My YouTube feed is pretty good; it's full of technical discourse on topics that I enjoy learning about, ranging from electronics hacking to civil engineering. That's probably the result of a long number of years of continuous training:

Good video, with a positive combination of presentation quality and a topic I enjoy? Watch it -- maybe now or later, but it gets watched. Thumbs up. Maybe even subscribe. That's what I'm there for.

Mediocre video, whether due to content or presentation? Watch parts of it, but probably not with any sense of completeness. No rating.

Bad video, with content I don't enjoy or with off-putting presentation? Stop watching. Thumbs down, and/or back out to use three-dot menu and "Not interested"

Bad ragebait scaremongering video with emotionally-distressing title? No watching at all. Three-dot menu and "Don't recommend this channel."

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I get a lot of good stuff. Some mediocre stuff. Very little bad stuff. Almost zero ragebait.

It works well enough that an unfiltered, logged-out view of YouTube is completely and utterly appalling by comparison. That place is fucking awful without training.

(And no ads, because ads have never been a thing for me on YouTube and I experience no compulsion to change that.)

Do you have web activity turned off or use a separate old style Youtube account? Mine is also bad but I think it's because of those for me.

I was thinking it would be good if there was something similar for kids. They seem to fall into a whirlpool of trash content.

For YouTube nerds I curate a list of channels. Size of list 3993 feeds: - https://github.com/rumca-js/awesome-database-top/blob/main/l...

From that list 731 are blocked in my rss feed. I do read and cache rest.

I sometimes check through website what new has entered the system. It is surprising to see something there new. It is so exiting to see something outside of my bubble.

YouTube algorithm has a lot to comb through, but I am too surprised how suggestion are bland, and unattractive. I am also surprised how difficult is to find new channels through YouTube search.

I suspect they know perfectly well when they can't make money from someone, so they deliberately serve up boring crap to save on hosting costs.

>Maybe it’s because I don’t watch enough videos, but it’s sort of like Amazon, in that it will suggest the exact same content/topic.

I've got years of history and it does the exact same thing for me. I watched one news video about the pope and now half of my feed is Catholic news channels.

I buy a mattress on Amazon and I get recommendations for... ten other mattresses? Like what's the logic here, I have an entire garage where I just keep stacking them up to the ceiling? Just show me something else. Is there a human being out there whose like "I bought a French press last week, what could I need this week, five more French Presses?"

I do not understand how these dystopian surveillance companies with their infinite data points are so bad even at this

Bad by what metric? They're interested in getting you to watch ads, they couldn't care less what you want.