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.
I like how Google thinks it’s going to encourage people turning it on when it’s probably going to do the opposite.
I’m not sure why people think that turning their history off protects their privacy. What’s to stop Google from just not showing you your history if you try to turn it off? I’m sure they still collect all of that data.
It’s not about privacy. It’s about not having shity recommendations.
Fair enough. When my history was off, the recommendations were bad. I just made my bookmark link directly to the Subscriptions page.