[behindsight]

Out of curiosity, do you have watch history enabled/disabled?

I found the feed with it enabled is much better than disabled and I have it finetuned to be more in line with the niches I care about.

I am also very proactive with marking channels or content I don't prefer with the "Not interested" or "Don't recommend channel" as well as going through and pruning any content I don't want from my watch history directly.

It's not perfect but it's orders of magnitude better than my logged out or watch history disabled account (though not sure if they have since updated it to not show anything at all)

[wrxd]

It’s sad that we replaced manual curation with recommendation algorithms because they were doing the hard job of surfacing relevant content for us and the end result is that you’re spending more effort and intellectual energy into steering the algorithms in the right direction than we ever did before

[Ekaros]

Manual curation would be waste of time. Why should I spend hours looking through slop when I can get algorithm do it reasonably well.

Youtube actually works reasonably well, as long as you remove from history content you disliked, use do not recommend channel and possibly not interested option. It might not be highest of quality, but at least content stream then is passable.