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
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.