I have a complexe experience with youtube. I wrote an article about that but I will not publish it now for some reasons. Anyway, to summarize, if you let me alone with youtube recommandation algorithm, I will be stuck watching videos for hours and hours (8 or 10 if I don't have anything else to do). To counteract this behavior and still be able to use youtube for usage that I accept and controle, I've set up a "good old youtube" with some tools. It's named like that because it feels more like the oldest versions of Yt (when the main feature were not the recommandation videos but the videos of the people you follow).
Firefox addon
DF youtube to remove every element of the interface that I don't want. I use it with all parameters enabled except comments. I heard about it from James Scholz
Return YouTube Dislike to be able to see if people mostly liked or disliked this video (why did they remove this feature in the vanilla version is still a mystery for me)
Block Site with only youtube base url in forbidden link. It forces me to go private/incognito nav when I want to watch a video, so I'm never logged and youtube (mostly) can't learn from my behavior
Subscription
I subscribe to video creators from the RSS feed that is provided for every youtube channel. Subscription system of Youtube seems kinda weird and I don't want to rely on it. Also, I don't want to be forced to go to the plateform (to check if there is new content) nor to have an account.
PS : Hi ! Hope you liked the article ! If you have other tool that would fit well in this setup, I will be really happy to hear from it (my email is always open). If you tried my setup and you have some feedback, let me now it too ! Hope you have a good day :)