How often do you use YouTube? Personally I am a very heavy user and in my experience the obsession with a new video kind you watch only lasts for a few recommendations unless you lean into it.

I would guess about two thirds of the channels I consistently watch I originally discovered through algorithm recommendations. I think it works extremely well.

That's because you fit into YT's conception of how viewers behave. For people who don't fit into "normal"-ish behaviour it has little utility.

For me, probably 90% of what I watch I'm not interested in and often I'm repelled by. This is because I mostly watch to find out what things I'm not familiar with are.

For example let's say I'm a liberal. I'm not going to watch liberal political videos because I know generally what they're going to say and I don't need my political views stroked in order to be happy. But I will watch various other political videos, no matter how extreme or not, so I can be at least a little familiar with their behaviour and views.

YT can't cope with this. To their systems I seem to be randomly picking videos with no correlation with the subject matter or other users and no reinforcing pattern. It just gives up and recommends things based on the behaviour of the general population, as if they had no data on me at all.

I think you raise an important point. The youtube algorithm is pretty bad if you don't use youtube very much or only use to consume very popular content. Youtube's recommendations used to be terrible for me, too, but sometime last year I crossed a threshold and since then it has been recommending a lot of small, highly specific channels that nevertheless are great fits. My wife's recommendations are still utter garbage though.

> How often do you use YouTube?

Every day, averaging 2-3 hours. It's background for working and foreground for evening viewing.

Is the Explore page controlled by videos I watched ? Because there isn't a single video on it i would watch. Not one.