Maybe it's finding some connection like math<->rap-focused music theory (lots of triplets)<->rap. I like an eclectic timeline, and YouTube could be optimizing for that, but I can see how it would be annoying if you don't dig that.
Those are all things I like, but I don’t want most of them most of the time — and YouTube gives me no way to signal what state I’m in. And because it shoves them all in a large pile, I get very few if any recommendations related to what Im looking for right now.
People are faceted, but YouTube fails to design UX to accommodate that reality — instead trying to be everything at once and so failing to be anything, ever.
I don't know about in the apps, but the web page has a row of tags above the videos that let you filter by topic. They're personalized, so you might have tags for those topics.
