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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] 15 points 1 year ago

I don't know how I feel about this personally. On the one hand, I feel like this is a privacy win for those who want it: no watch history means no algorithmic recommendations and (presumably) less data collection for those users. On the other hand, I personally really enjoy the recommendations that YouTube makes for me. Maybe it is the wide variety of content that I watch, but I'm honestly very pleased with the recommendations that YouTube provides. That being said, I feel like the opt-in to algorithmic recommendations is a good thing overall, however I am personally going to leave my watch history enabled.