I used a “trick” to make YouTube work in my favour. For a few days I purposefully watched and liked/subscribed a bunch of videos about things that I think make me a better me (jazz piano lessons, philosophy conversations, math/physics/CS lectures, etc) until the feed only contains those. If I notice it drifting because sometimes it tries to pull something on you, I make sure I thumb down the new shit and retrain it a little. Has been working well so far!
This is a good technique but I fear YouTube will always try to sway us away from our interests, and towards what they are soft-promoting.
I've always wanted a YouTube which is basically just a searchbar, with results and just the video, so I created a little private webpage with that. It doesn't have anything unless I searched for it. No autoplay, no trending or recommendations, and no comments. The YouTube API is free up to a certain amount of videos (which is very hard to reach for personal usage).
