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YouTube will now show a blank homepage if you don’t have watch history on (www.theverge.com)
submitted 3 years ago by 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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[–] 30 points 3 years ago (11 children)

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

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  • [–] 20 points 3 years ago (6 children)

    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

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  • [–] 15 points 3 years ago (5 children)

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

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years 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.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years 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!

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  • [–] 17 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Youtube is very hard on the people that provide content and don't have a corporation backing their play.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years 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.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 years 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.

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