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

submitted 10 months ago by trashhalo@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

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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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[-] Kajo@beehaw.org 62 points 10 months ago

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

[-] MagicShel@programming.dev 33 points 10 months 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 5 points 10 months 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@beehaw.org 4 points 10 months 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 1 points 10 months 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.