The homepage will look a lot different if your watch history is off.

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.

  • Boinketh@lemm.ee
    3·
    11 months ago

    Crazy how google still does that, but youtube doesn’t. My guess would be that laymen were copy-pasting titles with hyphens in them and then getting confused when what they were looking for wouldn’t show up, which honestly makes sense. That could be solved by just having the little tricks visible somewhere near the search so that people can figure it out.