Comment by graypegg

100% anecdata, but I think YouTube nudges your ad profile towards some averaged out cosign product of everyone’s ad profile at regular intervals.

I’ll discover something new, then get pushed a ton of things related to it, which is really good! After a very long break of ~4 years, I started playing oldschool RuneScape again, and that interest weaved its way into my recommended feed perfectly for a month. Felt like I was picking up where I left off, new folks making OSRS video essays, folks I remembered from a long time ago that I had unsubscribed from, exactly what I want out of an algorithmic feed when I’m freshly into something.

Then BAM, gaming content. Some sort of threshold gets hit and now I’m being pushed hyper popular gaming content regardless of RuneScape-y-ness. There’s still a nudge towards it, but I got placed in some “gaming” cohort and it totally crowds out my recommended feed. I don’t really do much gaming outside of this stupid old MMO!

All that’s to say: it might have been a year since you last had one of these inflection points where YouTube will let your ad profile exist as an outlier for a bit.