I think youtube recommendations are a sneaky and opaque thing. Whatever they're doing, "it works" well enough for their ulterior motivations rooted in surveillance capitalism.
The OP is absolutely right in wanting to regain some control over what's presented to his eyeballs. Right now the only way you can do that is to right-click on an offending video and select "don't recommend this channel" or "not interested". That only partially works.
I wish there were some way to specify actual words in a "black list" such that videos whose titles or descriptions contain a black list word would NEVER be presented as a recommendation. This is sort of like Twitter's muted words list. It really is the only way to block content that you really don't want to enter your headspace. Not perfect, of course, but better than being left to the whims of pavlovian algorithms coordinated by ever-improving AI.
I once made the mistake of viewing a Jordan Peterson video. It was mildly interesting, I found him somewhat provocative but a bit paternalistic, not my cup of tea, no big deal. But then... I got a ridiculous number of men's right's or "red-pill" videos recommended to me which were totally disgusting. It's easy to see how people can get radicalized or worse all because somebody is paying Google money for clicks and Google is, in spite of whatever they say, disinterested in our well-being.
The OP is absolutely right in wanting to regain some control over what's presented to his eyeballs. Right now the only way you can do that is to right-click on an offending video and select "don't recommend this channel" or "not interested". That only partially works.
I wish there were some way to specify actual words in a "black list" such that videos whose titles or descriptions contain a black list word would NEVER be presented as a recommendation. This is sort of like Twitter's muted words list. It really is the only way to block content that you really don't want to enter your headspace. Not perfect, of course, but better than being left to the whims of pavlovian algorithms coordinated by ever-improving AI.
I once made the mistake of viewing a Jordan Peterson video. It was mildly interesting, I found him somewhat provocative but a bit paternalistic, not my cup of tea, no big deal. But then... I got a ridiculous number of men's right's or "red-pill" videos recommended to me which were totally disgusting. It's easy to see how people can get radicalized or worse all because somebody is paying Google money for clicks and Google is, in spite of whatever they say, disinterested in our well-being.