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

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 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.