On the flip side, this also means users have the option to have a cleaner, less cluttered interface.
Full text:
[AUGUST 8, 2023] A new viewer experience that better corresponds to your YouTube watch history preferences
One of the benefits of having YouTube watch history on is that it enables YouTube to provide video recommendations you may be interested in; however, we know some prefer to clear and turn off your YouTube watch history. Starting today, we’re changing how you see recommendations on YouTube, based on your Watch History settings:
Starting today, if you have YouTube watch history off and have no significant prior watch history, features that require watch history to provide video recommendations will be disabled – like your YouTube home feed. This means that starting today, your home feed may look a lot different: you’ll be able to see the search bar and the left-hand guide menu, with no feed of recommended videos thus allowing you to more easily search, browse subscribed channels and explore Topic tabs instead.
We’re rolling these changes out slowly, over the next few months. We are launching this new experience to make it more clear which YouTube features rely on watch history to provide video recommendations and make it more streamlined for those of you who prefer to search rather than browse recommendations. You can change your YouTube watch history settings at any time based on whether you prefer us to provide video recommendations or not.
This is youtube being salty about people not wanting them to keep track of their watch list. because even without it youtube could make a lot of bucks by just suggesting based of other parameters. They are betting on nudging people the way they want.
I just use the Subscriptions feed and skip the algorithm altogether. Combine a bookmark of the subscriptions feed (With Ublock origin , ReturnYoutubeDislikes and sponsorblock) with NewPipe (a fork of newpipe with sponsorblock, specifically), and you get a good YouTube Experience. Otherwise, you can just forget it.
Edit: RSS is also an option if you want to go that route.
I’m perfectly fine with that. I don’t want recommendations, I want a search engine.
youtube suggestions are genuinely terrible for the individual and humanity as a whole
I disagree. Spotify and YouTube are the only platforms that actually do a good job recommending me content I’m interested in. Other places like instagram, twitter and lemmy needs heavy curation to be usable.
The only thing I’ll potentially sort of miss is the cynical comedy of the absolutely godawful shit they recommend when they don’t have a watch history to base anything on.
You can get that experience any time by going to Trending.
You could also pour milk in your boots.
My history log has been shit lately. When I search this log, it seems many of the videos I’ve watched are missing, but if I search my browser history I can find them normally. That’s the only reason I turn on my watch history, as my browser’s history gets deleted automatically after 6 months.
Maybe they should stop recommending videos I’ve already watched. And if I reroll give me a brand new list.
they now they run out of interesting content when they recommend you already watched stuff. Youtube™ is overblown
Not always their fault. Seems the dashcam channels have started copying each other’s content and rebranding it.
Would be nice if videos 90% watched would bugger off though.
Yeah, 70% of my reccomended is just videos I’ve already seen, and 29% is clickbait trash, but every now and then I do get a very good reccomendation, that I simply would never know about without it, so I’m not sure if I want to turn recommendations off yet.
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They could at least add a filter to remove shorts; but no, they do this.
No? I’m seeing zero shorts in my feed
They did the opposite and shoved a pointless shorts section in the middle of your subscription page so you can’t see what you actually want to look at.
I know I’ll catch shit for this but I kinda don’t mind shorts. Sometimes I don’t have anything specific to watch and I just wanna waste 10 mins…
The content quality varies wildly and it doesn’t seem to have a very good algorithm but it succeeds in helping me burn 5-10 mins while I’m waiting on someone or something.
I think YouTube expects people to burn hours on it like TikTok but I don’t see that happening.
Still, it sucks that they’re pushing them so hard on everyone. I tried to see the appeal, but I can’t stomach short form content at all. I get whiplash!
That’s what I use lemmy for.
I don’t mind them existing either. My issue is with how they show up in the subscription feed now. I’d prefer separate feeds for shorts.
I’m a bit confused.
Will this affect only the home feed or also the recommendations beside a playing video?I’d assume that “related” suggestions would still work, unless Youtube decides to break them out of spite.
Cool cool cool, disabled watch history and cancelled YouTube premium. GG YouTube.
This is nice because one of the most annoying things has been to randomly watch a video and then they start suggesting all of this content that is not relevant or is bothersome. Like, watch a video on certain topics one time and all of a sudden “check out Ben Shapiro!”
Surely Google is still tracking watch history for analysis for ads and profiling though, right?
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Do they think this is some kind of threat?
Fuck the recommendations - all I get is the same 15 suggestions across multiple categories, most of them I’ve already watched or in my subscriptions.
The beauty of YouTube used to be the random jewels of clips that would surface, now it’s just corporate friendly pop stars latest music videos and the same shitty content over and over and over again.
It’s impossible to just stumble across anything unique on yt now.
Totally agree, there’s so much good content on there but all I see are the same 10-ish content creators and it fucking sucks.
Any 3rd party site that gives better YT recommendations?
Huh. This presser just taught me I can disable watch history. That’s awesome. Unintended consequences of them trying to force people to turn it on will be teaching others that this setting exists.
