[strifey]

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.

[cturtle]

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/

[phatfish]

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.