YouTube will now show a blank homepage if you don’t have watch history on | Hacker News Reader

YouTube will now show a blank homepage if you don’t have watch history on

support.google.com

75 pointsDemiGuru56 comments

This sounds like an improvement. I only ever view YouTube videos in a private browser, in order to avoid getting a screen full of personalized video recommendations based on whatever random thing I happened to look at last, but the generic recommendations are completely worthless. It would be nicer to skip the whole thing.

I only use private browsing when looking at stuff I need to look right now but that I don't want in my recommendations.

I find it's pretty easy to curate your YouTube recommendations like this.

How about a "don't recommend things I've already watched" option?

The thing is, I like having a watch history and I like having suggestions based on it. If I watch something that I don't want affecting my suggestions, I'll delete it from the history after watching.

The things I watch on YouTube, I generally have zero interest in watching again, and if I really want to, then I'll find it in my history. What I really don't want is for something I've seen to be recommended at the end of a video (where there is no clear indication if you've seen before it or not) or polluting the sidebar of suggestions.

I'd also very much like suggestions to fall off the list if I don't watch them in a day or two. Sometimes suggested videos stick around for weeks. I don't want to click "don't recommend this channel" or "not interested", because I might want that channel's content recommended later, and I might be generally interested in the topic, but not enough to want to watch it now.

And while we're dreaming of features: let me disable shorts permanently. I refuse to support vertical aspect video (and based on the minuscule number of views the recommended-to-me shorts get, people interested in the sort of content I am agree).

> The things I watch on YouTube, I generally have zero interest in watching again, and if I really want to, then I'll find it in my history.

There's an exception to this that I suspect is not uncommon: there's music one likes to listen to when one is chill/buzzed; having to poke into (or worse: dig thru) one's watching history is a procedure-intensive buzzkill.

> (where there is no clear indication if you've seen before it or not)

This is definitely a bug not a feature. But if the music that one evidently likes to hear and re-hear is posted prominently (based on the time of day, say) AND flagged as such, that's a feature not a bug.

youtube is clearly able to treat music tracks differently from ordinary videos. its android app won't allow you to play music in the background (a dark pattern driving sales of youtube music premium subscriptions)

Using PlayTube allows playing music in the background. It works reasonably well too.

A huge problem is that YT allows users to enter their own hashtags, which turns into a complete cluster of spammy tag use, They also allow users to upload their own thumbnails, instead of only using actual thumbnails from the videos, which also feeds bias.

There are very clear solutions to problems on the platform, they just choose the wrong direction so much because it feed their constant need to increase YOY profit, and it's annoying users off the platform.

An empty home page is not a good idea at all, and it forces users into opting into tracking, which is not kosher, and likely going to become a legal issue if anyone authoritative is doing their job any more.

document.querySelector('meta[itemprop=genre]')?.content

How about an on screen slider that says, "New to Me" which would turn off previously viewed videos when on.

If that was a paid subscriber only option that one thing would be enough to get me to subscribe.

The absolutely worst thing about shorts is that you can't easily move around the part that is playing in the video. I say easily, since there is an extremely shitty dark pattern that allows this feature, but it involves liking the video and having to reload it from your favourites. Enshittification at its finest.

> if you have YouTube watch history off and have no significant prior watch history

I don't know what they consider to be "significant prior watch history". I have mine paused for nearly 4 years, and have spent a lot of time removing videos from my watch history to improve their recommendations. I've talked about it on HN before [1].

I finally got around to subscribing to YouTube Premium, and they already burned me once by raising prices. If I'm affected by this, I'm canceling it and donating the equivalent between NewPipe [2] and Piped.video [3]

I truly despise this company. No matter what you do or how much money you give them, you are always the product to Google - never the customer.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34385025

[2] https://newpipe.net/

[3] https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped

> I truly despise this company.

maybe it felt good to say that, but don't expect any change. The number one hated company in the USA for years according to some poll, is monopoly cable TV in many regions. "hate" all you want, they know that, and they hire people who are increasingly immune to feedback.

basically, I agree with you here in California.. with the added content that some of those who hold stock in that company are the ones buying overpriced houses.

