this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
429 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

37702 readers
482 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
alyaza@beehaw.org
TheRtRevKaiser@beehaw.org
gyrfalcon@beehaw.org
rs5th@beehaw.org
Los@beehaw.org
coldredlight@beehaw.org
SemioticStandard@beehaw.org
TheRtRevKaiser@kbin.social
remington@beehaw.org
429
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
93 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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] autotldr@lemmings.world 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:

Click here to see the summaryThe change is all part of a “new viewer experience” Google announced on Tuesday.

That means you’ll only see the search bar on the homepage, along with the Shorts, Subscriptions, and Library buttons.

This could come as a welcome change for people who hate sifting through increasingly extreme thumbnails to find the play button, but it could also be a way to annoy users into turning the history back on.

Google says it’s going to roll out this feature “over the next few months,” but several users across the web are already seeing the change.

In place of YouTube’s recommended videos is a notice that reads, “Your watch history is off.

“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,” Google writes.