What did it for me was disabling my history (a setting). Consequently your YT homepage is blank and it doesn’t suggest any shorts. You can maintain a kind of history by liking videos or just via the browser itself.

Ha! So I am not alone. I thought it was just me as I have search history off and all privacy toggles switched to maximum off.

I was under impression that this was the reason all follow-ups/recommendations are just irrelevant rubbish.

But the sound of it, it is just a feature of modern YouTube.

Also side note: 3-4 years ago watching hardware reviews was fine on YT. Today it is a pulp of sponsored/biased reviews (disclosed or not). I give youtube 0 trust, on par with Amazon reviews.

Most of trusted creators already moved or double publish to Nebula.

I still watch a lot of youtube. I'm subscribed to lots of youtubers providing me with more interesting stuff than I can manage to watch. I'm not aware of a better platform for watching stuff like that.

The trick with youtube (if you are not paying, like me):

- Use Firefox and a decent ad blocker to skip the ads. I never see any. It think Google just gave up on doing anything about that and just focuses on making life miserable for Chrome users only. Whatever it is, if ads are the reason you are no longer watching Youtube, Firefox is the fix.

- Ignore recommendations and the glorified more of the same shit algorithm that produces them. It's just not very good. And you can't really potty train it to better. The controls are there but they don't do anything useful or productive. I just bookmarked the /subscriptions page and only bother with the front page if I'm really bored.

- Ignore shorts. They are easily recognized because they are portrait mode instead of landscape mode. So, just don't click them. I find them disappointing and bland. And stupid. I have no patience for that.

The ridiculous amount of ads is what’s made me basically not use YouTube unless I really really need to.

On my computer I have an ad blocker which makes it more tolerable but then there’s the added friction of “ugh I have to go start the computer and sit down yadda yadda”.

I could pay for a mobile ad blocker so I could watch crap on my phone. But then again - it is mostly crap so why bother. Perfectly fine with less YouTube in my life.

Youtube doesn't even want me to watch videos anymore!

Every video is just this now:

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