Not knowing anything about the guts of youtube, I'd bet that it actually does optimize for videos it thinks you might like. Unfortunately, it doesn't know anyth

Not knowing anything about the guts of youtube, I'd bet that it actually does optimize for videos it thinks you might like. Unfortunately, it doesn't know anything about you so it assumes you're a random denizen of the internet. Even more unfortunately, far more of the internet is 4chan than HN. 95% of the subreddits I've seen would answer a simple query about antarctica with ten pages of obvious trolling and "ironic" conspiracy-theory videos. And that's as good as it'll ever be because further improvement would require detailed personalization that they can't implement because the bad PR would destroy them.