true, I have to say "Not interested" a couple times

I think I've said Not interested in channel hundreds of times. Creators get one shot with me, and if I think your thumbnail is clickbaity, or you do anything to annoy me...your channel is out. My youtube recommendations are pretty good. I subscribe to a decent-sized set of pretty great creators -- ones that follow my personal rules without even knowing what they are...

There are many decent youtubers who have clickbaity thumbnails. Unfortunately it probably makes such a large money difference that they compromise. E.g. LinusTechTips.

I see LinusTechTips recommended so often and I just don't get it. Everything I've seen from him has been clickbait, or surface level looks at technology, it never has any more depth than a technology enthusiast magazine. I guess that's fine if you're a technology enthusiast, but I find it weird how he gets so much air time even in a community like this which is populated by actual professionals.

Most people here are 'technology enthusiasts', are they not? I for one am a software engineer and definitely not a hardware professional. I might not be able to even build a PC on my own.

You can usually go into your history and remove it to fix it.

I open Incognito mode when I'm about to watch a video like that.

I discovered the other day that incognito mode removes the Premium privileges, which makes 0 sense to me.

I want to watch one video without it contributing to my history, and now I'm subjected to ads again. No thanks.

It doesn't remove anything; you're not logged in, which is the point of opening in an incognito window in the first place.

Watch your one-off video with mpv+yt-dlp.