220
YouTube will soon require watch history to be enabled to show video suggestions
(support.google.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
220 points (97.8% liked)
Technology
34794 readers
217 users here now
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
This initially sounded like they were forcing users to their history under the guise of providing suggestions, however it really just means "no history, no suggestions"
I'm ok with this
If they also kill autoplay it would be super.
I can see how autoplay can be useful, though.
What I don't like is that it's opt-out.
So every time I use a new browser, I have to disable it yet again.
Isn't that a toggleable option?
On the TV version of YouTube, I still have no idea how to turn that off. It's much easier on desktop and mobile.
I see no downside here I hate suggestions 90% are crap. I prefer to discover things on my own. I don't want your suggestions and turning off autoplay be cherry on the top.
They could go back to suggesting only videos related to the one you're watching but they really want The Engagement Algorithm to be the only one available :(
G O O D. Their suggestion engine provides no diversity. Once you watch one video about something, that something is all they show you
Yes, I do wish it had a longer memory. It feels like only the past few days of watching has any impact on suggestions, if you've neglected to watch videos about a certain topic for over a week it's basically ancient history and never comes up again. I'd love to get a varied mix of things I've been interested in for the past 6 months or even longer.
I'd even like a ranking scheme like we have here on the threadiverse. Show me videos with a lot of activity, ones that have been showing a lot of promise, what's been happening over the past 12, 24, 48, or 72 hours.
I guess what I'm saying is I want long form video content like YouTube to be delivered and ranked like comment threads on Lemmy and the older link aggregator(s)
I'm COMPLETELY okay with this.
Technically couldn't they do this without "history"... Isnt that what cookies are for? I mean they can already show me shit based of what I say with my phone in my pocket, lol.
Cookies are a way of establishing persistence between a device and a site (most commonly a server session).
They could technically put some of your history in the cookie, but it wouldn't be retained between devices nor if you logout/clear-cookies.
To keep it consistent and build those suggestions across devices and logins, it needs to be saved on a server somewhere, which is essentially... history tracking.
Not legally because of various data tracking laws around the world. Maybe they can where you life, but then then need to be 100% sure they have that right. By making this clear they can argue in court they need to track this data, and that you have the option to not have it tracked.