[loveparade]

I don't care as much about the privacy as I care about not messing up my Youtube recommendations. Any time I accidentally click on or hover over some BS video my front page is full of clickbait spam and I need to manually clean up my watch history.

I guess (?) it works for monetization, but the UX of YouTube and their pushing of clickbait content has become horrible over the past few years. I just wish they stopped trying to be "smart" about what I want to watch. I'm already paying for Premium, just give me an option to make Youtube stupid.

[_Algernon_]

The option for making youtube stupid has always been there. It is called the subscription feed: https://youtube.com/feed/subscriptions

You can hide all the other sections using an extension like UnHook: https://unhook.app/

[loveparade]

Thanks, I wasn't aware of Unhook. I know the I can use the subscriptions feed, but it doesn't solve all problems. When I open YT on my phone, or on my TV, I still get blasted with recommendations and clickbait. When I search for a keyword I get relevant results interspersed with clickbaity content (similar to Google SEO spam), and so on. This problem permeates the whole YT experience because the business model is maximize engagement metrics and ad view time at all costs.

Unhook looks good indeed, I guess I am just a bit frustrated that I need external extensions, many of which are linked in this thread, and hacks to fight against services that try to monetize my attention. Especially when I already pay for them.

[zeta0134]

I've long since blocked the recommendation content. No sidebar, no end-of-video overlay, no homepage content at all. Just a search box, thanks. (And even that's gotten functionally useless over the years; external search engines are much better at finding that one video I remember seeing but can't seem to convince YT proper to actually show me.)

Then again, I curate my subscriptions. Nobody I follow posts more than once every couple of weeks or so. Most days my subscription page looks the same as it did yesterday, so when I do have a new video to watch it's more like a rare treat.

[wildrhythms]

Certain 'categories' of Youtube videos is like dropping a nuclear bomb in your suggestions. Even accidentally clicking on it and immediately going back will poison the well. I have to go into my watch history and delete, and then spend days clicking 'three dots > Not interested' on the horrific thumbnails until Youtube stops recommending that category. I call it tending the garden.

[Krssst]

You can disable autoplay of videos on hovering in your YouTube settings. I disabled it and hovered videos stopped being added to my watch history.

https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/130441859/how-to-d...

Edit: not sure if the above page is up-to-date. On my side the setting is in "Settings - Playback and performance - Integrated playback" (setting name could be different, my interface is not in English so I translated the entry names)

[pbhjpbhj]

The algorithm just seems really blunt. You like a video on one category and then your entire feed becomes that category, it's not mixed into the other 100 categories of video you've liked.

Like you said, I'm sure this works for engagement, but it's pretty evil. I know they don't care about being evil anymore; but it's still annoying.