If I go to https://www.youtube.com/feed/history, I can hit "Pause watch history". Isn't that enough?

At least on the android app, there is an incognito mode. But you do lose your ad-free experience last I checked.

This was exactly the reason I cancelled my subscription. I'm paying for no ads, so don't shove them down my throat when I want to watch something without it fucking up the algorithm. Just because I want to watch a video my friend swnt to me of Alex Jones say some disgusting heinous shit one time doesn't mean I want to have it fed to me like I'm being prepared to be made into foie gras.

I’m the type that wouldn’t even tap the link if I saw that it was garbage (seriously, you can set boundaries with friends, an Alex Jones clip will do nothing to improve your life); but for the odd misclick, or if I go in not knowing what I’m watching, I instantly nuke that shit from my history.

But yeah, the incognito mode is bollocks.

As far as I understand it, you can you set it that way by disabling activity tracking here https://myactivity.google.com/product/youtube

Some of my recommendations are based on my subscriptions (but only directly), others are just random things based on my location and language.

I go to History afterwards and delete specific videos from there with “x”. That still works.

But even self-curated history and other tips I’ve got here still produce an echo chamber. Even “New to you” tab which appears once a month for few minutes becomes too narrow. I gave up recently and removed youtube from my bookmarks bar, to suffer less often. I find the idea of paying for it pretty… strange?

YouTube without recommendations is absolute pure cancer. On chrome desktop there is an option to delete cookie everytime you close browser. That resets your recommendation history.

Log out of Google.[1]

Browse in Incognito mode.

Better: access through an Invidious or Piped instance.

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Notes:

1. And never log back in again.