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by johan914 542 days ago
YouTube has become especially horrific. It seems a couple years ago they gave up on video search- after 5 videos it will suddenly start recommending random videos under “you may like”. If I watch one UFC video I am flooded with recommendations of Joe Rogan, despite my subscriptions all being unrelated.
4 comments

You watch 2-3 videos on autopilot and Joe Rogan always pops up eventually. With that kind of promotion I dont understand why he's not bigger.
He’s pretty big. He helped tip a presidential election.
Considering his content is auto recommended to billions of people, should be bigger.
I don’t remember ever getting a Joe Rogan recommendation.
I have (recently).
I feel asleep to YouTube last night and woke up to a 4h Joe Rogan podcast playing.
Best thing is, if I search for something it'll give me hundreds of search results. But if I then decide to filter by upload date, whooopsie! there are no search results, sorry!
No idea about who Joe Rogan is, maybe because I'm not American and because I use YouTube via NewPipe on Android, almost never inside a browser on my laptop and anyway never logged in with my account.

NewPipe doesn't need an account. I can subscribe to channels, bookmark videos and save them to playlists. It's all I need.

Not having an account has the disadvantage that I don't have a common list of videos across my devices. I could export and import but it's too inconvenient. I just share videos to the other device if I have to, via KDE Connect.

On your desktop please try Freetube. You can also import your NewPipe backup (history and subscriptions) Freetube will also allow you to have different profiles, that you could use one per device and regularly import their backups.
I do have Freetube but I forget to use it. I developed the instinct of reaching to my phone or to my tablet when I want to watch a video. The only source of videos on my desktop would be technical stuff embedded in pages from HN but videos are too long (as in time) compared to text so either I read the transcript if available or I skip to the next interesting post.
Have you tried informing YouTube that you are not interested in Joe Rogan? There are several places and ways to do so in the application, and they seem to have worked for me.