there's actually a great "hidden" way to disable the youtube homepage and shorts across platforms - turn off youtube's watch history feature (myactivity.google.com > youtube history)
I've found that over time this chokes the recommendation system - makes it boring and it now finally refuses to show me any video recommendations on my youtube homepage - just a message asking me to turn history on. of course, you lose your watch history, but I just bookmark the videos I like anyway.
Videos related to the one you're watching may appear, but imo these tend to be based on your subscriptions / more focused / less rabbit-holey (and you can disable those with extensions and such as well).
This is another addition to a whole slew of tech / "hip "marketing videos inspired by the format of Apple's "iPhone 7 event in 108 seconds - Don't Blink" ad.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jk6sz25OZgw&pp
I think the original was pretty interesting and worked in context, but doesn't work for every product.
I think a few of the other comments poke at this general idea, but I've come to be very intrigued by the meta-game of training these media recommendation engines (YouTube, Spotify, Netflix, TikTok?) by picking the right things to get a good feed. This sort of training is becoming more important than ever for a good experience in these platforms.
In my experience, YouTube seems to be one of the more reactive recommenders - especially if you go down rabbit-holes / dig deeper into certain types of topics. I have turned off both web history and Youtube watch history in my Google account and I find that the Youtube homepage very quickly devolves to lists of videos by channels I've subscribed to - a randomized subscription feed. I would really be interested in seeing recommendation behavior be quantified and documented in some systematic/objective way (if this is even possible).
I completely agree with your point but just wanted to note that iSH is available on the App Store (and hasn't been booted out as of now by some miracle) and love it to bits.
OT but if it helps you, Whatsapp does actually allow you to send messages to yourself (sort of)! You can create a Whatsapp group with you and one other person in it, and then remove them from the group. The result is a group with only you in it that you can use to send messages to yourself.
The Chrome reload gesture also gets in the way sometimes. It's especially infuriating when there's a link you want to click on the page (that's still loading), but additional content causes the content to scroll down as you're tapping the screen so Chrome misinterprets this as you wanting a page reload.
I've found that over time this chokes the recommendation system - makes it boring and it now finally refuses to show me any video recommendations on my youtube homepage - just a message asking me to turn history on. of course, you lose your watch history, but I just bookmark the videos I like anyway.
Videos related to the one you're watching may appear, but imo these tend to be based on your subscriptions / more focused / less rabbit-holey (and you can disable those with extensions and such as well).