Each day I go to the YouTube app on Roku to my subscriptions tab and watch whatever is new. Then I go to Recommend and it's 90% or more previous videos from those same subscriptions and very little new creators it hasn't showed me.

After almost a year of this it figured out last week I might like AronRa, a person I'm very familiar with. And after countless videos on anthropology, evolution and paleontology he should have come up so much sooner.
So much for big data.

But what is completely lacking is a "show me completely random stuff, old, new, not in my algorithm, short, long, completely against my algorithm, etc." it lacks almost any way to discover new stuff that isn't 100% related to content you already have.

YouTube gets more uploads than any one person can possibly watch and yet it's almost incapable of showing me something unless I explicitly tell it to find it for me.

You too can get his by disabling history

They are really pushing you to log in. This was not YouTube a year ago.
Upside, you skip all the brain rot videos.

no ads
no algorithm
no preset slop machine

a gentle reminder to use my own decisions in what to search and watch

true zen

Your title makes this sound like a bad thing, but this looks like it would probably be preferable over being shown whatever it is YouTube wants you to see.

Still remember the first time I saw this. It was the last time I touched YouTube for a looong time.

It would cost them absolutely nothing to show a feed of hot/high rated/popular videos. Throwing in some entropy such that it doesn't only show the most viewed videos globally wouldn't be hard at all either. They're just openly stating that they don't want you there at all if they can't track your viewership.

Yes and no, I don't have an account but I also don't use the frontpage because why would I, it's empty. When you watch a video you still get the recommendations in the sidebar.

In fact if you disable history it will refuse to show you things even after you search something.

On the home screen yes, but you do still get search results.

Its not this simple, it looks like this to me on my fairly locked down browser (firefox), but on a fresh profile (image attached), that page is populated. I assume its a cookie setting, as I see the same behavior when I turn off tracking protection and ad blockers. I didn't play around beyond that.

Yes, that's what I meant. The home screen will just continue to inform you that your history is off. You can only sign out or browse your subscriptions.

YouTube should have never sold out to Google. Such a shame

I'm not defending yt, but I am curious to know how specifically this isn't mostly an overreaction if possible

You guys are signing in?

Best we can do is some Jordan Peterson videos and something where trump appears to be yelling.

Tried this on a private window, and yes, that's what it looks like. Thought I'd click on Shorts and let the first 3 seconds of the opening auto-play video play. Then back to the home page and wow, full of absolute trash.

I see no problem with this, what with all the recommended slop

Looks wonderful to me!

You watch one ContraPoints video about Jordan B Peterson and the next thing you know ... Still not any JBP video recommendations. So I guess there is an upside to the failure of big data.

No matter how frugal the surface, underneath it's all still there. Also something to remember when using Google search. the fact that it's all white and clean does not mean it's minimal.