There's a "don't recommend channel" option if you click the 3 dots button on a video.

I use this liberally for all sorts of reasons and it makes my recommendations much better.

I have done it a lot for around a year, but i think than the block list is very limited, because after a will the same "blocked" channels come back again in the list. I have now stopped to use this fake feature. I am sure of it because i regularly block official news or music channels, but they appear again anyway after a wile.

It's the same for the "not interested" feature. I have stop to tell them, when asked, why i am not interested (mainly because i have already see the video). The same already "not interested" videos, already viewed and already liked videos show up again after a wile anyway...

Sounds familiar, my post from 7 months ago:

"I would love to see someone look deep into Twitch recommendation system - last time I tested the thing they call "Feedback" is a rolling buffer and wont let you exclude more than ~100 things, adding more simply removed oldest entries and starts spamming you with things you already excluded in the past. This looked like performance optimization (less things to track per user)."

Why isn't this a variant on a bloom filter that supports deletion? eg vacuum filter

I am convinced the not interested button does absolutely nothing.

I'm baffled by people who says things like this. I make heavy use of both "Not Interested" and "Don't recommend Channel". They don't do as much as I would like (why oh why does Youtube insist on thinking I'm interested in obscure Rap/Hip Hop?), but I can clearly see recommendations shift over time. Marking any single video doesn't seem to do much, but marking 5-10 similar videos (mostly) does something.

Paid promotion (by channels) breaks past the barriers... It's part of the conflict of maintaining the illusion that sponsored content is what gets first placement throughout YouTube.

Its also maddening to content creators how newly upload content lists only feature paid promotional content every time. That's also exactly what makes certain (paid) content look massively popular over everything else, even when the production values are sub-par.

It does at least blacklist that exact video.

The "don't recommend channel" feature works fine for me, but I have probably blocked only a few hundred channels.

I have this exact problem on YouTube and spotify.

this isn't true. I have clicked "no interested" on hundreds of videos and channels. It works

Everyone on platforms now has a different experience because of configuration and account maturity. Invalidating another user's experience because of yours is not helpful to meaningful discussion. I did not downvote you though.

A much better approach is to go to your history and delete it from your history (if you're signed in) this will change your recommendations so much harder.

Here's one better: just disable the watch history. Your subscriptions then have a much bigger influence on recommendations and you have more control.

For some reason that only shows up in certain webviews (I’m not interested in the app)

You're right, it shows up on the youtube homepage as well as the recommendations on the right side, but not for a particular video while watching it.

In other words, strategically hidden where you would want it most.

I can’t isolate what particular view but there have been times in some list view where I want to eliminate videos but the option isn’t there.

I've blocked entire accounts, because it kept coming back every time i searched for something specific. It was one of these "10 best <xyz>" channels. Really annoying.

Top 10 videos are so often just complete crap. Every once in a while you will get a decent production, and even rarer you get one of those that isn't also an ad for something (looking at you, MrWhoseTheBoss). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wz_xJPN7lAY comes to mind as one of the "good ones". But the format is just so perfect for what YouTube as a platform rewards.

I have been using it most recently to shield myself from an avalanche of Depp and Heard trial clips seemingly created to support Depp.

Random jordan peterson clips were the worst. Once it started, it took months to die out despite me clicking don't recommend several dozens of times.

uBlock breaks that menu though, so it's a hassle to turn it off, block it and then turn it back on. Especially since you have to refresh and youtube randomizes the recommendations again and sometimes hides all traces of that channel.

works fine with no issues at all for me on uBlock origin. unless you're talking about literal uBlock, which i can't comment on.

yup.. any YT links that are sent by friends.. I open in incognito mode to not ruin my recommendations

Youtube has a history tab, my advice is to go through it and remove videos that you don't want recommended.

I learned this the hard way after watching a few videos about a particular person who had a fatal disease and then overnight my Youtube recommendations all turned into videos about cancer.

I use bookmarks. It sucks that you can't organize your subscriptions into folders.

You can go to “history” and remove it.