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I suggest stopping any and all interaction w/ the algorithm. Get a library card and be intentional about your media consumption choices.
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This doesn't help when searching. I'm looking for specific things as often as I'm clicking on recommendations.

What's needed is a global "Hide AI Dreck". Particularly the overwhelming hoard of AI slide-shows masquerading as reviews.

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This isn't possible on Youtube right now. The automatic tools for detecting LLM-generated content have far too many false positives. And obviously no one is going to pay an army of people to curate the content. The best thing right now is to rely on the reputation of individual channels that you are personally familiar with.

Youtube's automatically applied label will be worse than useless unless they've made some remarkable breakthrough, which I doubt. They'd be better off just using creator-applied labels, and of course if they would label anything that Youtube itself contaminated with automatic translations or its ilk, that would be good too.

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Or just use Channel Surfer.

https://channelsurfer.tv

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When I used to use YT, i used https://untrap.app/, it was a great improvement.

If you think you can't quit youtube, I used to think that way, and then i did it by deleting my account and using libredirect for invidious. my usage went to just a few minutes or 0 per day.

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I'm not particularly religious but I did give up Twitter for lent as a test of my self control.

I highly recommend everyone occasionally do this with social media as it was somewhat eyeopening how much better I felt overall. This was mostly due to not being exposed to the doom scrolling you can eventually get pulled into (despite efforts not to).

I did miss feeling like I was "plugged in" to the stream of news/memes etc though.

YMMV but def recommend.

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A nicer way that also works on mobile is turning the watch history off. C
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Same for me. Godsend. It also switches off showing me a follow up "short" after I watch the one I want to watch.
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Their recommendation engine has surfaced awesome obscure content I would have never found otherwise so I value it.

Stuff like random recorded conference talks with 3 views. A super enthusiast in Latvia.

It does recommend crap sometimes but on balance I like it.

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I love how passive aggressive the page becomes: "You turned off recommendations...we won't show you anything else on here either!"
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Yeah exactly, they could have made their service useful by showing your subscriptions instead. Yet, they decided to enshittify for people who want choices.
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Just a small reminder that we aren't wanted ;)
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Likewise. The page is youtube.com and then just /feed/ without anything else there. That's the blank page, thank goodness they've not ruined that yet :)
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This ^
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