alt Hacker NewsIf you want to know if this is just an accident of the design, or a purposeful trap, just know that it is no longer possible to browse while not logged in!
If you log in, you get the personalised funnel.
If you don't log in, you get a blank page and a search box.
That's evil.
It's tantamount to censorship, of the worst kind, deliberately sending all viewers directly to their own personal echo chambers without even the possibility of ever being exposed -- even accidentally -- to alternate viewpoints of any kind!
As a random example: I now get only Australian news channels recommended to me. I have to go to heroic lengths to see the BBC or any US source, let alone something more out there like Al Jazeera.
The blank page is what you'd get if you cleared your Watch History. I use this to watch a new-to-me topic/channel or just a video that I know I'd only watch once and don't want in my recommended history in Incognito mode(although you could just remove that video manually from history too).
This makes it easy to somewhat steer the algorithm, I just open and scrub through a few videos of the same "kind" that I'm interested in and this then makes the youtube homepage a bit wieldy. This still populates unrelated videos but at a lower rate.