I have an extension that can individually disable all the most useless/addicting components of the Youtube site, such as shorts and whatnot. On the search page, I have turned on:
hide Shorts
hide For You
hide Trending
hide 'People Also Searched For'
hide Search Categories
hide Promoted Videos
hide Promoted Websites
hide Suggested Products
Do you know what Youtube has started doing? They are now inserting engagement slop DIRECTLY into the search results, as seen in the image above. It's literally a short, yet it's inserted like a video so you're forced to see it. The only possible way to remove it is by using a privacy frontend, as even on incognito mode, Youtube will look at the three videos you've watched and start inserting shit based off that.
Louis Rossman is right, they all have rapist mentalities... "just let me stick it in"
Yeah, tbh, the insane focus on privacy makes YouTube a lot worse, no shit. The algorithm just throws shit at the wall hoping it sticks, what do you expect?
Make a burner account only for YouTube. See how the quality goes up because you can follow people you are actually interested in.
I personally really don't see the privacy risk with that? (then again, I gave up on the idea of true privacy online years ago. Privacy through obscurity is enough. I don't care big companies recognize my habits, as long as they don't know 100% exactly who I am.)
You can subscribe without an account using third party clients like NewPipe or FreeTube
You can subscribe but you can’t comment without an account. I know YouTube has a terrible reputation for the low quality of comments but that’s exclusively a large channel problem. Small, niche channels actually have decent discussions.
Even viewing comments has been broken on Newpipe and frontends for a while.
Use pipepipe. You can view comments there.
But you dont get the algorithmic recommendations.