Just keep being led around by the nose and you will be fine.

Those are the defaults videos and "sections" you'll get on the YT homepage if you have a "fresh" history. It also shows you the current trending videos based on your country or your language.

You think that's bad? What about when you see just a single video about something and Youtube decides that it must mean you want to watch everything about that?

Like when a stupid video with a clickbait title gets you one day, say you wanted to see how stupid this thing must actually be and you get the answer within the first ten seconds, very stupid.

Now get ready for your recommended videos to be nothing but "THE CRINGIEST KID ON THE INTERNET ATTEMPTS TO RAP" or "YOUTUBER PEES IN HIS OWN MOUTH" for a whole fucking week!

Yeah, it is kind of hard to find pro No Man's Sky videos on Youtube, I agree. :)


Is that possible to do without logging in and effectively letting Google not only track every video you watch but actually knowing who you are also?

Personally I use Youtube without an account and have cookies blocked. Virtually every solution to every youtube related problem I've ever seen someone suggest "you can disable that" requires logging into youtube in order to use it and requires cookies be enabled for the site to work properly. In a sense the only way to reduce their "tracking" is to enable browser features and use the site in a way that facilitates easier tracking of what you watch and who you are.

Unless I'm missing something obvious to others... :)

Well, at least they don't seem to be using browser fingerprinting or evercookies yet (at least for that purpose). Neither of those are bothered whatsoever by clearing your cookies. While the latter can be removed, it's rather annoying as it's stored in multiple places and forms, and the former doesn't require local storage methods at all.
It is rather paradoxical, don't you agree?
"If you log in and thus let us track a lot more data, you can ask us to not use that data to give you recommendations (it is still being tracked and stored, just in case you wish to turn it back on, and because we make money off it)."

Err no, obviously.
But it's the way less anonymous searches that bug me the most.
It has become quite impossible to remain totally unknown after Android, though..

Indeed. The only consequence I've found of disabling cookies on Youtube is the comments don't work, which is actually a pretty cool feature of its own. :)

They still manage to track what I view somehow though and I don't have flash installed or any other plugins, and have cookies and localStorage disabled. I presume they're using unique image caching with metadata for tracking or some other sinister crap.

Seems we humans can barely have subjective or rhetorical conversations any more without prefacing them within the constructs of technology. We are slowly abandoning our own agency and personal freedom of thought. Bit alarming if you ask me.

To the question I'd say that confirmation bias is a real thing because it's intellectual fast food. Why accept a countering point of view when you can just look at a group of people who agree with you and assume that your position is the correct one because a greater number people agree with you rather than the opposing idea? At a certain level everything becomes about weights and measures, and that of course answers part of the question as to why large corporations are pretending to give a shit about you believe. You're just a number, and to do proper analytics or system engineering, you need LOTS of numbers added into the big math meat grinder.

Just think for yourself and do your own research (studying and understanding all sides/solutions to an idea/problem). Also realize that while you do this as a free thinking snowflake that very few shits are going to be given about your own interpretations, views, or principles. We can promise the idea of safe spaces and protection of bad ideas against good ones, but those spaces will always crumble in the face of evidence and convincing argument.

There are far more YT channels supporting a popular belief system than channels supporting a different value system.

So surely it must be a numbers game to some extent: if there are many more videos being made in favour of X as opposed to being against X, your search result should reflect this uneven distribution.

In gaming for example, you will find tonnes more videos giving favourable reviews of Skyrim than videos giving it a negative review, so a search for Skyrim reviews will predictably result in a one-sided perspective of the game.

You can always find well-argued alternative viewpoints on YT but they can be very difficult to find.

In my experience, most of the channels that offer them don't tend to last very long. They don't attract many views - since they are not mainstream opinions - and the channel owner thus shuts everything down, since it may not be worth all the effort.

Historically I've had better luck with regular webpages and blogs, not YT channels.

If you want to have your opinions on a topic challenged, the best way I can think of is to find someone on Twitter with an opposing view and search their account for things related to the topic in question. You can almost always count on the confirmation bias of others to provide you with articles, Youtube videos, and links to other users with similar opinions who have even more content like that. And once you get a few Youtube videos like that under your belt, recommendations tend to sway in that direction and make it easier.

Ha, true story. Awhile back I found a movie reviewer I really liked, and she had a video about attending a furry convention that piqued my interest because of how out of left field it seemed. Clicking was a mistake because Youtube suddenly decided that every recommended video needed to be about furry stuff from then on. It's kind of amazing how fast you can learn about the "I'm not interested in recommendations based on (video)" button when sufficiently motivated.

I was wondering the same thing a while back, but my experience was quite the opposite. I was in the market for a new pistol and had narrowed my prefrences down to a few specific models. I was checking around online for reviews and found some YouTube reviews that also offered comparisons to other models I was interested in. After watching a few of these videos I started getting recommendations for similar videos and some produced by the NRA. I also got a lot of recommendations for what I call the idiot gun videos. These are things like "let's make a bullet out of play-dough and shoot a watermelon with it just to see what happens" or "funniest gun fails". I hate these because they glamorize or humorize deadly irresponsible behaivor. "Oh hey, let's give this 90 pound weakling a .44 Magnum to shoot, it will be hilarious when the gun flies out of thier hand and hits them in the face!!" That's not funny, people have been killed by stupid stuff like this. But I figured it was the YouTube algorithm equating all videos where someone shoots a gun as being in the same category. Then I got recommended some videos that were very anti-gun, the kind where some dude sits behind a desk and talks about how evil guns are and if only knuckle dragging rednecks could get a clure the world would be a better place.

This made me wonder what kind of math was running in the YouTube servers that made them think this would be something I'd want to watch. Does watching a video called "Which model Glock should I Buy" automatically make YouTube decide I also need to see one called "Gun Owners are Weak Cowards"? Maybe, but that's going a bit into tinfoil hat territory so I dig further. If I were to do a Ven Diagram of people on both sides of this issue would there be an overlap of those who watch Funny Gun Fail videos? Perhaps this is all a bizzare coincidence because I also watched the movie trailer for Chi-Raq? I know there has been some recent controversy around sites like Facebook or Twitter purposely editing bias iinto individual posts and tweets so it wouldn't surprise me to learn YouTube does the same.

I thought about setting up some alternate YouTube accocounts to each focus on a different viewpoint of politically charged subjects just to see what happens. Then I remembered that I actually have a life.