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After having been on YouTube for well over a decade, I've noticed some of the dark patterns.
One is the 5th video tile on your "Home" (not including ad tiles, I block ads).
It's the toxic tile. The one with the low view (<1000), low quality, possibly racist, videos.
Never click the 5th video tile.
I just saw The Project turn up in that tile 
@sortius I pay for premium and basically never see political recommendations. ABC News is about as close as it gets.
But I suspect my "never recommend this channel" list is thousands long, I aggressively curate out things I don't like (mostly because I watch one channel of a bunch of minor interests. One model train channel, one UK farm politics channel, one bicycle tat review channel etc. So I block 200 "similar to one you like" for each topic)
@moz the 5th tile definitely recommends in-line with your tastes, but it's always toxic. Not sure if it does that on Premium, but definitely free there's a 5th tile. I see it on my kids' computers, and I need to explain what it is to them at some stage
@EricFielding @moz oh, I'm very active with the "don't recommend" stuff, but it still comes through if they really want to push it on you.
I spend a lot of time on YT, as do the kids, so we've got pretty full profiles.
Funnily enough, if the kids watch YT on the TV, it's my account, so I can see how their viewing affects mine. 5th tile will go from Minecraft to Rogan. 
It's why I have a blanket ban on "Shorts", it's like 5th tile all the time
@sortius urk. I just refreshed a few times and got "making a dog bed" (woodworking?), an old "female vocal trance" vid from a channel I'm subscribed to, a soldering iron password reset howto (electronics), a "lathe power feed hack" (metalworking)....
Nothing toxic. I'm not even getting "Starmer the farmer harmer" etc contents from the UK farm politics channel.
@moz I suspect they disable it for Premium 
@sortius sounds like another reason to pay. Or another tax on poor people who obviously don't deserve nice things. Depends how you look at it.
I wonder whether it's defeatable with adblocking? Coz until I paid I used to run the youtube adblocker du jour to get rid of most of the ads inside videos, and the usual one(s) to get rid of on-page ads.
Which may be another reason to use Firefox, IIRC Chrome(ium) keep making adblockers less useful.
@moz it's not a big deal, you just use the 5th tile as a "don't recommend" tile.
It's not every single refresh that the 5th tile is bad, but the vast majority (like 9 out of 10 refreshes).
Personally, I'd rather pay nothing, have uBlock Origin deal with the ads, and ignore the 5th tile