Crafting YouTube to Reduce Extreme and Clickbait Suggestions, page 1

I use YouTube to only view videos and don't participate in the social media aspect of it, so there are some features I don't use, such as comments and thumbs up/down. There was a point a c couple of years ago that I nearly quit using YouTube, not because of Google's data collection practices but because of the inflammatory and Clickbait video suggestions. Frankly, I find both extremism and it's ad generating cousin, Clickbait, to be distasteful. Ultimately, this content is a waste of time driving division and/or fear into people.

For the past 6 months, I've been clicking on 'Dont Recommend Channel' for any video that contains flames, emotional faces, and Clickbait titles. At first, my efforts were unsuccessful, as there seemed to be a never ending stream of channels that offered this content. After a while, I thought it was impossible to clear my feed of this useless "entertainment".

Then, about a month ago, the tides changes and more content in my feed was moderate, non-Clickbait videos. Inspired, I began to hunt down channels by searching for Clickbait content then searching the videos on the right hand side and rejecting similar useless videos.

Even more so, since I value seeing situations from multiple perspectives, I began to spiral out slowly from the moderate content to both left, right, and 3rd party. Now the content I receive has a range of political, technical, economic, and hobby driven content. The best part of this, is that the political perspectives are varying without the extremist view.

There are times when an unwanted video pops up, especially if I investigate one side's or another's far perspective, but it's quickly remedied with the method above.

It's possible to craft YouTube to leave the extremist views it seems to trap us in, if enough effort is applied.