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.
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!
I use the Hide Youtube-Shorts addon to block those annoying shorts.
Thank you!
I’d straight up ban obvious dopamine drips like that if I was dictator for a week.
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.
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!
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
Youtube is very hard on the people that provide content and don’t have a corporation backing their play.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The only collective effect I can think of is that if everyone would start blocking ads google and others would crack down on ad-blockers and it would be more difficult for us to use them. Let the sheep feed google so it doesn’t care about the 1% that’s currently hiding.
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 has failed me on a regular basis, yes i’m using it
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.
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.
