1y ago

YouTube will now show a blank homepage if you don’t have watch history on

www.theverge.com YouTube will now show a blank homepage if you don’t have watch history on

The homepage will look a lot different if your watch history is off.

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.

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1y ago

VERGE

YouTube will now show a blank homepage if you don’t have watch history on

www.theverge.com /2023/8/8/23824672/youtube-blank-homepage-watch-history

14 2

94 comments

Is this not a privacy win though? Isn't this what people want?
- lol right? I call this an absolute win! Less garbage on the homepage and more privacy! Should be a search bar and that's about it
  
  I agree, it should look like the Google home page. I’m actually surprised google has never gone the way of Yahoo, MSN, etc and crammed their home page full of shit “news” articles & videos.
- @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.
- 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

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.
- Yep, those shorts are dumb, and YT is passive aggresive when closing the tray: "ok, we'll repoen the tray in 30 days". It's like "I don't care you don't want those, I'll feed them to you no matter what..." Piss off YT!
- https://letsblock.it/filters/youtube-shorts
  
  Thank you!
- I use the Hide Youtube-Shorts addon to block those annoying shorts.
- 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.

Google realizing they had gone too far and actually improving UX to avoid losing visitors

Man, I can get a cleaner homepage at the cost of not showing me my history? Seems worth it to me.

What a fantastic QOL improvement!

If you've seen the default homepage then you'll appreciate this.

This is exactly what I would prefer even without being logged in!

Oh no, how am I going to be recommended Tucker Carlson because I watched something about space? Legit happened during a private browsing session where I watched some rocket videos. Left it on accidentally with auto play and it ended up going down a Tucker Carlson rabbit hole most likely because Elom Munsk and Spacex videos were part of the auto play history.

TIL you can turn off Youtube history. Done!

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.

In some circles on the internet I really feel like the only person who actually likes YouTube.
- I love the content/creators, but hate the company that runs it. Sadly, unless you are willing to give up the channels you love there isn't much in the way of alternatives.
- 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.
- Youtube is very hard on the people that provide content and don't have a corporation backing their play.
  
  Only the people who provide content for profit tbh. For the original focus of YouTube, which was simply to provide the ability for the collective "you" to post videos and share them with the world, it's fine. The problem was, like every platform that provides a financial incentive to do anything, it gets gamed by those seeking to profit off of it and devolves into a corporate hellscape.
  Ignore the monetization aspect and, other than the ads (which can be blocked by uBlock at least for the time being), it's still a fine platform.
- 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.

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.
  
  There will be personalization as long as cookies are enabled though. I wouldn't be surprised if they fingerprint on top of that too.
- Everyone one is already giving all their data to google/facebook/tiktok/amazon. Why would you care about average internet user?
  
  But collectively it makes a difference.

My youtube recommendations are pretty good but if I watch a single video I'm not interested in it's fucked for a week.
- You can delete stuff from your watch history. It usually fixes the recommendations for me.
  
  Any video I watch I have to consider if I want to be pushed more of it and delete from history whenever I look at something I don't want more of.
  It's an annoying tightrope, I have considered no history but then I wouldn't get more of what I do want. This new change is to make turning off watch history worse, to no longer suggest any videos if you want privacy.

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.

I actually find the watch history useful as it has search in it. It's like enabling your browser history On. "What was that video/webpage? I recall the keyword but forgot the name of the video (or webpage)."
Also, I hardly visit the site except for links shared so the home page recommendations don't bother me and aren't of much use to me.
- Except the search on the history sucks horribly, many times I've found the video doing a normal search when the history one finds nothing
  
  Hmm. It has never failed me. You're using this, I guess?

It seems people are now discovering that they can turn off watch history and think this is a new feature.
- Wait until they figure out you can browse youtube without logging in.

I have watch history on and the recommendations are garbage. Maybe I should disable it.

That's a marked improvement. I don't want their stupid algorithm feeding me bullshit.

From what i've been able to tell this is one of the few good changes they've done. You won't get crap you don't care about if you're not logged in and haven't watched anything.

I don't know how I feel about this personally. On the one hand, I feel like this is a privacy win for those who want it: no watch history means no algorithmic recommendations and (presumably) less data collection for those users. On the other hand, I personally really enjoy the recommendations that YouTube makes for me. Maybe it is the wide variety of content that I watch, but I'm honestly very pleased with the recommendations that YouTube provides. That being said, I feel like the opt-in to algorithmic recommendations is a good thing overall, however I am personally going to leave my watch history enabled.

