I did a weeklong purge of everything last year to dial in the algorithm and it was pretty ok but the last 3 days it has been just complete trash from recommending reactionaries as well as some guy with 50 views playing a game I've never heard of. Is this just me or did they fuck with something
the random <100 garbage you always get at least one of is their attempt at mimicking a thing that tiktok does; new channels on tiktok will get a "grace period" where anything they post gets super boosted so they get enough views and followers to incentivise them to keep producing on the platform
websites like youtube (and twitter before going tits up) had a chicken and egg problem were producing good videos was not enough for the algo to pick you up if literally nobody saw them, which of course they didn't, yours is one of the septillion videos that go up on youtube daily
This is the same A/B testing gimmick that Google and Facebook have been doing forever. The big difference is that some dipshit meme takes a few seconds to digest, while a YouTube video short is going to need your attention for 30 seconds minimum.
The TikTok approach of sub-30 second clips is better for the algorithm and for the Endless Feed, because there's a low risk of you getting bored on any one particular thing. But YouTube is more of a video library than a Clickbait-With-Ads Channel. The model doesn't match up with what the marketers want from them.