[johnnymorgan]

Do you never see content that has no connection to your viewing habits?

It happens all the time and I got hit with the warts and pimples a few months back, just a counter point, I watch YT daily.

It's mostly shorts where you will see it

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

I mostly see content that similar to the things I watch(lot of sci-com, some gaming stuff, some sports stuff, a fair share of chess content) The only offputting stuff I get recommended is these AI generated video essays with nonsense claims masquerading as scicom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJ-pztYXH8k

Depresses me that this channel has over 100k subscribers...

But I've never been recommended gross-out stuff. I have history enabled because otherwise all I get recommended is videos I've already seen.

One thing I would recommend is disabling autoplay. I found recommendations improved markedly when the only videos I even start watching are ones I decided to. And sometimes with autoplay on I'd pass out in front of the TV and wake up to some wild shit, and get stranger recommendations because of it. But still not getting a bunch of gore or gross stuff.

[shmeeed]

Disabling autoplay is paramount.

I've once tuned into my Chromecast to find my tablet had been autoplaying for a week and was in the middle of a long streak of middle-eastern folk music with guys playing the flute and dancing in a tent. Thankfully, the tablet has its own YT account, so my main never gut spammed with the corresponding recommendations.

[Suppafly]

Turn off downloading too. Every time I get a new phone, the youtube setting to downvote videos that I might be interested in somehow gets re-enabled. Caught it trying to download like a gig of random things just in case I wanted to watch them on my phone later.

[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.

[adra]

Never heard of this myself... but the algorithm doesn't present you with content based on you watching the video but though others that are highly correlated with you. Maybe you started watching some weird fringe video channel that somewhat mirrors your habits but is also highly linked to viewers of these other things? The algo is just going to start grouping you into these groups if you like it or not. Don't like it? You can always do an rng spin of all posted videos and hope to find something you like, or just cut out your weirdly correlated video watching preferences.

[dylan604]

> It's mostly shorts where you will see it

Maybe that says a lot about the type of person that will actually watch a short?