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.
I was using unhook to do the same thing! Thanks, Google!
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.
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.
Good point
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 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.
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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
https://lemmy.ml/post/3038208 Enjoy the exodus.
Is this not a privacy win though? Isn’t this what people want?
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.
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.
That’s what makes them different and they know it, the simple search page. They learned a long time ago to fill the results page with shit instead
Yesterday, for the first time, I got google search results that were entirely useless. I don’t remember what I searched, but it was a relatively simple question and I was kind of in a hurry. The only results I got were video thumbnails and sponsored products… Also presented as thumbnails. Barely any text anywhere to tell me what the thumbnails were supposed to be. They even removed the choices across the top so I couldn’t select “all”.
It’s been getting worse for years, but that was the last straw for me. I don’t want to search the web on “large thumbnails”, I want “detail view”. Sometimes I’m searching for a product, but mostly I need information in the form of text written by a real human. If a search engine can’t give me that, then it’s not useful anymore.
Really frustrating. I guess I better get around to using duckduckgo everywhere.
@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
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
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.
That’s a marked improvement. I don’t want their stupid algorithm feeding me bullshit.
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
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.
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.
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 like how Google thinks it’s going to encourage people turning it on when it’s probably going to do the opposite.
I’m not sure why people think that turning their history off protects their privacy. What’s to stop Google from just not showing you your history if you try to turn it off? I’m sure they still collect all of that data.
It’s not about privacy. It’s about not having shity recommendations.
Fair enough. When my history was off, the recommendations were bad. I just made my bookmark link directly to the Subscriptions page.
