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?
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.
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.
Man, I can get a cleaner homepage at the cost of not showing me my history? Seems worth it to me.
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 or aren’t of much use for me.
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.
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 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.
Youtube is very hard on the people that provide content and don’t have a corporation backing their play.
If you’ve seen the default homepage then you’ll appreciate this.
Nothing of value was lost. With my history on all it shows me is fucking right wing hate and shit I’ve already watched.
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.
I don’t understand. Is this supposed to be an incentive to turn on watch history?
TIL you can turn off Youtube history. Done!
I have watch history on and the recommendations are garbage. Maybe I should disable it.
Google realizing they had gone too far and actually improving UX to avoid losing visitors
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.
