I turn off my watch history and recommendations and mainly stick to channel I know or deliberately search ot
this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2026
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i don't use its recommendation system, i subscribe to a few good channels i know through rss
I gotta find a way to watch their videos without logging in.
I use PipePipe on mobile, FreeTube on desktop
Invidious is a third party web frontend for YouTube, and NewPipe (or one of its forks like Pipepipe) are third party Android apps for YouTube.
Also, if I remember right, you can get RSS feeds of channels and keep up with their new videos that way.
I use Tor Browser to find videos and download to watch with yt-dlp. I used to use Freetube app which was also good.
How do you get past the Google cookie gate keeping page on yt-dlp?
I’ve not seen that issue for maybe a year. I use the Parabolic flatpak app which uses yt-dlp under the hood. Sometimes Google has the upper hand for a week or two, but then the app catches up.
When they feed you things you don't want, click the three dots under the preview window and select "Don't Recommend Channel"
This is what I do diligently when I see a slow thumbnail and have a second to spare. I hope others do the same and we vote this shit into oblivion.
You can add "before:2023" to filter out a lot of it when searching. Doesn't work for everything, obviously you won't find yesterday's news or info on the newest games that way. But I think it's good hygiene for very broad topics. Beyond that, if it recommends me some new channel, I check the account history and try to see if they were already uploading similar looking videos before the early 20s. If not, I treat it as suspect.
Tho even before the recent AI boom, there was plenty of other low effort (via other means) slop out there.
There's different levels. Are you looking for a filtering to avoid seeing anything potential, something on the video to indicate AI, how to tell at the start it might be AI? The first is probably the hardest to do, and if there is a way to do it you'll either get a lot of false positives (so miss real content) or stuff will still get through. Easiest is to weed out channels as you find them. Don't rely on YT's little AI marker, like everything else it's automated and will tag anything remotely suggestive of AI (but maybe isn't).