Technology

Is this not a privacy win though? Isn't this what people want?

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.

This is great!

Could you also not show a link to shorts? I could also do without those.

I don't understand. Is this supposed to be an incentive to turn on watch history?

Google realizing they had gone too far and actually improving UX to avoid losing visitors

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

What a fantastic QOL improvement!

If you've seen the default homepage then you'll appreciate this.

This is exactly what I would prefer even without being logged in!

Oh no, how am I going to be recommended Tucker Carlson because I watched something about space? Legit happened during a private browsing session where I watched some rocket videos. Left it on accidentally with auto play and it ended up going down a Tucker Carlson rabbit hole most likely because Elom Munsk and Spacex videos were part of the auto play history.

TIL you can turn off Youtube history. Done!

In some circles on the internet I really feel like the only person who actually likes YouTube.

So the subscribe page is going to start working normally again??

Good.

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.

My youtube recommendations are pretty good but if I watch a single video I'm not interested in it's fucked for a week.

Rare google W

I actually find the watch history useful as it has search in it. It's like enabling your browser history On. "What was that video/webpage? I recall the keyword but forgot the name of the video (or webpage)."

Also, I hardly visit the site except for links shared so the home page recommendations don't bother me and aren't of much use to me.

It seems people are now discovering that they can turn off watch history and think this is a new feature.

I have watch history on and the recommendations are garbage. Maybe I should disable it.

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

From what i've been able to tell this is one of the few good changes they've done. You won't get crap you don't care about if you're not logged in and haven't watched anything.

I don't have my watch history turned on but everything on my home page is related in some way to my subscriptions and it's annoying as fuck because it makes it difficult to discover new areas of interest. It's even worse if I log out because all I get is twenty something year olds shouting at the camera like 12 year olds in full HDR+++++. YouTube should be looking at broadening peoples interests rather than narrowing them. When they jam your homepage with similar crap to the crap you've been watching for god knows how long the whole experience starts to become stale.

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.

I was using unhook to do the same thing! Thanks, Google!

Good.

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

I like how Google thinks it’s going to encourage people turning it on when it’s probably going to do the opposite.

Cool, now make the search useful again by letting me do -thingIdon'twant or "thing I do want" in quotes. Why did that functionality even go away? Search is such garbage now that tries to get you to click on shit you didn't search for.

🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:

If this means I never see the homepage again that's a win.

Finally a decent change. More reason to disable watch history.