> I'm a huge fan of the Youtube recommendation algorithm, and I find it works extremely well for me. This fascinates me. I'd guesstimate that roughly 60% of t

> I'm a huge fan of the Youtube recommendation algorithm, and I find it works extremely well for me. This fascinates me. I'd guesstimate that roughly 60% of the recommendations I get from YouTube are for videos I've already seen. (To be fair I "watch" a decent amount of music on YouTube, so maybe I'm disproportionately likely to rewatch videos I've seen before.) Another 30% is content based on misinterpretation of my political beliefs, like "you watched a critical analysis of a Prager U video, maybe you'd like these 6 Trump-stanning videos from Newsmax". The political thing seems like an obvious blindspot in the YouTube recommendation algorithm to me. Going all the way back to 2015 YouTube seems unable to distinguish between "critical of establishment Democrats" and "intellectual-dark-web / pro-Trump" interests. I'll watch one lefty "breadtube" video that's critical of someone like Biden or Pelosi or complimentary to someone like AOC or Sanders and get Newsmax/OAN/Fox-and-Friends video recommendations for a week. More generally it seems to me that YouTube's recommendation engine is far too volatile and heavily influenced by recently watched content. A one-off, slightly out-of-character view will noticeably taint my recommendations for a week or two. In contrast I'd say Spotify, Google Music (before it was folded into YouTube), Netflix, Twitter, Amazon Prime, or even Pocket-via-Firefox does OK - not great but acceptably well - so I don't think I'm especially inscrutable. I'm curious about your experience with this. I have moderately broad interests, I feel like it shouldn't be hard to come up with something I would find interesting but it virtually never seems to happen organically on YouTube. I've always just assumed they were optimizing for something other than things I would consciously find interesting or engaging. For example I'm guessing that triggering "outrage" is probably a good way to drive engagement (comments, shares, etc.). I don't really do either of those things regardless but I'm pretty sure that strategy works in general. Do you find that YouTube frequently recommends novel content you enjoy? Is that even what they (or your company) is trying to do?