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.
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
@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.
Came here to say this, hours do i turn search history off?
Man, I can get a cleaner homepage at the cost of not showing me my history? Seems worth it to me.
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 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.
I don’t have my watch history off. I use it a lot to remember videos I was watching. It honestly ended up doing a lot for me and I’d rather get recommended content I might enjoy. Just like how Lemmy recommends content to me like how this post ended up at the top of my front page.
I totally get that. For most people, watch history and relevant recommendations are indeed useful tools.
But if, for some reasons, you want to switch off these tools, the price to pay was a home page full of flashy clickbait miniatures. This terrible home page could have been an incentive to switch history on.
Now, it’s just a minimalistic google-ish search page. It’s an unexpected improvement when they could have done much worse, like a home page autoplaying ad videos, for example.
Maybe google here is attempting to appeal to both types of people? Why should they truly care if people have watch history off? The end of the day, you are still watching videos on YouTube and that’s what they want.
What a fantastic QOL improvement!
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.
Youtube is very hard on the people that provide content and don’t have a corporation backing their play.
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.
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.
If you’ve seen the default homepage then you’ll appreciate this.
Google realizing they had gone too far and actually improving UX to avoid losing visitors
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.
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.
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.
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.