I don’t understand why people get so upset over being recommended content.

You can stick to the subscriptions tab.

You can search YouTube from your browser (!yt in DDG)

Somehow YouTube wronged you by doing…what exactly? Raising prices? And who didn’t raise prices?

I’m more upset at the quality of the recommended content. I yearn for a YouTube recommendation engine as good as TikTok.

It's just annoying a) not having control over how I want to consume my content, b) the fact that I spent all this time cleaning up my Google account history just for them to potentially throw water on my efforts, and c) I'm paying them for them to do this to me.

To start off, I already lost two of my favourite ways to consume content this year: Flamingo for Twitter and Sync for Reddit (the latter thankfully resurrected as a Lemmy app).

I do use the Subscriptions tab, but that's for existing channels I found via YT's recommendations. I can't add more if I can't find more. My current YT setup has been working perfectly fine for me to discover cool stuff.

!yt is only as useful as the results YT provides, which they've recently messed with as well. If I search for "pizza" I'm provided with results that have absolutely nothing to do with pizza. https://i.imgur.com/gxhNViW.png I checked the transcripts of both Architectural Digest videos - not once was "pizza" mentioned. The "Fresh Guacamole" film has no dialogue, and is also not about pizza. It's about guacamole.

I think it's general consensus that Google's consumer products have been on a decline. Just 2 days ago "Google Maps has become an eyesore" was at the top of HN with 764 points [1]. If I search "Google Search" on HN, the top post that shows up is "Google Search Is Dying" with 3636 points [2]. And we're all familiar with the infamous Google Graveyard [3].

I enjoy not seeing ads and being able to support the creators I watch (Premium viewers apparently earn creators more money than ad-supported viewers [4]). I just think it's reasonable to want some control over what and how I feed them information about myself, if I'm paying $14 a month.

I understand that costs for a lot of other things have gone up, it's still annoying to be affected by it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37030044

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Google+search

[3] https://killedbygoogle.com/

[4] https://youtu.be/Rh5hL47z2us?t=154

> My current YT setup has been working perfectly fine for me to discover cool stuff.

This passage shines above the rest of the complaints, which feel more philosophical than tangible to me.

The HN consensus mostly just points out the opinion of a small and vocal community. M

In your screenshot you scrolled past the results to a different section of the page. Keep scrolling and you get more results (maybe that’s bad UI but again like you said it’s working perfectly).

It’s also notable that the more popular TV, tablet, and phone apps don’t work this way.

>I finally got around to subscribing to YouTube Premium, and they already burned me once by raising prices.

The first burn is that you are paying them with money AND your data (which they now can link to your CC#). I'd be more than happy to pay for a service like YT to get it ad free as long as it doesn't harvest my data (for any damn purpose).

The willingness to pay, actually makes you a more valuable customer to premium services, it reclassifies you for the 2nd tier web. Like a higher-refined product for advertisers.

Subscriptions are indeed being used to trigger class-ism covertly by companies more than ever, but it's a terrible form of discrimination because many can use bootleg credit cards, or even decide to cancel subscriptions/// Those that cancel or don't pay suffer unknowingly on basic service now pelted with even more ads to subscribe, and possibly even their uploads are held back when they are not a premium user. This needs to be killed as a practice, otherwise the future is going to be pay to breathe everywhere... Dreadful.

> I finally got around to subscribing to YouTube Premium, and they already burned me once by raising prices.

What are you paying for, exactly? Youtube is already free.

Actually wait, I don't want to know. I'm happy with my life, there's no way that knowing this will improve it.

no ads on non-browser devices (and browser based as they've taken stronger stances against ad-blockers).

