How can I get YouTube to not offer rage-inducing stuff?

Turn off all history tracking for youtube (disables all recommendations). Rely solely on your subscriptions

I have the exact opposite advice lol
Edit: privacy aside, it does work. YT shows rage inducing content because it wants engagement more than anything. My algorithm is so trained now that it can show me stuff I'll actually enjoy and want to engage with and therefore it doesn't bother showing me that crap
- Exactly! There should be a browser extension for training YouTube's algorithm and even other ones. I've been very comitted to never feeding that beast after midnight, so I thoroughly enjoy content thatd positive as much as I want.
This is the only way. I've been doing it for years, in part because I absolutely hate catered content based on what I've viewed/read. Doing so only increases silos. At least with reddit (RIP)/Lemmy you pick from a potpourri of silos that are don't change depending on what I've read.
- This is the only way.
  No, that's just the only way to do it without putting in any effort.
  I've have history enabled for years and I don't get much of the complaints people have about YouTube; my recommendations are fine and I usually find other channels I like that way, anything I don't like I dislike and mark as not interested and that type of content goes away after a handful of markings.
  I understand the want of not being silo'd, but at the same time, I know what kind of brain rot YouTube can offer, so I'm happy to solo myself away from that dreck.
I think that would give you the worst content on YouTube in your feed...
- It literally turns off that feed you're talking about?
  “How do I get rid of political recommendations filling my feed”
  At the extreme end - turn the feed off entirely. Then you dont get a homepage filled with political recommendations.
  What am I misunderstanding?

Keep ignoring the videos and choosing "don't recommend this channel", eventually they will diminish.

My shorts feed cleaned up eventually like this.

YT wants to keep you watching YT, so:

stop watching rage bait videos
watch only videos you want on your feed
thumbs up videos you want more of
"not interested" videos you dont want
hide users that post rage bait material
66 😈

Hide no longer works. The only thing it does is stop them from showing up in the comments of videos you post.
I kept seeing a commenter in a genre of video I watch, and wanted to get rid of them, but there is no way to block or hide a user except to remove them from the comments on your channel.

Stop clicking on them. YT shows it to you because it has seen you open them and watch a chunk of the video. The algorithm is dumb and can't tell whether you watch because you like it or hate watch them. It just knows you make engagement and revenue whenever it shows you that, so it does it more.

This isn’t true. I’m constantly getting recommended all kinds of crazy right wing video nonsense and I have never clicked on a single one nor has the only other person in my house. They are picking up on something else or just pushing those videos in general.
- Some seemingly-innocuous channels just happen to appeal to fascists and become arbitrary entrances to the right wing YT pipeline.
  I’ve noticed Big Think, Sabine Hossenfelder, lots of economics videos, and lots of less-reputable science channels tend to spur a rash of neocon content.
- This so much. Years ago I've had it push Moon landing denial videos in my recommendations, even though I've never watched videos on conspiracies or anything of the sort at the time. The closest I got were pop-sci channels such as Vsauce, Numberphile... It's just trying to hook you onto the garbage content and garbage ideas because they have good and loyal viewership.

When a video pops up that you find upsetting or irrelevant, click on the "Not interested" option. You'll have the chance to provide feedback on why you don't like the video. This helps YouTube understand your preferences better and refine future suggestions.

To keep YT under control: Firefox is my web browser, with the uBlock Origin extension installed. So, all Shorts/Suggestions, 'News' and 'Related content' are now automatically removed from YT '(easy to achieve with uBlock Origin when using Firefox).

😍🥰 Firefox + uBlockOrigin

And whenever Google/YT suggests me some turd content, I dislike it and ask it to not suggest the channel/content anymore.

In the end, my feed is mostly made of stuff I enjoy watching, with so little noise that it can not be considered an issue.

Go into your watch history and delete all of the rage inducing videos. YouTube generates recommendations directly from your watch history (as well as subscriptions etc).

Then subscribe to channels you really like that don’t enrage you! I highly recommend hobby-focused and science-based channels. There are tons of them out there and they have great content!

Apparently the gardening and eco/tiny-house world is very wholesome, because that's 75% of what I watch (not including music) and I never see recommendations for ragebait.

Stay within your sub box. If you want to watch recommended, stay within the video you are watching right now.

This is my personal advice as well. I completely turned off my watch history thus making YouTube replace my home page with a search bar. Whenever I want to watch videos i just go to my subscriptions

Safest way is to block chanels. It's a bit of a constant work, but at least I avoid falling twice for the same idiot.

I've been really diligent about that but I'm realizing that 99% of channels are garbage. Instead I just search for specific things in youtube and don't really click on anything recommended to me, unless I'm looking to fall asleep since youtube knows I like long videos.

I watch gaming and science stuff and my feed is filled with gaming and science stuff.

Agreed, though I wish youtubes algorithm was able to take into account video release date. Sometimes most of the science youtubers happen to be on a break and I end up watching a higher proportion of gaming content which then further kills the science content in my feed until I manually search it out again.
- I get stuff over a year old but I don't watch the latest necessarily so it may have learned I don't care about the date.

