YouTube is changing the homepage experience for users who have their watch history turned off. They will now see an almost blank homepage with just a search bar and buttons for Shorts, Subscriptions and Library. This is intended to make it clear that personalized recommendations rely on watch history data. The new design aims to avoid extreme thumbnails and instead focus search. Some users have already started seeing this change, though it may not be fully rolled out yet. The goal is to both help those who prefer searching over recommendations, and potentially encourage users to turn their history back on. Overall this represents a major interface change focused on watch history preferences.
What’s been your experience with youtube recommendations? For me they are consistently hot garbage.
Is this not a privacy win though? Isn’t this what people want?
@peter I’m not actually sure if this is a privacy win at all. I use Google for years with disabled history (and other stuff disabled) and this new change does not make any difference to my privacy. At the moment, still, the home feed recommendations is mostly about videos from my subscriptions, past videos and the newest one. All it does is take away that view, which does not improve privacy. What actually improves privacy is to disable the history, which you could do since years.
Edit: I totally forgot the link I wanted to provide: https://myaccount.google.com/u/0/yourdata/youtube
But if you disabled the history and they still had recommendations then they were still storing your history in some capacity. Now they’re probably not doing that.
@peter No. As said, the recommendations was based on my subscriptions and mostly old videos from the subscriptions.
Yes. This is the functionality I want if Watch History is off. Chalk one up.
*chalk one very, very minor win up
Same
I used to use an extension to do something similar, but disabled it when I went and cleared out a bunch
The trend across different interfaces seems to be to crowd it with more junk. Cleaning it up seems like a win, as long as the content is still accessible through other means.
Came here to say this, hours do i turn search history off?
@worfamerryman Sorry, just saw your reply now. You can turn off it here: https://myaccount.google.com/u/0/yourdata/youtube
Thanks! I didn’t think YouTube expected anyone to be excited by this new feature 😂😂
For my use case this is a positive change (for once). The less data I need to waste loading a Mr. Beast face thumbnail I don’t need the better.
I wonder if it is intended to cause NewPipe to crash, lol. Or to instead fill the page with ads later.
This is great!
Could you also not show a link to shorts? I could also do without those.
Thank you!
I’d straight up ban obvious dopamine drips like that if I was dictator for a week.
I don’t understand. Is this supposed to be an incentive to turn on watch history?
Right? At last I have a way to let my kid use YouTube for school and stuff without the algorithm trying to seize control of her brain.
I don’t have my watch history off. I use it a lot to remember videos I was watching. It honestly ended up doing a lot for me and I’d rather get recommended content I might enjoy. Just like how Lemmy recommends content to me like how this post ended up at the top of my front page.
I totally get that. For most people, watch history and relevant recommendations are indeed useful tools.
But if, for some reasons, you want to switch off these tools, the price to pay was a home page full of flashy clickbait miniatures. This terrible home page could have been an incentive to switch history on.
Now, it’s just a minimalistic google-ish search page. It’s an unexpected improvement when they could have done much worse, like a home page autoplaying ad videos, for example.
Maybe google here is attempting to appeal to both types of people? Why should they truly care if people have watch history off? The end of the day, you are still watching videos on YouTube and that’s what they want.
Man, I can get a cleaner homepage at the cost of not showing me my history? Seems worth it to me.
If you’ve seen the default homepage then you’ll appreciate this.
What a fantastic QOL improvement!
This is exactly what I would prefer even without being logged in!
TIL you can turn off Youtube history. Done!
In some circles on the internet I really feel like the only person who actually likes YouTube.
It’s funny because I agree with you - out of everything that collects my data I get the most out of YouTube, it often recommends things I like quite a bit and it’s the primary way I discover new music
I take steps to prevent algorithms from dictating what I listen to and watch. Algorithmically-decided culture feels utterly wrong to me.
What is the alternative? There is so many videos and creators I am not sure their is any other way to do it. Besides some form of an algorithm.
Music-wise: Radio stations “oh but the radio sucks” yeah but online radio stations don’t. They don’t have any ads. Start with NTS 1 and 2 and go from there. Last.fm browsing USER pages. RYM user pages. Online music guides written by real people. Recommendations from friends- real people.
Video-wise: I honestly don’t watch youtubers. Their output and quality isn’t up to snuff. No I don’t care about speedruns, about “internet rabbit holes” about any of that. About people restoring old gear. About basically anything. So I watch actual TV shows and actual movies, and you guessed it, I get those recommendations from REAL PEOPLE.
I deleted my original comment cos I felt it was a little negative but somehow that didn’t propagate across the fediverse… weird!
I used to like YouTube, but between the constant increase in number and length of ads, as well as how they keep stifling creators by restricting the language they can use and the topics they can cover, it seems like anything good there exists in spite of the company rather than because of it.
So the subscribe page is going to start working normally again??
It still does? That is an entirely different page and still shows the newest videos of channels you are subscribed to. At least, for me it does.
Good.
This is not good like the people in the comments think. It’ll just get more people to create accounts to give Google more data. You could easily just not click on thumbnails before. You could also just block it all with uBlock Origin to have an empty front page.
I concur. It seems like Google is trying to force personalization. It’s also not good that they are hiding the default recommendations because it becomes harder to see what is being censored.
Google is already forcing personalization on everybody anyway. Browse Youtube without an account and it’ll look just the same as with an account. The only difference is that without an account you can’t clear videos from your history or ignore channels, but the videos they list are still highly personalized on your watch history.
You have to actually clear and block cookies to get rid of personalization.
There will be personalization as long as cookies are enabled though. I wouldn’t be surprised if they fingerprint on top of that too.
It seems people are now discovering that they can turn off watch history and think this is a new feature.
Rare google W
IKR? Like, this is a feature, not a downgrade. TBH, my recommendations are pretty good when I see the sidebar, but I’d be 100% okay to never see them since I generally only go to youtube for specific content, not for entertainment.
