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Comment by drivers99 | Hacker News Reader

There are 0 videos on my YouTube homepage, just a screen asking me to turn on history. Just the way I like it. Here’s what I did:

Go into the YouTube app, settings, manage all history, under the history tab hit Delete -> delete all time.

Then go to controls (still in the manage all history dialog box under settings), under YouTube history hit Turn off. It says “pausing…” Hit Pause, and Got it.

It’s been exactly 3 months since I did that. I still watch stuff from my subscriptions and when I search for something I want to watch. There are still recommended videos when you’re watching a video but they are a lot less enticing since they are not personally targeted. I curated my subscriptions so it’s more what I would want to spend time watching instead of reaction videos for instance. My actual time watching YouTube has dropped a lot.

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Weirdly I've had history turned off for just over 10 years (I can tell from the date on the most recent entry), but my YouTube homepage shows me videos related to things I've watched recently anyway.

I just deleted the all-time history and now the homepage is blank as you say.

I don't think they're really deleting your viewing history, else the homepage wouldn't have looked the way it did before I deleted "all time".

I have clicked "stop showing me Shorts" several times but they keep coming back, so I don't think the homepage works properly anyway.

EDIT:

On further consideration, I think what was happening with the homepage was that it was showing me videos related to channels that I subscribe to. (But not always videos from channels that I subscribe to).

However I don't see why they can't still do that even after I delete my all-time watch history? Not that I want them to.

But if you did want them to, you could probably turn watch history back on, click on any single video, and then turn it off again, and you'd probably have a home screen dictated by your subscriptions.

Or else they just ignore the setting and it's all a lie anyway.

> On further consideration, I think what was happening with the homepage was that it was showing me videos related to channels that I subscribe to

I think so too. I turned my history back on and watched part of one video in order to make sure I had the steps right for clearing and disabling history again. In that time, after having at least 1 video in the history, the front page was like what you said. The first recommendation made me want to click on it. It was called "why c++ is terrible" or something like that. Cleared/disabled again and back to normal (blank home page).

Internet companies will stop storing user data the same day AI companies stop training on copyrighted data.

You can go even further and remove the recommendations panel when you're watching a video using the eye dropper on uBlock Origin, it's so good.

I see the same screen and wonder why they don't suggest videos based on subscriptions. I assume they figure no suggestions will nag people into enabling history.

I did that as well and also removed all the subscriptions form YouTube itself and instead have all the channels I like in my RSS reader

That would be the next level I should do. Maybe not RSS, but just making an html file linking to various channels (similar to bookmarks) organized by category, while removing them from subscriptions (and curate the list even further). Check out the channels when I feel like it, like how we used to surf the web. Right now, I'm seeing whatever is newest today which favors channels that churn out content like it's their job (which it is in a lot of cases).

I tried to make a custom Subscriptions view for YouTube but they kept blocking me for trying to scrape hundreds of RSS feeds.

Maybe because their robots.txt disallows that?

https://www.youtube.com/robots.txt

    User-agent: *
    ...
    Disallow: /feeds/videos.xml
    ...

Best decision I made this year.

I thoroughly love this experience. I open subscriptions as needed to catch up on things I care about. Otherwise I use the homepage to search for something. No distractions. No infinitely scrolling feed of slop and ads.

This was one of the most relaxing things I’ve done. Recommendations are so bad so useless, despite paying for premium for peace, it’s just hassle to interact with the platform.

And shorts, just let us turn them off in the subscription page exactly like the posts.

It’s utterly baffling that a multi-billion dollar video empire doesn’t provide much of an option to their users in terms of settings.

> It’s utterly baffling that a multi-billion dollar video empire doesn’t provide much of an option to their users in terms of settings.

In a better world with an actual open web, we would not have to rely on the graces of the hosting company to offer us a better UI. Our browsers would act as true "User Agents" and render the web page in a way that is best for the user.

Browsers should be able to by default pick and choose what elements of a web page get rendered, without having to reach for extensions. Browsers should be able to render things in a different order, and easily allow the user to override things like styling, size and so on. Browsers should provide this kind of flexibility by default! They should not just be canvases following orders, for the web developer to program against the user's interests.

Instead, we just punted, and handed over all of the control to the web developer. Now they decide what gets shown and not shown. They decide the layout. They decide everything!

I agree that browsers should be doing a lot more, starting with the cookie popups for example. If the user selected to be not tracked, there's no need for the browser to even allow things like third party cookies or javascript profiling etc. But instead the browsers are working for the websites and helping track the users.

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