You can do it easily using ublock origin. Just select the div of the video you dont want to see anymore, and append to the filter string something like this
:has-text(/channel name that I hate/)
I filter any video with less than 1000 views, since youtube started to push insanely small channels to my recommended videos lately. This is the filter to accomplish that, on mobile youtube:
I have so many filters on my ublock youtube section that nowadays their algo doesn't seem to even bother me so much. I hardly let Youtube show me anything that I would not really like to see.
Another anoying thing that started showing up on my feed lately were very old videos, 5, 10, 15 yo videos, with millions of views. Clearly meme worthy garbage. So I started filtering out any video with more than a million views from my feed using the following filter:
I never, ever, watched a single "short" youtube video in my life, so maybe their algo tried to memefy my feed using this alternative path. No way, my time is precious and every single video I watch must add something.
To remove "Sponsored", i.e. videos that are really ads, from your feed:
My youtube feed nowadays only shows videos that have between 1001 and 999999 views. To me, its the sweet spot of quality for youtube videos. If you didnt catch the upload on the first week, you'll get it down the line, when it passes the threshold of 1k views. I know I maybe not getting a Veritasium video suggested to me once in a while, since nowadays he tends to get millions of views on the first day already, but once I remember about those channels I really like, I'll manually visit their page and retro watch all the videos I missed in between.
Ublock Origin is the single most useful piece of software one can use to keep their cognitive sanity in the modern world.
I've gone nuclear and just have my home perma blocked using newsfeederadicator extension (works across a few sites), and shorts blocked in subscriptions via a ublock origin rule.
Are you actually able to use home / reccomendations using this solution (I opted out of both a long time ago for many of the reasons you state), or is it just to fix the terrible search results yt gives?
The full css path of the div you want to block will be different on every type of list, "home", "recommended", "subscriptions" etc. But the basic string rule will be the same, you just have to set 3 or 4 sets of the same rules and you're done.
Also, you'll have to set the rules on both mobile and desktop, since the layouts are different. But after setting up the first rule set, it's just a copy and paste job for every other list. Not a hard task at all. I haven't touched my filters in over 3 months, the last time was to add the "no video with more than 1 million views" rule.
These rules basically never break, I only have to edit the filters when the Youtube algo decides to push another set of annoying videos on to my feed. The layout, it seems, never changes.
