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.

      • WorstPyroEver@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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          1 year ago

          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

          • nickajeglin@lemmy.one
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            1 year ago

            Yesterday, for the first time, I got google search results that were entirely useless. I don’t remember what I searched, but it was a relatively simple question and I was kind of in a hurry. The only results I got were video thumbnails and sponsored products… Also presented as thumbnails. Barely any text anywhere to tell me what the thumbnails were supposed to be. They even removed the choices across the top so I couldn’t select “all”.

            It’s been getting worse for years, but that was the last straw for me. I don’t want to search the web on “large thumbnails”, I want “detail view”. Sometimes I’m searching for a product, but mostly I need information in the form of text written by a real human. If a search engine can’t give me that, then it’s not useful anymore.

            Really frustrating. I guess I better get around to using duckduckgo everywhere.

    • thingsiplay@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      @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

      • Big P@feddit.uk
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • Otter@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • Rentlar@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • MagicShel@programming.dev
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      1 year 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
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      1 year 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 [he/him] 🌈@beehaw.org
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        1 year 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
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          1 year 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.

  • MajinBlayze@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

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

  • ironcrotch@aussie.zone
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Creesch@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      It still does? That is an entirely different page and still shows the newest videos of channels you are subscribed to. At least, for me it does.

    • Riker_Maneuver@startrek.website
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      1 year ago

      I love the content/creators, but hate the company that runs it. Sadly, unless you are willing to give up the channels you love there isn’t much in the way of alternatives.

    • Geometric7792@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      It’s funny because I agree with you - out of everything that collects my data I get the most out of YouTube, it often recommends things I like quite a bit and it’s the primary way I discover new music

      • Pleat1752@feddit.uk
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        1 year ago

        I take steps to prevent algorithms from dictating what I listen to and watch. Algorithmically-decided culture feels utterly wrong to me.

        • Catsrules@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          What is the alternative? There is so many videos and creators I am not sure their is any other way to do it. Besides some form of an algorithm.

          • CaptainAniki@lemmy.flight-crew.org
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            1 year ago

            How about not making suggestions? Just show me what I’m subbed to. I don’t need nor want a massive billion dollar company doing anything for me.

            • Catsrules@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              But you have already found what you subscribed to. One of the reasons why Youtube is so popular is the discoverability aspect of it. That is my question how does discoverability work without some kind of algorithm recommending people videos.

          • Pleat1752@feddit.uk
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            1 year ago

            Music-wise: Radio stations “oh but the radio sucks” yeah but online radio stations don’t. They don’t have any ads. Start with NTS 1 and 2 and go from there. Last.fm browsing USER pages. RYM user pages. Online music guides written by real people. Recommendations from friends- real people.

            Video-wise: I honestly don’t watch youtubers. Their output and quality isn’t up to snuff. No I don’t care about speedruns, about “internet rabbit holes” about any of that. About people restoring old gear. About basically anything. So I watch actual TV shows and actual movies, and you guessed it, I get those recommendations from REAL PEOPLE.

            I deleted my original comment cos I felt it was a little negative but somehow that didn’t propagate across the fediverse… weird!

      • CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Only the people who provide content for profit tbh. For the original focus of YouTube, which was simply to provide the ability for the collective “you” to post videos and share them with the world, it’s fine. The problem was, like every platform that provides a financial incentive to do anything, it gets gamed by those seeking to profit off of it and devolves into a corporate hellscape.

        Ignore the monetization aspect and, other than the ads (which can be blocked by uBlock at least for the time being), it’s still a fine platform.

    • TwilightVulpine@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      I used to like YouTube, but between the constant increase in number and length of ads, as well as how they keep stifling creators by restricting the language they can use and the topics they can cover, it seems like anything good there exists in spite of the company rather than because of it.

  • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • nyander@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      I concur. It seems like Google is trying to force personalization. It’s also not good that they are hiding the default recommendations because it becomes harder to see what is being censored.

      • lloram239@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        Google is already forcing personalization on everybody anyway. Browse Youtube without an account and it’ll look just the same as with an account. The only difference is that without an account you can’t clear videos from your history or ignore channels, but the videos they list are still highly personalized on your watch history.

        You have to actually clear and block cookies to get rid of personalization.

      • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        There will be personalization as long as cookies are enabled though. I wouldn’t be surprised if they fingerprint on top of that too.

    • ExLisper@linux.community
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      1 year ago

      Everyone one is already giving all their data to google/facebook/tiktok/amazon. Why would you care about average internet user?

        • ExLisper@linux.community
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          The only collective effect I can think of is that if everyone would start blocking ads google and others would crack down on ad-blockers and it would be more difficult for us to use them. Let the sheep feed google so it doesn’t care about the 1% that’s currently hiding.