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
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
Thanks! I didn’t think YouTube expected anyone to be excited by this new feature 😂😂
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.
I already leave it on as the watch history can be pretty handy especially when I accidentally close a video
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.
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.
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.
Rare google W
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.
