mostly have no interest in. Other 10% are irrelevant to me.

Anyway, I’ll try to follow your advice (thanks!) with more active liking etc for a while, but my hopes are weak atm.

My recommendations have become such an echo chamber that it actively pushes me away from using YT. It's frustrating scrolling through rows and rows of the same rehashed content from mostly the same network of creators. I wish I could turn the dial down on similar content and ratchet up interesting but unrelated content.

I use Youtube as more of a delivery channel than a platform, kind of like podcasts. I listen to a fair number of podcasts and to be honest I have no idea where I found most of them, I guess word of mouth? Or maybe linked from some article I read a long time ago? It definitely wasn't from any recommendations engine, although my podcast app does have a "Browse" section that I've never used.

I don't think it's necessarily bad to use the automated recommendations but there are certainly other ways to discover new content.

The recommendations for me are trash. They are 50% videos that I have watched and 40% videos that I have had recommended and scrolled past before. Most of the 10% of new stuff is just clickbait trash.

Every once in a while after scrolling for a while it gives me a "Want something new?" link and then the recommendations are fanatic but that feed has no bookmarkable URL or reliable way to get to it.

Is the recommendation engine more than just "Currently watching X - people who watch X usually watch Y next"?

I say that because, as someone who does not sign into YouTube, I have no idea if it gets more complex.

There's a tag system and data metrics matching system. Based on your comments, watch history, audience crossover between channels, watch time, and subscriptions, and data collected from your Google account (searches, apps opened in Android, etc.) it will generate a list of tags that are visible at the top of the home page. For example, some of my current ones are Electrical Engineering, History, Film Criticisms, and Scientific Explanations. The tags are constantly changing based on the factors mentioned above.

> I discovered amazing content through this engine

Did you actually discover it through youtube's algorithms and discovery engine or was it linked to you by friends and you simply watched it on Youtube?

These are completely different things in this context.

> But the distribution capabilities are what makes Youtube what it is.

Hold on, I thought it was the recommendation engine? Which is it? Distribution is about economies of scale and good engineering, recommendation is about putting the user first, rather than monetization.