Youtube is actual trash and we have modern designers and businessmen to blame.

Youtube has been intentionally made worse year over year for the last 12-15 years. Nobody knows exactly why. But it has been.

Youtube has been an innovator in enshitification since before that term existed.

Yes, YouTube is absolute shit without extensions.

Both can be true.

It's getting bad. Almost unwatchable now. Google is screwed.

I don't use this plugin myself, but if you're using Firefox, you might take a look at it, as it provides a bunch of browser-side configurability. I don't know whether the feature you're looking for is there, but as far as I can tell, it aims to be a pretty large bucket of pretty much every add-on YouTube feature one might want.

I was looking at it a while back for something unrelated, a UI tweak that I was hoping that it might do.

I think pausing your watch history will accomplish this, but then of course your watch history will be paused.

I noticed years ago that youtube search give up after like 10 results and then just spits up the generic algorithm recommendations.

Corporate enshittification for 16 years will do that

It could be both 🤷‍♂️

(Clear your cache and it should fix your issue)

unfortunately you're not

Haven't tried the YouTube app for years, but watch the content all the time - using newpipe/pipepipe and freetube/Kodi. I usually just "subscribe" to a few channels and stick to those

it skips to somewhere in the middle because it thinks you're more likely to stay on the video if it starts there