The amount of ads I see people watch is ridiculous, I can't stand them at all anymore.

What about pihole? What about watching less TV/youtube?

> What about pihole?

I had trouble with pi-hole breaking things and requiring too much manual intervention (compared to browser based ones that I can toggle with a mouse click without changing screens).

> What about watching less TV/youtube?

I generally have youtube on pretty much all day for music as I haven't found anything else that approaches it for music recommendations (which is pretty sad as they're still not great).

I was previously in an apartment that had its own internet setup, using my Xbox to watch what was basically more ads than video. I don't think there's a way to set up a PiHole on their connection (maybe there is, but at the time a Raspberry Pi would cost more than a year's worth of YT Premium.. I was also not aware of NextDNS back then).

That, and Premium views apparently pay creators more than ad-supported views [1], so I justified it that way.

[1] https://youtu.be/Rh5hL47z2us?t=154

A lot of very talented people make a living by posting videos to YouTube.

YouTube gives them a platform to remain independent content authors. It's not perfect. Nothing is.

YouTube shares ad revenue with them. That's their living. If you pay for premium, you do not see ads but YouTube still pays them for your view. I don't know the full details, I'm sure it isn't perfect.

I'm not sure what part of that you were concerned about knowing, but I am glad I can not view ads and that I can consume a lot of great independently content for a very minimal monthly cost.

I'm tired of youtube recommendations and comments full of vanity praise and flamewars. These days I use ublockorigin to kill most of youtube recommendations and comments to just use it as a searchbar. A lot of it is adopted from reddit[1]

www.youtube.com###contentContainer

www.youtube.com##.ytd-two-column-browse-results-renderer.style-scope > .ytd-rich-grid-renderer.style-scope

www.youtube.com###below

www.youtube.com###related

www.youtube.com##ytd-comments

www.youtube.com##ytd-live-chat-frame

www.youtube.com##yt-live-chat-app

www.youtube.com##ytd-thumbnail > a#thumbnail > div#mouseover-overlay

www.youtube.com##ytd-browse[page-subtype="home"] /annotations_module.js$script,important,domain=youtube.com /endscreen.js$script,important,domain=youtube.com

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/sif7x3/how_to...

I'll admit I was pleasantly surprised at the lack of dark patterns involved in turning these settings off:

https://myactivity.google.com/u/1/activitycontrols

Disabling a setting asks if you also want to delete your history for that setting; if you say yes it shows a sample of what you're deleting, you confirm it, and it's done. Nothing tried to encourage me to stick around, keep my data, they could easily have let me turn off collection of new data but not mentioned that they still have the existing data around -- I expected trickery but found none.

(Except for one small detail: I can't figure out how one is supposed to discover that this page exists in the first place; the support update we're discussing contains a link to it, but I can't find it anywhere in the YouTube preferences or advanced settings or anywhere else.)

(Oh, and it had no visible effect on my YouTube home screen, I'm not seeing the empty page I hoped for, just the same garbage videos it usually prompts me with for no clear reason. So there's that too.)

> I can't figure out how one is supposed to discover that this page exists in the first place

Click on "History" in the YouTube sidebar. It'll take you to https://www.youtube.com/feed/history. Not only does it shows the watch history, it has embedded controls for clearing the entire history, deleting individual entries, turning off new collection, as well as links to the more granular activity control pages.

You're absolutely right, thank you. I was so hung up on "preferences" or "settings" being the place to look that I missed the link that was literally named the thing I was looking for!

AFAIK, this "My Activity" page is controlled by the user trust team which is mostly independent from other products, hence it doesn't share much incentives to "optimize" metrics.

If you open your google account settings, the very first section is labelled "privacy and personalization". If you click on that, the option to disable youtube watch history shows up. In terms of "dark patterns", they do have a nag prompt begging you to reenable watch history which shows up in the recommended videos section of a youtube video. The only way to disable this nag permanently is seemingly to block it with uB0.

