YouTube will now show a blank homepage if you don’t have watch history on

trashhalo@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 448 points – YouTube will now show a blank homepage if you don’t have watch history on
theverge.com

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.

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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.