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453

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

submitted 1 year ago by trashhalo@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

97 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[–] mojo@lemm.ee 25 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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 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.

[–] lloram239@feddit.de 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.

[–] mojo@lemm.ee 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.

[–] ExLisper@linux.community 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] Dark_Dragon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But collectively it makes a difference.

[–] ExLisper@linux.community 6 points 1 year ago

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.