[frankosaurus]

I actually agree with OP. YouTube recommendations on my primary account are quite good.

I attribute this to careful curation of my logged-in viewing habits.

> you watched a video about the US elections

That's the problem. As a rule, I never view political, celebrity, or clickbait videos when logged in. There is such a vast amount of dreck in these categories, you're sure to be disappointed sooner or later.

If I see a political/clickbait video that catches my eye, I open it in an Incognito tab.

[BeetleB]

> I attribute this to careful curation of my logged-in viewing habits.

> That's the problem. As a rule, I never view political, celebrity, or clickbait videos when logged in. There is such a vast amount of dreck in these categories, you're sure to be disappointed sooner or later.

I think you've just pointed out that YT's recommendation algorithms are very poor. If a user needs to carefully curate to get good recommendations, then it means Youtube's algorithm is not very robust.

[Zancarius]

I've had a similar experience. Anything I don't want to litter my recommendations I view from a private window. If I accidentally click on something I don't particularly want to watch, I remove it from my history.

It's not perfect, because as you go down the YT rabbit hole, you'll invariably get fed "top ten X" type clickbait videos if there's anything that's remotely related to what you're watching, but it does reduce the noise level.

Curating your subscriptions also helps.

[piva00]

I think this is the problem: it's really hard to understand how to get better recommendations out of YouTube.

I did try to curate my watching history, at one point I erased it and started to keep track of what stayed there or not, it doesn't matter, if I watch 2-3 news/political commentary I start to get crap recommendations. If I watch 2-3 videos of any subject I start to see a flood of those recommendations.

It is absolutely useless to me, even more that I have some very non-overlapping hobbies that I jump around.

I tried curating my subscription list, at some point that worked but since YouTube dropped those from their recommendation algorithm my subs are just to check videos from channels I like, some weeks I will see the same videos on my recommendations that I have already watched.

It's a mess, I can't understand it as a SWE to be able to tailor it to my usage. By now, after trying for about a year or so, I completely gave up on "training" YT's recommendation algorithm...

On the other hand, Spotify has always been really good for me, the trends of what is recommended doesn't change so often if I don't change my listening habits, when I do change it picks it up as a quiet signal and doesn't overwhelm me with recommendations for a genre I listened to one day out of the year. Also the Spotify's Radio feature for a song/track/album/artist works really well for the genres I listen to, when I'm tired of my playlists, or when I just want to discover new music, a starting a radio from a track, album or artist I like usually gives me very relevant content.

[kovek]

Nice "hack" with incognito! I also notice that Youtube will catch on to a random video I watch and recommend me similar things, even if I am not interested in those topics. I'll think about incognito in the future! "Right Click -> Open Link in Incognito Window"

[mcjkrw]

I always start with a fresh session and never log in. Then if I'm researching a particular topic, I always get recommendations on that topic. If something is worth saving, I bookmark it like a regular page to access it in future sessions.