This is great!
Could you also not show a link to shorts? I could also do without those.
this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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Technology
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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!
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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.
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
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Youtube is very hard on the people that provide content and don't have a corporation backing their play.
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.
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.
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.
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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
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Rare google W
IKR? Like, this is a feature, not a downgrade. TBH, my recommendations are pretty good when I see the sidebar, but I'd be 100% okay to never see them since I generally only go to youtube for specific content, not for entertainment.
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.
I have watch history on and the recommendations are garbage. Maybe I should disable it.
That's a marked improvement. I don't want their stupid algorithm feeding me bullshit.
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.
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.
I was using unhook to do the same thing! Thanks, Google!
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.
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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.
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.
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Good.
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'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summary
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.
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Nothing of value was lost. With my history on all it shows me is fucking right wing hate and shit I've already watched.
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If the watch history is off, why don't they just use the favorites and liked videos to form recommendations?
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.
Finally a decent change. More reason to disable watch history.
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