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Comment by blitzar | Hacker News Reader

> Google right now makes my youtube.com homepage blank, asking me to turn on my watch history.

Google right now fills my youtube.com homepage with what is "popular" - seeing what is widely consumed crushes the last hopes I have for civilization and makes me almost want to turn back on my watch history so I can be oblivious to reality.

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Oh man, me too. The garbage that fills the homepage of yt I think is truly the least-common-denominator bottom barrel stuff. We really have raced to the bottom with clickbait titles, thumbnails with "WOW" faces and neon colors, etc. (And that stuff really works! I find myself tempted sometimes to click on one just to see if some outrageous claim or feat is really true.)

It's weird, I've had mine go back and forth between blank, popular garbage, and what seems to be inferred from like/subscribe data without using watch history. I assume this is some A/B testing flag they use and somehow I end up in different experiments.

To make it a bit brighter for you, many of these are just watched for a few seconds by bored teenagers sitting on a toilet without nothing better[0] to do. I'd be very surprised if people actually deliberately sat on the couch and spend hours watching this crap.

[0] At least this is what they think/feel

I thought that too, until I visited my colleague who turned on their tv on those braincell killing videos and presented it as entertainment.

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