In order to get recommendations on your homepage you need to enable your Youtube history in order for videos to be "tailored for you". This is complete BS, as recommendations were perfectly fine before, and I have never had history enabled. This is just a stunt to get people to give their personal data to google. Now I know google has always been bad but this is what really gave me the wake up call, the final straw if you will.
This has prompted me to look for an alternative, specifically an open source alternative. Unfortunately, there are no suitable candidates to my knowledge. However, there is a small, open source alternative which is federated (similarly to Lemmy) called PeerTube. I believe with enough users it could potentially become a viable alternative. Please consider reading more about it. I have not joined yet but I will research more tomorrow. Thanks for hearing me out, just wanted to spread awareness.
Youtube api: so I saw you watched a video on how to replace a smoke detector once, here's all the videos about smoke detectors.
But it's not cool stuff like "The History of the Smoke Detector". Instead it's a bunch of other videos on how to replace the battery in one, including the video you already watched. Have fun!
Then there's the random company that uploaded an advertisement 8 years ago that keeps popping up.