it sucks that we live in a timeline where the sentence, "I swear to fucking god if the Israeli apartheid state is the reason why there's cocomelon in my recommended, I'm going to war, I'm strapping the fuck up" is something I can find myself saying, unironically
on that note, if anyone can advise me on how to fix my sidebar, that would be appreciated
Delete garbage and random videos that are unlike your normal watching (especially hate watch videos linked from here or social media), and then just be aggressive about hitting the Don't Recommend Channel every single time you see something you dislike on the sidebar and homepage.
be aggressive about hitting the Don't Recommend Channel every single time you see something you dislike on the sidebar and homepage
I have no idea how long it takes because my account is fucking ancient, but I promise it does actually work, my recommendations are almost always cool or at least inoffensive. I need the addon to remove youtube shorts though, that section is always a mess.
Yeah, shorts doesn't tailor its algorithm much based on what you watch outside of shorts.
It seems like the breakdown is about 70% what's popular, 15% the previous things you viewed this session, and 15% which hashtags you've watched previously. So, if you click on a short, and then scroll to another short, it will weight the short you viewed into its algorithm. If you've never viewed any non-shorts videos with hashtags in the title, it won't have anything to do with what you've ever viewed before. If it decides to show you some random awful life hack video that you didn't want, and you've never watched a life hack video before on the platform it'll just start showing you more of those, even if you just immediately stopped watching that short within a second. It's now in your view history and the only way to get rid of that seems to be deleting all shorts videos you've ever viewed from your view history.
Not being tracked by cookies or being logged out of your account will suddenly make everything awful. If it doesn't know exactly who you are, it'll show you nothing but the worst videos the platform has to offer.