Personal experience sharing time. I use YouTube heavily, and even pay for YT Premium.

The other day a little modal appeared on the side of youtube.com desktop saying something like, "Curious for new stuff? Explore content that isn't what you usually watch."

It ended up being sorta like an alternate reality. It was all the topics I usually watch, but with different channels I don't normally see at all. In other words, it was as if all the channels I normally watch don't exist, what else would exist to fill the void.

I'm not who you're replying to, but at least for me, I've found a way of keeping the recommendations on check.

https://i.imgur.com/XIRW4U2.jpeg

When opening videos that are sent to me by others, I always use a private window, so my main account is pretty low "variance".

When I find a creator I like, I do a "fake binge", by queuing all their recent videos and some old ones too and playing them unattended.

I also try to minimize my use of the recommendation sidebar, since it usually shows content related to the current video rather than the more general recommendations of the home page.

When something foreign sneaks its way to my home page, I immediately click "not interested", paying attention to not hover the thumbnail.

Overall, Youtube has got me trained pretty well, but at least I get some nice recommendations out of it, so much so in fact that over half the recommendations I get are usually videos I have already watched (even if Youtube thinks I haven't yet for whatever reason).

When you depart from your usual intake, some departures are a lot more powerful than others. Sometimes you watch something new and YouTube spends days pushing similar stuff into your face. Other times you watch something new and only see one or two relevant recommendations mixed into your usual fare. My hypothesis is that YouTube knows that particular topics and particular content are associated with usage patterns that make money for them, and the algorithm is alert to any possibility of pushing users into those patterns.

What they watch is shaped by recommendations, but I think most are also aware of it. For example, when I want to watch something about basketball I typically go to YouTube and there are recommendations of what to watch. There are probably millions of basketball videos, but YouTube is going to show me a handful based on previous videos I've watched and liked. I'm not surprised to see certain content creators more than others. But at the same time if they did a poor job of recommendation (like Spotify) then I'd probably just go and search through channels that I know I like.

The Explore page seems to be globally-curated stuff not based on personal taste, so it seems like the opposite of recommended.

And is that the main page for you? When I open the website or the Android app I get "Home". "Explore" is a separate tab. "Home" is pretty much filled with recommendations from channels I've watched recently, no corporate stuff (excluding ads).

I do see the issue of recommendations being flooded with one topic you've watched recently, but I generally don't have too much of a problem with it. When the recommendations stop being relevant/interesting to me, I tend to shut off YouTube.

What do you consider "independent news"?

The majority of "independent news" have a highly partisan or highly unreliable tilt (both to the Left and to the Right): https://adfontesmedia.com/static-mbc/

Interestingly enough, most people complain about the opposite: that if you watch some piece of slightly tilted piece of content on YouTube, the recommendation goes wholehog and pushes you towards the same radicalization direction, and so you start by watching someone complaining about Feminist Frequency and before you notice you're getting recommended White Nationalist content.

If anything it's probably good that if you're watching "independent news", that the algorithm tries to moderate you with some mainstream content...