I don't have my watch history turned on but everything on my home page is related in some way to my subscriptions and it's annoying as fuck because it makes it difficult to discover new areas of interest. It's even worse if I log out because all I get is twenty something year olds shouting at the camera like 12 year olds in full HDR+++++. YouTube should be looking at broadening peoples interests rather than narrowing them. When they jam your homepage with similar crap to the crap you've been watching for god knows how long the whole experience starts to become stale.
- You can click "not interested" and it will clean it up some, you can also nuke your watch history.

I was using unhook to do the same thing! Thanks, Google!

Good.

Cool, now make the search useful again by letting me do -thingIdon'twant or "thing I do want" in quotes. Why did that functionality even go away? Search is such garbage now that tries to get you to click on shit you didn't search for.
- That, and remove the 3 vids of what I searched for, then 3 vids of whatever the fuck, then shorts thay may or may not be related.
  
  And also how if you're looking at a creator's page and you start scrolling to see their old stuff it starts putting in random videos from other people in the feed.

I like how Google thinks it’s going to encourage people turning it on when it’s probably going to do the opposite.

Would be an excellent change if they replaced it with a chronological timeline, but we all know they won't do that even though their backend already generates RSS feeds and it would barely take any effort to integrate with the frontend

🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles: ::: spoiler Click here to see the summary The change is all part of a “new viewer experience” Google announced on Tuesday.
That means you’ll only see the search bar on the homepage, along with the Shorts, Subscriptions, and Library buttons.
This could come as a welcome change for people who hate sifting through increasingly extreme thumbnails to find the play button, but it could also be a way to annoy users into turning the history back on.
Google says it’s going to roll out this feature “over the next few months,” but several users across the web are already seeing the change.
In place of YouTube’s recommended videos is a notice that reads, “Your watch history is off.
“We are launching this new experience to make it more clear which YouTube features rely on watch history to provide video recommendations and make it more streamlined for those of you who prefer to search rather than browse recommendations,” Google writes. :::
- Good bot

Finally a decent change. More reason to disable watch history.

If this means I never see the homepage again that's a win.
- I just bookmarked the subscriptions page instead so I never really saw the standard homepage.

Nothing of value was lost. With my history on all it shows me is fucking right wing hate and shit I've already watched.
- Or just any hate shit. Right now my feed is full of hate for everything Star Wars because I'm a huge fan. I'm perfectly aware of all the flaws and could pen some epic rants myself, but I'd rather focus on what I enjoy.
  Though... I do feel like lately 90% of hate material seems to be from people with right wing leanings.

I never open youtube to watch what’s on the homepage, so that’s a plus for me. I also don’t watch using an account so it doesn’t matter either way.

If the watch history is off, why don't they just use the favorites and liked videos to form recommendations?

This is some sort of bug?

What’s been your experience with youtube recommendations?
I've never had a YouTube account, so YouTube doesn't have any persistent data on me as an individual to do recommendations unless it can infer who I am from other data.
They seem to do a decent job of recommending the next video in a series done in a playlist by an author, which is really the only utility I get out of suggestions that YouTube gives me (outside of search results, which I suppose are themselves a form of recommendation). I'd think that YouTube could do better by just providing an easy way to get from the video to such a list, but...
- I've never had a YouTube account, so YouTube doesn't have any persistent data on me as an individual
  Pretty sure they do anyway

jokes on them i use an extension that removes the home page and any recommendations on the site.

They can do almost anything they want to my Freetube backend as long as it keeps working

@trashhalo I have the watch history disabled for years now. And the results for the home feed recommendations was more or less of content from the subscriptions I had, with a sprinkle of other content when scrolling down. Wasn't too bad, at least better than what can be seen when logged off. But overall I don't care if the home feed recommendations get disabled for me. Not worth trading off the watch history to Google. It's fine for me.
There is still recommendation on the video itself, for related content. Also you can discover other channels by searching or with third party sites sites (where it gets shared). There is plenty of opportunities to discover new content. I personally rely and use mostly the Subscriptions feed view with my 137 subscriptions.
Edit: https://myaccount.google.com/u/0/yourdata/youtube

https://lemmy.ml/post/3038208 Enjoy the exodus.

I already leave it on as the watch history can be pretty handy especially when I accidentally close a video

94 comments