Technology

37745 readers

357 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

coldredlight@beehaw.org

Los@beehaw.org

SemioticStandard@beehaw.org

TheRtRevKaiser@kbin.social

remington@beehaw.org

457

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

97 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

[–] MJBrune@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't have my watch history off. I use it a lot to remember videos I was watching. It honestly ended up doing a lot for me and I'd rather get recommended content I might enjoy. Just like how Lemmy recommends content to me like how this post ended up at the top of my front page.

[–] Kajo@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I totally get that. For most people, watch history and relevant recommendations are indeed useful tools.

But if, for some reasons, you want to switch off these tools, the price to pay was a home page full of flashy clickbait miniatures. This terrible home page could have been an incentive to switch history on.

Now, it's just a minimalistic google-ish search page. It's an unexpected improvement when they could have done much worse, like a home page autoplaying ad videos, for example.

[–] MJBrune@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

Maybe google here is attempting to appeal to both types of people? Why should they truly care if people have watch history off? The end of the day, you are still watching videos on YouTube and that's what they want.