It does adjust in some way, but somehow it never picks up on the signal that actually made me like or dislike a video. It's very clear that some video-makers have figured out how to exploit this poor signal reception to shove really crappy content at people. Other video-makers, who aren't trying to dominate youtube revenue, are buried and difficult to find.
TikTok, meanwhile, takes about an hour of scrolling and reacting to cultivate a feed that is very tailored to my taste. It's truly remarkable. If the app gets banned it'll be a huge loss for finding people and content with similar interests.
(I also just don't have the desire to watch an entire 10-minute video packed with filler when I'm trying to relax unless it's very dense, and that's the entire revenue model of youtube. edit: I forgot youtube has shorts now)
While the YouTube algorithm could be better (e.g. its recency bias is much too strong), 99% of what it recommends me is in line with stuff I watched or liked before. So, I don’t know what to tell you.
Maybe your interests are shared by a lot of people who also like crappy stuff? Just joking, but there must be some reason for the difference in experience.
The problem is it never stops recommending stuff. So if I say to never show me some channel (because maybe it’s irrelevant to me), then it just fills that spot with the next slightly more irrelevant channel.
Pretty soon all the recommendations are way far off what I would ever watch, because of course i don’t want to watch everything YouTube has. There is a point where there is nothing left that I will ever wanted to watch.
