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 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
I have watch history on and the recommendations are garbage. Maybe I should disable it.
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.
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.
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.
@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.
So the subscribe page is going to start working normally again??
This is exactly what I would prefer even without being logged in!
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.
What a fantastic QOL improvement!
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 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.
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.
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.
Crazy how google still does that, but youtube doesn’t. My guess would be that laymen were copy-pasting titles with hyphens in them and then getting confused when what they were looking for wouldn’t show up, which honestly makes sense. That could be solved by just having the little tricks visible somewhere near the search so that people can figure it out.
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 hate that so much. Makes you go to their profile, which is a lot of clicks to get to their videos.
If you’ve seen the default homepage then you’ll appreciate this.