Yep, I was looking in YouTube settings instead. I wouldn't have thought to leave YouTube to change a setting that affects YouTube, but it's a reasonable-in-hindsight design decision to collect all the privacy stuff for various google apps in one place.

I don't have watch history on, and I don't see a blank homepage. I still see a grid of videos from channels I've never watched. It doesn't say "recommendations" or anything, but I'm not sure what else it could be...

From the post: "We’re rolling these changes out slowly, over the next few months..."

Oh I see, thanks for the attention to detail :) The title should probably be changed, then, since it says "YouTube will now show..."

This is a great change but either it's not fully rolled out yet or it's not enabled when logged out. I still see a cluttered home page when I visit.

It stinks that a user interface improvement this large would require you to log in; hopefully that's just a temporary issue. In the meantime there are scripts, css tweaks, and alternative clients that can make the watching experience cleaner and less distracting, but people shouldn't have to have technical knowledge just to get a clean home menu when visiting the site.

"We are launching this new experience to make it more clear which YouTube features rely on watch history to provide video recommendations" - this almost sounds like a veiled threat like: We're doing this to show you that you really DO want to drink the Kool aid because you definitely won't like what we have in store for you otherwise.

At the very least, it seems like they expect most users to dislike the idea and leave history on.

I use YouTube without logging in. I got something in between. Instead of a blank page I got a generic page with popular topics instead of videos similar to the ones I watched previously.

So this happened to me. I submitted a support request and they fixed it very quickly. My watch history is still off and the homepage is back.

It's still a pretty crappy thing to do.

This sounds like a feature I've wanted for a while. I'm seriously trying to decide if deleting my watch history is worth the major benefit of disabling the YouTube homepage and recommendations area.

The Improve-YouTube browser extension can disable sections of the screen, the homepage is just the search for me, I haven't seen the recommendations on the right side for months now, and I don't miss it.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/improve-youtube-%F...

On mobile, NewPipe is an alternative player where you can enable and disable many parts of YouTube (comments, recommendations, trending...).

I turned off "watch history" just now, and the home page still shows me (personalized) recommendations--which makes me sad because I hoped this would an easy way for me to quit my bad habit of scanning the recommendations when I am bored.

I used to welcome these recommendations, BTW, but they've been crap for the last 5 weeks or so.

Have you considered using an ublock origin filter?

    youtube.com##[page-subtype="home"]

Thank you for that.

I had `||www.youtube.com/|`, but it didn't always work.

My self discipline hack was only navigating to my subscription feed, that way it "ends" and there is only a handful of videos to check each day.

But now they put Shorts into the subscription feed, a gateway into another endless feed. So I have blocked YT altogether until I can update my little chrome extension to remove them. When my executive function started to falter shorts could vacuum up so much of my attention. You can't remove them from that page either like you can on the homepage, and on the homepage you can only hide them for 30 days (why is that I wonder...)

You can also block Shorts with uBlock Origin.

https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/wiki/solutions/youtube...

This is a superpower, I had uBlock but didn't realise it had the element picker feature. It took seconds to clear up the annoying parts of YT. Cheers for the recommendation.

Glad to hear it. Note how it can also re-style elements, eg restoring the old (non-bold) Youtube titles

  www.youtube.com##h3.title:style(font-weight: 400 !important;)

or un-float navbars:

  ! Disable floating navbars
  nytimes.com##.live-blog-above-main-content:style(position:absolute !important)
  latimes.com##header[data-element=header]:style(position:absolute !important)
  wired.com##.persistent-top:style(position:absolute !important)
  vice.com##.nav-bar:style(position:absolute !important)

You can even run a selection of scripts from a built-in library.[0] For instance, to disable Youtube rollover previews (including network traffic), you can interrupt the event handler with addEventListener-defuser:

  www.youtube.com##+js(aeld, /^(?:mousemove|pointermove|pointerenter|mouseenter|mouseleave)$/, buttons)

The best thing is to read the wiki (which I procrastinated for way too long!), especially the parts on filter syntax[1][2] and blocking modes[3]. I used uBO for years without appreciating its full power.

