YouTube used to be things people made for fun, now it's all content made for clicks and monetisation. It's just cable TV but non-linear (which in the TV business means you can choose what to watch next, not have a fixed selection of live channels).

My YouTube isn't that.

But it has taken a heavy hand with the "Don't Show Channel Again" and the hand is getting heavier over time. YouTube seems to have some idea that I am uninterested in the dozens of AI slop TTS + AI slop animation channels that are popping up every day but it keeps probing me, just in case maybe I've changed my mind.

It also takes a certain amount of discipline. While it's not like my feed is nothing but high-brow university channels, you do want to make sure you don't leave any cute animal videos or reaction videos accidentally clicked on or anything else you don't want to see hundreds more videos of in your watch history. If you do decide to watch some junk you have to remove the junk from your watch history. I have no illusions that removing things from my watch history has anything to do with "privacy" but it definitely does impact The Algorithm, and I've seen little evidence that The Algorithm is using those videos anyhow... it really does seem to 100% remove them from consideration.