YouTube's recommendation algorithm appears to have completely self-destructed, and is now flooding my suggestions tab with children's entertainment and nursery rhymes.
And to make things even better, apparently you can't select "don't suggest content from this channel" anymore, and have to do things on a video-by-video basis.
If you figure out how to get the weird AI-made children's videos, hook us up. The real weird ones with Wolverine killing Daffy Duck while Frozen sings or whatever.
What? I wanna see this
That's not a real video, it's an allusion to a type of video.
The issue was that certain characters would get you up to the top of the search results for Youtube Kids, so a lot of channels started cramming characters with easily-obtained costumes into a bunch of videos and then cramming all the keywords into the name, and the AI recommendation system in Youtube Kids would put you next on the play list. Go to Youtube and search for "frozen elsa spiderman joker" to see some of the videos of this type. It's not really AI generated, it's just keyword-cramming to try and get higher in the AI rankings. So no, you'll never get a wolverine/daffy duck one, because those aren't easily-obtainable costumes that also happen to score highly in the AI recommendation system (and there was probably a snowball effect since if there are a lot of spiderman/elsa videos then a lot of them get views, and future spiderman/elsa videos end up getting higher rated as a result).
The real reason for this was because Youtube made "Youtube Kids" for parents. It's locked down and the kid can't choose the next video, so the AI recommendation system was deciding what to play next. Also, they turned off comments for the Youtube Kids app.
Hence, a lot of low-budget channels popped up with the exact same "frozen elsa spiderman joker" formula. And some of these videos were getting
millions of hits, yet only have a few comments, and those comments are mostly "what the fuck is this? Who watches this crap?" That's because only a few normal Youtube users would find these videos, they're mostly about gaming the recommendation system for the Youtube Kids app, and the millions of viewers on that can't see or leave comments.
(Also there was the hilarious incident where a shitty edgy "prank" video channel which used race-baiting suddenly turned into an Elsagate channel and started having videos about Spiderman having tea parties with Elsa and co. All the little racist teens tuned into their favorite channel and were all "wtf am I watching?"