Why Youtube's recommendations are now days are weird and possible solutions to the issues

WTF is with that word salad title? AI generation?

They just didn't know how to write nowadays, happens when you're not maybe English speaker or have poor vocabulary because you don't read enough
- Also a superflous "are".

I'm back to subbing to my favorite creators because the algorithm has been so fucking random for the past weeks. Nothing even makes sense.

I don't know if that was their intention or not, but the YT homepage is now worthless to me

Yeah, I've been doing this for a couple years, since recommendations became useless. At least 50% of recommendations are things I've already seen (and I do have history turned on). I also use SmartTubeNext, which let's me filter out shorts.
- SmartTube is so much better than the official app. Same for Revanced

I turned off my Youtube history, and now my YouTube home page is just a message asking me to turn it back on. It's weird.

I found a browser addon that just redirects the home page to my subscription page. There was nothing of note on the home page before and there sure as hell isn’t now
- Do you remember what the addon was called?
  *edit: Nevermind - found it! https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-sub-redirect/?utm_source=addons.mozilla.org&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=search
Same, but am standing strong on my decision. If they want to chase me away, I'll find a different place.
- There are alternatives these days. Which is cool.
They recently announced they'd be doing this for people with history turned off.
- It's so much better.. subscribing I much better than their algorithm.

I noticed earlier the same video I just "not interested" actually appeared twice on the next refresh not only did they ignore my effort but they doubled down.

I feel like the algorithm for recommendations hasn't changed much in years. It's decent, better than a lot of other recommendation algorithms. The not interested options have always done jack shit. I can't count how many times I've not interested a video and told it I had already watched it. Only for it to consistently recommend me other videos I've already watched. You'd think after the 100th time selecting I wasn't interested in videos I've already watched, that it would get the clue.

I like to listen to creepypasta stories when I'm going to sleep, youtube has been insisting on showing me 2 hour long videos about the Decline of ancient cities.... how we get from dumb horror stories to the fall of some empire from 500ad is beyond me.
Yeah, not interested doesn't do much but don't recommend channel is flawless for me

I switched to watching YT in an incognito window.