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 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.
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 can see how autoplay can be useful, though.
What I don’t like is that it’s opt-in.
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 :(
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.
Maybe they should stop recommending videos I’ve already watched. And if I reroll give me a brand new list.
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.
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.
They could at least add a filter to remove shorts; but no, they do this.
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.
That’s what I use lemmy for.
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!
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.
No? I’m seeing zero shorts in my feed
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?
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.
Thank goodness! Finally, I won’t have to suffer through “suggestions” that are unrelated to anything I’ve watched and are just pushing clickbait. It does make sense though. They can’t suggest anything, if they can’t digest what you’ve watched.
Well, they could suggest popular content, which seems to be mostly what I get. It’ll be good to not have a bunch of nonsense I’m going to ignore anyway I guess.
I feel like folks have a very different YouTube experience than I do. My suggestions are all already related to either my watch history or are from my subscriptions.
It’d be nice if they would stop pushing Shorts though.
I usually use yt on a wifi network with upwards of 200 other people, so I’m sure the suggestions are relevant to us as a unit, but not so much to me as an individual.
And, yes. The shorts can die.
Certainly possible! My husband watches a completely different type of content than I do and I never get recommendations from his feed unless we watch something that we’ve watched in a shared chromecast feed, and then only very rarely.
Their recommendations are always a bit shit anyway, so I’m not too bothered about this on a personal level.
Lately I have been spending more time looking for videos that actually interest me than I have been watching videos. It’s all either extremely similar, or stuff I have already seen. I often end up just closing the app without having watched anything at all.
Once they had to change the algo because it was shoving people down the right wing pipeline at an alarming rate it got a lot worse. They basically had to nerf it and start over and it’s never recovered to the point it used to be at. The recommendations used to be significantly better, but that also coincided with alt right content doing extremely well.
It seems to be getting worse every day. I used to always find something interesting to watch, and now my feed seems to be the same 10 videos or so, and the rest is stuff I’ve already watched? I feel stuck in such a small bubble!
same feel.
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.
As long as NewPipe still works, I do not care.
I’m perfectly fine with that. I don’t want recommendations, I want a search engine.
On the flip side here, almost everything I watch is from recommendations and this is going to be a change that drastically changes how I use the platform. I’m probably just going to have to turn watch history on, which is what they want, but it’s also apparently now the only way to get a decently curated YT feed.
No, the subscription box doesn’t do that. I don’t want to only see things I subscribe to. I specifically want to be recommended things to watch on my homepage.
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?
Kind of makes sense - the suggestions are based on your watch history after all.
I cleared mine a while back, and it also reset my feed to whatever random popular stuff they suggest. As it rebuilt the history, it became nice again.
At least it makes it somewhat clear what it’s suggesting you stuff based on. Can’t have suggestions if they don’t have data on your watching habits.
I already curate my own watch history and occasionally go on a remove spree when my recommendations get stale or full of shit I don’t really care about.
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