Maybe this whets your interest. Cheers

[0] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Resources-Library

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Static-filter-syntax

[2] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Procedural-cosmetic-f...

[3] (watch this first: https://youtu.be/2lisQQmWQkY?t=114) https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode

YT users built their castles in the sands of the shores of a globalized megacorp.

Time to find another platform more transparent about crap content and where corporate crap isn't given a soapbox.

To be fair, the content creators are building the castles, consumers just visit. If my favourite creators all build new castles somewhere else one day, I'd go there.

And there's some really nice content on the platform which other platforms just lack. Considering how much Youtube I watch for free and how much I pay Netflix for not a whole lot of good content, I think Youtube is somewhat getting a rough deal here. But it is what it is. I'm actually considering cancelling Netflix. Their content has gone down the drain in the last years and I spend an order of magnitude more time watching Youtube content at this point.

Content creators on the other hand seem to be doing fine in Youtube. This is what matters to me. I follow about 120 channels and a few dozen of those are very active and getting lots of sponsorship deals. Several of the wonderful people I follow seem to be getting a full time salary out of their activities while maintaining good production quality.

The endless promotion of a handful of the same companies sponsoring their content on these channels is a bit weird but I just fast forward through that with the arrow keys. These companies seem to be spending a lot on Youtube marketing, which I guess is working for them. And I get some satisfaction out of watching stupid VC cash being funneled into the pockets of people I actually care about. At least it looks to me like VC funded companies buying traffic by spending their investment like this. Old trick in the valley that makes the investment portfolio look healthier than it is. Whatever it is, thank you! I never see ads on Youtube because ublock origin doesn't let any of those through. Works really well. Hence I'm not paying for a premium account (yet).

Yes Youtube recommendations kind of suck. Don't they all? Glorified more of the same shit dressed up as machine learning snake oil. Very hard to escape the recommendation bubble of stuff I've already seen and stuff I'm never going to watch no matter how often Google recommends it. I mostly just watch my subscription feed instead. Which is just stuff I follow in order it gets published. Exactly the way I like it.

Honestly, It's not like Amazon, Spotify, Netflix, etc. have much better recommendation algorithms. This whole space seems to have hit a local optimum about ten years ago where it drives enough of their business that they stopped trying to improve it. All the generative AI stuff that people are talking about lately isn't being applied for recommendations yet. I suspect, Google has actually reduced investments in this team years ago. It's been sort of a constant and I've not really noticed any changes in the quality of the recommendations. It was bad five years ago and it still is in more or less the same way.

> Honestly, It's not like Amazon, Spotify, Netflix, etc. have much better recommendation algorithms.

YT has a dislike button that:

- doesn't prevent video from being at top of search results

- doesn't remove it from recommendations

- doesn't remove it from autoplay nor mixes

Even Netflix deals with that better.

Amazon and other e-commerce sites all have "toilet seat collector" problem with recommendation systems, I don't know if it can be improved upon.

> Hence I'm not paying for a premium account (yet).

I gave it a try for a month - as there is no adblock available for my TV. It somehow makes all sponsor segments much more annoying. I don't give a damn about Brilliant, I don't neead a reminder it exists every 15 minutes. And if I get yet another VPN ad that includes bullshit claims about security or anonymity, then I will drop the channel - I guess the "Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect" doesn't work within single video stream.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/df-tube-distractio... I use this addon because I was sick of the clickbait and nsfw homepage videos that I would get on incognito. I guess after this update I won't need it.

Sounds minimalistic, I like it. My dummy Google account loaded in a Firefox container tab with YT watch history disabled just got even better.

Boycott YouTube, use:

https://piped.video

That's just using YouTube with extra steps.

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