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.

    • thingsiplay@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      @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

      • Big P@feddit.uk
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • Otter@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • Rentlar@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • MagicShel@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • MJBrune@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Kajo [he/him] 🌈@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • MJBrune@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          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.

  • MajinBlayze@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Man, I can get a cleaner homepage at the cost of not showing me my history? Seems worth it to me.

    • Creesch@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • Riker_Maneuver@startrek.website
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • Geometric7792@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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

      • Pleat1752@feddit.uk
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        1 year ago

        I take steps to prevent algorithms from dictating what I listen to and watch. Algorithmically-decided culture feels utterly wrong to me.

        • Catsrules@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • Pleat1752@feddit.uk
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            1 year ago

            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!

      • CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • TwilightVulpine@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • nyander@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        There will be personalization as long as cookies are enabled though. I wouldn’t be surprised if they fingerprint on top of that too.

  • Jaysyn@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    That’s a marked improvement. I don’t want their stupid algorithm feeding me bullshit.