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391

YouTube will now show a blank homepage if you don’t have watch history on (www.theverge.com)

submitted 2 years ago by trashhalo@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

79 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

(page 2) 29 comments

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[–] tal@kbin.social 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

What’s been your experience with youtube recommendations?

I've never had a YouTube account, so YouTube doesn't have any persistent data on me as an individual to do recommendations unless it can infer who I am from other data.

They seem to do a decent job of recommending the next video in a series done in a playlist by an author, which is really the only utility I get out of suggestions that YouTube gives me (outside of search results, which I suppose are themselves a form of recommendation). I'd think that YouTube could do better by just providing an easy way to get from the video to such a list, but...

[–] WookieMunster@kbin.social 4 points 2 years ago

I've never had a YouTube account, so YouTube doesn't have any persistent data on me as an individual

Pretty sure they do anyway

[–] falinter@midwest.social 4 points 2 years ago

jokes on them i use an extension that removes the home page and any recommendations on the site.

[–] roon@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 years ago

This is some sort of bug?

[–] metaStatic@kbin.social 4 points 2 years ago

They can do almost anything they want to my Freetube backend as long as it keeps working

[–] thingsiplay@kbin.social 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

@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.

Edit: https://myaccount.google.com/u/0/yourdata/youtube

[–] Im28xwa@lemdro.id 2 points 2 years ago

I already leave it on as the watch history can be pretty handy especially when I accidentally close a video

[–] peter@feddit.uk 1 points 2 years ago

Is this not a privacy win though? Isn't this what people want?

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