Make use of subscriptions, dislike your dislikes, like your likes and liberally hide/remove things from your feed you dont want. Also make sure to prune your history from time to time, especially if you watched "junkfood" and dont want more recommendations for it. The algorithm catches on quickly. My feed is pretty decent and relative to my interests.
I never subscribe to anything and I never like or dislike videos. I do use "never recommend this channel" occasionally, especially for that bald guy with the beard who has like a dozen channels. If I see his face in a thumbnail it's an instant "never recommend." I will probably start doing the same for channels that are obviously AI created or AI-voiced.
Yet it still learns from what I watch and though it throws some clickbait into the mix it's mostly stuff that's relevant to my interests.
You never know what it's leaving out though, so a service that curates videos based on stated interests might be interesting. On the other hand I already spend too much time on YouTube so it's not like I need more to watch.
I was spending way too much time on YouTube. So I disabled history and subscribed to channels I liked. My YouTube use plummeted immediately. Sometimes I search for something or someone links something interesting and I click that, and maybe even add a new subscription that way. I am missing a lot of what YouTube has to offer and it’d be cool if it had a more useful/less exploitative recommendation algorithm, but like you said I don’t need more things to watch.
> I never subscribe to anything and I never like or dislike videos.
Youtube has a tremendous library of videos, tremendous in volume and topic. You are going have to give the algorithm a little more to work with. A curation service seems nice on paper, but I think you will actually miss out on more that way, as it'll remain static over time. My YT interests ebbs and flows between various topics over time. Sometimes the algo throws something unrelated in, that takes me down a total rabbit hole for months. My current rabbit holes are synthesizers with a dash of urban planning. I basically self-curate by using subscriptions, and if the latest batch of videos from a creator move beyond my current tastes, I unsubscribe.
You can remove items from your history, which clears out the junk immediately.
Sometimes my wife will accidentally watch something on the TV's YouTube app without signing in to her account first, and then the history delete feature comes in quite handy to ensure I don't get any knitting or kpop videos in my feed.
