I know I could probably delete my cookies to get rid of all the recommendations, but I’d rather not do that. Lately I’ve been inundated with Tears of the Kingdom spoilers. I wonder if there was some way to get rid of just those.
I don’t know the answer to your question but I, too, have my issues with YouTube (and I watch (listen, really) it a lot. I don’t like their algorithm at all. My biggest (well, I have a lot of ‘biggest’) complaint is that they recommend videos I’ve already seen. Why?
Also, back in the day, if you searched for a thing, it would recommend a lot of similar things - especially music videos. Here’s an example, I just now googled “The Parlor” (music group). I click on a video of theirs (This Old Life). Scrolling down, here are the suggestion/recommendations in order:
~ Is Elon Musk building a real Jurassic Park?
~ An Aubry Plaza video
~ Jerry Jeff Walker (OK, finally a somewhat related video)
~ Firing the Flak 88MM on Mars (Nope, not making this one up)
~ Some random YouTuber singing an original song
~ Old West accents (not making this one up either)
~ What year was this globe made
Etc…
I miss the halcyon days of a flood of recommendations of similar music so I could discover new and…
But I digress. Like I said, I don’t know the answer to your question but I sidestep it by using Bing or DuckDuckGo.
Well, is he???
I have found “not interested” to work pretty well on subject matter, as distinct from “don’t recommend channel” which removes the channel from your recommendations. If you click “not interested” for maybe three of those videos on one topic, one right after another, that should help a lot. You might have to do that one or two more times after that. (I’m assuming here that those spoilers videos are not all coming from the same channel.)
The first thing I usually do is go through my watch history and delete whatever similar videos might be there to make youtube think that I am interested in something. For example, in your case, maybe you clicked on a trailer for Tears of the Kingdom, which makes youtube’s algorithm think “oh, you briefly clicked on something, you must be passionately interested in everything related to this so I will flood your recommendations with similar videos” (stupid youtube). Deleting all of the videos in your watch history about Tears of the Kingdom should get rid of most if not all of the suggestions.
If that doesn’t do it, @Roderick_Femm’s suggestion of clicking “not interested” or “don’t recommend channel” usually does the trick.
What you’re supposed to do is click on the video and comment ‘WTF youtube y u recommend this pls stop FFS’
(or alternatively ‘FINE YT I’ll watch it OK are you happy now?’ )
JK, but you would be surprised how many people seem to think that’s what you should do. It’s the opposite of what you should do.
I’ve usually found the ‘not interested’ and ‘don’t recommend channel’ options to work fairly well, if you’re actually as far in as the video player, pausing, clicking dislike and backing out ought to also have some effect - the purpose of the dislike button is supposed to be for training the algorithm, not just expressing a general dislike of the content.