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

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

@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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

@peter No. As said, the recommendations was based on my subscriptions and mostly old videos from the subscriptions.