Personally I prefer not to be fed by the algorithm. I bookmarked 'subscriptions', check for new ones and if there aren't any I go do something else.

On a video in a video list page there should be a "..." menu next to the title. It has options for "hiding" the video and "don't recommend channel". I can't comment on how effective those are, but they might give the algorithm some hints about what you want to watch.

In addition, if you have stuff on your watch history that you don't want to see more of, you can go to https://www.youtube.com/feed/history and remove them. Allegedly that stops them being used to decide what videos are recommended.

Use Newpipe.

Sponsorblock, ublock origin(don’t use chrome), and Unhook are nice browser extensions to help remove much of the bullshit.

Subscribe to creators you like instead of just watching random shit?

Lol I row like 15h/week. Stereotypes are awesome.

How can I get Lemmy to stop all the political stuff

Subscribe only to communities you want, and then use your subscribed feed instead of the local or all feeds.
I blocked a lot of communities.
- I have over 200 in my block list, it took a while to curate Lemmy to where I wanted, but its a much better experience than reddit now!
- I did this today and it feels refreshing!

this is radical suggestion, but maybe dont use youtube? its working for me.

I like the idea. Can you elaborate, please? Did you stop, or did you never start? Do you use something else instead? How do you wind down or get a quick laugh?
- so, i just stopped going directly to youtube and switched to doomscrolling a meme-excessive feed [for humor]. youtube still pops up in fediverse feeds, and i will watch some things from there, but i'm not going directly to the domain.
  ive never really appreciated video on the web. i prefer to stream locally. the few youtube videos i want (usually obscure vhs copies of old shit), i have my kid download into out media center.
- Permanently Deleted

Subscribe to the channels you like, tell Youtube to stop reccing outrage-mongers

Turn off history. It makes the homepage blank, and you will only see your subscriptions. But, there are still recommendations in the side bar you will have to ignore.

Browsing YouTube on incognito does the same, I believe.

Find a healthy hobby out-of-doors.

Don’t log in, clear your cache, use a vpn

I have a question

Why is election stuff rage inducing? Like what’s an example of a thumbnail you would see that would induce rage?

Example: Thumbnail with Trump and some other guy i dont know, big caption: "OH MY GOD!" Video title: "Trump Released the MOST EMBARRASSING Video EVER & You HAVE to Watch it! | Bulkwark Takes"
I assume it is designed to induce rage.
- I highly recommend the DeArrow extension. I was on a waiting list after installing, for a few days, and then once I got access it has made the entire YouTube experience much better.
  The extension removes clickbait thumbnails (replacing them with a part of the video itself), and clickbait titles are replaced with more accurate descriptions. It's all done by a big community, so the more popular videos are likely to have the edits, however overall it certainly is a better experience for me.
- ?
  That is clickbait nonsense. I think it’s designed to induce as revenue. I generally don’t watch and avoid all versions of it, electoral and not (“You won’t BELIEVE what this HERO CAT did for Pennsylvania mother of 3”)… I get what you’re saying and it’s dumb but why does it cause you rage?

Clear or curate (remove anything political) your watch history, start liberally (hue hue) blocking shit. Install BlockTube. (uBO and SponsorBlock are also a given, just slightly less on topic)

Delete Google, the apps are trash. If you want web based content go directly to the source. Highlights::Your Team Page, space videos::space website, political info::unbiased news sources, silly memes::giphy, etc. The Google algorithms are severely flawed as well as the algorithms of all generative content sites that collect your data.

I had to clear my history because all I was getting was jujutsu kaisen and none of my subscription stuff was coming through.

There is a subscription page! I had no idea for years that in addition to the home page (which is a mix of subscription and algorithm videos) there's a subscription page which only lists videos from channels you're subscribed to, in order of recency.
- I use it now quite a bit. And I've been subscribing more. Before I fell down the jjk rabbit hole, I hadn't realized how mamy creators were being suggested that I'd never hit follow on, but would watch often.

Stop clicking, interacting, hovering or looking at the thumbnail for too long. Clear your watch history. Search up lots of unrelated content that you enjoy, thumbs it up, subscribe to unrelated channels you like. It will stop doing that. Mine basically only shows video essays an, science, technology and gaming content

I don't understand why people don't turn off youtube watch history. I nuked my account about a year ago and have since made a new account with a burner email adress. Turned off all tracking and history for YouTube and all affiliate Google accounts and all the recommended videos are completely random shit. They're basically sidebar ads to me now, I dont even notice they're there. I want to watch a video - search it, watch it, thats it never see any other shit about.

Get a chrome extension to block channels, ez pz

https://sepiasearch.org/

Edit: I don't really have a full answer, but I hope that we can get the problem fixed with community-based video hosting, like the one linked above.

I'm not subscribed to anyone on youtube, but my feed is pretty good. Every time i see something i don't like or care i hit the three dots and choose: don't recommend channel, and then they slowly go away.