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

submitted 11 months 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] 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

What’s been your experience with youtube recommendations?

I've never had a YouTube account, so YouTube doesn't have any persistent data on me as an individual to do recommendations unless it can infer who I am from other data.

They seem to do a decent job of recommending the next video in a series done in a playlist by an author, which is really the only utility I get out of suggestions that YouTube gives me (outside of search results, which I suppose are themselves a form of recommendation). I'd think that YouTube could do better by just providing an easy way to get from the video to such a list, but...

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

I've never had a YouTube account, so YouTube doesn't have any persistent data on me as an individual

Pretty sure they do anyway