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.
https://lemmy.ml/post/3038208 Enjoy the exodus.
🤖 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.
@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.
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
@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.
@worfamerryman Sorry, just saw your reply now. You can turn off it here: https://myaccount.google.com/u/0/yourdata/youtube
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.
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
