How am I not surprised? Shorts is video equivalent of cancer.

I assume its a cookie setting, as I see the same behavior when I turn off tracking protection and ad blockers.

It goes way deeper than that. Fingerprinting is a whole thing. Your IP, combined with some characteristics about your browser, operating system and hardware... pretty unique.

Interesting to see what YT "thinks" about you.

I see 1995 twice there.

I still feel like they could make an effort to show whats popular in the region at that time. Instead we're being tunneled into bubbles and asked to watch the same stuff over and over.

Yeah and you can get to the most popular short form stuff with one click but not long form. Its like. Well since we are trying to compete and take over this area here we will put some minimal effort forth.

Probably cookies, I did another quick test and created a new profile. The front page was unpopulated. I went to a technology connections video, and the refreshed the front page. It was populated, cleared stored information, (history, cookies, cache, etc...) and when I refreshed the homepage it was blank again.

The fairly default browser I used to take the screenshot is to watch some free with ads movies on youtube, most recently was waterworld, fun to watch, makes no sense.

I don't know what you're talking about. I love my reccomended videos. I just watched a video about the reasons so many old subway stations use tile on the walls.

Spoiler alert, it's because in the early 19th century these stations were poorly lit, and white tile reflects light. So it made a small amount of light act as a bigger source of light. Plus it doesn't degrade and break down like paint or wood does over time.

Just one example of something that I would have never even wondered, but now I watched an interesting video explaining it. There was more to it than that, but I'm not going to go point by point of the video.

Signed in? There's your problem.

Start fresh - search for, I dunno, "bread recipes" and bang-zoom, your suggested next video is something about how wonderful fascism is.

My recommended is decent but every now and then it'll try to throw some weird shit in there. Loves recommending me off-shoot Fox channels because I have the main one blocked. Seems like every few months it pops up. But yeah, I get a lot of MTB, Motocross, and OSRS stuff cause it's what I tend to watch. Some random car YouTubers (Rob Dahm ILY) and random video essays about interesting stuff.

This is always what my YouTube homepage looks like because I only access it in ghostery browser, using a ghost tab by default (like incognito/private/inprivate, but because ghostery, also blocks tracking, cookies, etc.)

I typically completely close the browser between links (it’s my default link handling browser for Lemmy), so it gets reset frequently enough to have nothing on home if I actually navigate there.

Ok but I'm pretty sure it's like this because if they make recommendations they go from being a social media company to a publisher, so they can't make recommendations not based on what things you watch through the algorithm. And if you don't have an account they aren't (at least officially) tracking what you watch to make recommendations.

You get a handful of results, after which you just get "recommended" AI slop shorts and completely irrelevant "suggestions".

If YT Red gave me the option to disable Shorts and "suggestions" I might pay for it but you can't pay your way out of this hellhole.

Oh.....yeah. I don't get ANY of that. I get weird random shit, and I'm like "Yeah, sure, let's watch this video on the mating habbits of ladybugs! Why not?"

Spoiler alert, the concept of cuckolding absolutely exists in the world of ladybugs. She makes her mate watch as she fucks other ladybugs. No, I'm not joking. That's a thing. Thanks youtube!

It’s cookies for sure. I use Firefox Focus on my phone and it clears cookies after every session. Blank front page of YT.

Private browsing window with Librewolf on my computer? Blank front page.

Holy shit it works, and transforms the front page into an ABSOLUTE NIGHTMARE

I'm like, "Is this what normal people in 2025 watch?" I feel like an alien on earth, except the planet changed and not me.

Good to know. As my posting history on Lemmy will show I definitely watch bread recipes videos.
In fact I became a mod for c/cooking today.

I never spent enough time on YouTube for it to develop its algorithm for me. I watch like 2 videos a week maybe, usually searching for something specific, and most of the recs for me have always been obscure clickbait I'm not interested in seeing

Better than whatever brains of garbage would come up of it was just giving you a default based off what's popular.

They probably got tired of those videos where people see how quickly you can fall down an alt-right rabbit hole directly from the home page on a fresh account.

The only way to use YouTube.