There's this one streamer/YouTuber I used to watch a lot, but after some controversy I didn't feel comfortable watching him anymore. For months now I've been telling YouTube to stop recommending his channel and it still pops up.
Yeah, like a month ago my YT recommendations were dry, plus and I wanted to delete all my search history and turn it off, but I couldn't do that without clearing my watch history too. So I did that and the algorithm was fixed!
The only problem was that it recommended videos I already watched.
I manually clear my history once in a while. I used to have it turned off to force the algorithim to only work with my Liked videos but can't do that anymore. It will pretend that they can't recommend anything unless the history is turned on.
Also, use a private window or app for viewing videos outside of the "norm". I do this for pretty much everything I click through on Lemmy and some channels I just don't want to ruin my feed.