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
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
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.
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 😂😂
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.
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.
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.
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.
What a fantastic QOL improvement!
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
I take steps to prevent algorithms from dictating what I listen to and watch. Algorithmically-decided culture feels utterly wrong to me.
What is the alternative? There is so many videos and creators I am not sure their is any other way to do it. Besides some form of an algorithm.
human interaction, mostly. I get a lot of my new music from a guy who scours bandcamp for stuff he likes as a hobby.
How about not making suggestions? Just show me what I’m subbed to. I don’t need nor want a massive billion dollar company doing anything for me.
But you have already found what you subscribed to. One of the reasons why Youtube is so popular is the discoverability aspect of it. That is my question how does discoverability work without some kind of algorithm recommending people videos.
Music-wise: Radio stations “oh but the radio sucks” yeah but online radio stations don’t. They don’t have any ads. Start with NTS 1 and 2 and go from there. Last.fm browsing USER pages. RYM user pages. Online music guides written by real people. Recommendations from friends- real people.
Video-wise: I honestly don’t watch youtubers. Their output and quality isn’t up to snuff. No I don’t care about speedruns, about “internet rabbit holes” about any of that. About people restoring old gear. About basically anything. So I watch actual TV shows and actual movies, and you guessed it, I get those recommendations from REAL PEOPLE.
I deleted my original comment cos I felt it was a little negative but somehow that didn’t propagate across the fediverse… weird!
Youtube is very hard on the people that provide content and don’t have a corporation backing their play.
Only the people who provide content for profit tbh. For the original focus of YouTube, which was simply to provide the ability for the collective “you” to post videos and share them with the world, it’s fine. The problem was, like every platform that provides a financial incentive to do anything, it gets gamed by those seeking to profit off of it and devolves into a corporate hellscape.
Ignore the monetization aspect and, other than the ads (which can be blocked by uBlock at least for the time being), it’s still a fine platform.
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.
Good.
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.
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.
I concur. It seems like Google is trying to force personalization. It’s also not good that they are hiding the default recommendations because it becomes harder to see what is being censored.
Google is already forcing personalization on everybody anyway. Browse Youtube without an account and it’ll look just the same as with an account. The only difference is that without an account you can’t clear videos from your history or ignore channels, but the videos they list are still highly personalized on your watch history.
You have to actually clear and block cookies to get rid of personalization.
There will be personalization as long as cookies are enabled though. I wouldn’t be surprised if they fingerprint on top of that too.
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.
