[marcellus23]

My recommendations are generally very relevant to the kind of stuff I've been watching and like to watch. I've never seen something as totally out-of-left-field as pimple popping -- even in shorts. I wonder what's causing this behavior to be so different for different users?

I am very liberal with the thumbs-down button on anything I don't like. I'm also using YouTube premium, although I doubt that would significantly affect the quality of recs, and the recs were fine before I upgraded.

[twisteriffic]

The weird thing is that it's only in search results. I'm militant about thumbs down/don't recommend on the feed and shorts, and in those places I almost never get an irrelevant suggestion. It's only an issue in search, where there's no option to influence the results, and also where it's most irritating.

[josefx]

Youtube can crawl its way into irrelevancy if you leave it running unsupervised for too long. I had autoplay try to make me listen to Disney music for a while after letting it run over night and the recommendations can stick around for ages after that. Not sure how it got there, not my usual taste in music.