YouTube using antipattern to force people enable history
If your history is off Youtube's landing page will show no videos and will "encourage" you to enable the history.
Any ideas why are they using this trick?
Any ideas why are they using this trick?
I often go to youtube to find explaination to different things, but usually I ended up watching 10 other very interesting videos and even sometimes forgetting what for I came in the first place!
It's either a weak will of mine or great algorithms serving what I would love to watch. Now it's an easy game: only what I came for and no distractions!
Best move ever, YT!
[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-yout...
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...
YouTube has become something I catch up with, just like RSS.
I do that too but thankfully I have history enabled so I just check there.
i only see subscriptions and videos i care about now. and through my subscriptions, i discover videos related to what i care about. they should do away with the home page all together for people who have watch history turned off.
best move ever!
How do you navigate it? Does search start working once history is gone?
Just another anti-user annoyance, like having to click 3 different menus to hand-pick a specific video quality on the app and having it not stored as your preference. Thankfully it's all fixed by Revanced.
By the way, a bug that I found a few minutes ago on YT for TV: if you're watching a video with subs on (manual subs, not autogenerated) and an ad rolls in, it switch to automatic subtitles for the ad, and then doesn't switch back when the ad is over.
I use the YouTube recommender extensively and understand the issues about getting increasing crap in recs. I really have no interest in fake science crap or conspiracy theory crap! So I aggressively "do not like" videos or channels that turn up with this junk. I'm not sure I could use YouTube without the recommender and would not use it if I got constant crap. The "do not like" tells the recommender not to send that particular type of crap and though more crap will inevitably drift in, the result is a pretty useful feature.
It's not a cas where they can't. They decide on this course of action.
On a related note, they already show an (almost) totally generic feed for Shorts. If you turn search history off, you see a lot of Andrew Tate, anti-trans, and "masculinity is under attack" messaging. It's disgusting to think that's what Google are showing to new sign users.
Thus, they simplified it down to one recommendation tool, that uses history in it
YouTube Will Display a Blank Home Feed If Your Watch History Is Turned Off https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37151135
YouTube will stop showing videos on the homepage if your watch history is off https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37066718
YouTube no longer suggests videos if your ‘watch history’ is turned off https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37058189
YouTube will stop showing videos on the homepage if your watch history is off https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37054233
YouTube will now show a blank homepage if you don’t have watch history on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37053817
Ash HN: YouTube home page blank when history is off https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36963702
now you have a "mini player" on an almost blank page.
so, seems to me that what they're doing is encouraging users to watch more videos, so Google can serve more ads, and thus increase revenue.
Surely they understand that this has to end at some point, right? They keep taking steps to get users to watch more, so they can serve more ads, "earning" more money from advertisers. Users will continue to resist changes like this, which will encourage Google to get more aggressive about getting people to "play along" which will push more users away, and so on.
at some point, SURELY, Google will understand that previous growth rates are impossible to sustain, right? and that this is a normal thing when you have an entire market completely and totally dominated across all demographics? Right?
Like, how far are they going to go? until every last video on the Internet is served by them? until everyone either pays for YT Premium or watches 6 ads every 90 seconds?
They understand that they are just creating a dystopia so that people click ads, right? They obviously know, because they measure the performance of the company by how many people watch ads, click on ads, and pay for YT Premium. So they're aware that they're creating something unsustainable and they're doing it anyway? for a good evaluation on their performance review?
what the fuck?
"Successfully wore down enough people so they stopped blocking ads and watched more videos served with ads, wasting literally millions of person-hours per year, and lowering the quality of life for those users so that value can be extracted from their activities more completely, all for the glory of Google quarterly reports."
at this point, if you work for any company that puts ads in front of people's eyes, please sit down for a minute and think about how you'll feel after retirement when you recount how you spent your gift of time on Earth. Ask yourself if you are proud of what you have done in exchange for the meager raises you have earned. Is that the best way you could have spent your time? Really? Think about what you've done when you want to watch something on television or in the theater, or even in a book, and you get annoyed by ads which you know were put there solely to "capture value from users." think about how enjoyable it is for you to be a user who is having a penny's worth of value extracted, and ask yourself if 20 minutes of your life per hour of television time is worth that penny you provided someone.
I've been playing a game of cat and mouse, it's disgusting how much they're pushed IMO
Every couple weeks I have to change the filter
It's good in the "I just want to peruse and find something unusual/interesting" sense
If nothing else, absently happening across what's new or popular
It's a massive time sink and probably best spent elsewhere
All of those things depend on tracking your viewing history.
This *was* a very powerful and useful feature they've ripped from us.
Most articles I can find seem convinced that if you disable YouTube history, it's disabled and not logged. If you delete it, it's deleted and it's gone.
I suppose Google could secretly or surreptitiously log it and save it, but nobody seems able to prove that.
There are certainly a lot of other trails left. Any link, dislike, or comment you leave is a historical marker. Every URL you visit goes into your browser history, so is that disabled too? All your DNS queries, though these won't pinpoint individual videos.
It's just a thing IMO.