[pjc50]

I've never seen these; perhaps you need to scrub your watch history as well as use "never recommend me this again" and reporting content. It's possible that it's counted a mouseover preview as a "watch" on one of those, and now you're doomed to get more of them.

(I note that if you go to youtube .com in incognito and refuse cookies, you get no suggestions at all, not even the default homepage.)

I do wonder what, if anything would happen about reporting this stuff to OFCOM; https://variety.com/2023/tv/global/ofcom-media-bill-streamer... if we're going to have an overly intrusive regulator we might as well use it against things that are genuinely bad.

[jprete]

Android's YT app will do the same autopreview behavior if a video is roughly in the middle of the top half of the screen. If the video runs for long enough in this state, it will show up in your watch history even though you never interacted with the video in the UI.

[BizarroLand]

If you see that stuff, just ignore it and move on. I think their algorithm targets engagement and counts dislikes/blocks/reports as engagement as well.

I blocked one video like that and all of a sudden my recommendations that were tech and comedy centric started being prepper/anti-antifa/weaponry/pro-republican/Jordan Petersen/Ben Shapiro/Pro-trump general dog crap, and the more I blocked and reported the more it sent my way.

I cleaned my browser history and it kept coming.

I was losing my mind with frustration as it got so bad I had to explicitly go to my favorite channels just to see their videos.

Then, I deleted my youtube watch history and it stopped but reset all of my stuff to their generic front page. That was exasperating.

[snapplebobapple]

Why aren't you using an rss feed reader to "subscribe" to all the channels you like and filtering through that? I have all my stuff subscribed in commafeed (https://github.com/Athou/commafeed/ but freshrss is also quite good https://github.com/FreshRSS/FreshRSS) I only ever go to youtube main page if I have time to spare and want to see something new, it's wonderful. If you combine this with some ad blocks and sponsorblock it makes youtube splendid again.

[BizarroLand]

I didn't know about this functionality.

Thanks!

[snapplebobapple]

Its' really the way to go in my opinion. I have my feeds grouped by interest so if I'm in the mood for something specific I click on the specific feed and see what's new, but if I'm interested in something carpentry, or rving, or hiking, or networking/selfhosting I just click on the directory I have those feeds in and see them all most recent first. It also makes it dead simple to switch a youtube feed out for rumble/bitchute/peertub/lbry/etc. if the creator you are following starts publishing elsewhere.