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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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[–] 20 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (3 children)

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.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Except the search on the history sucks horribly, many times I've found the video doing a normal search when the history one finds nothing

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