On the flip side, this also means users have the option to have a cleaner, less cluttered interface.
Full text:
[AUGUST 8, 2023] A new viewer experience that better corresponds to your YouTube watch history preferences
One of the benefits of having YouTube watch history on is that it enables YouTube to provide video recommendations you may be interested in; however, we know some prefer to clear and turn off your YouTube watch history. Starting today, we’re changing how you see recommendations on YouTube, based on your Watch History settings:
Starting today, if you have YouTube watch history off and have no significant prior watch history, features that require watch history to provide video recommendations will be disabled – like your YouTube home feed. This means that starting today, your home feed may look a lot different: you’ll be able to see the search bar and the left-hand guide menu, with no feed of recommended videos thus allowing you to more easily search, browse subscribed channels and explore Topic tabs instead.
We’re rolling these changes out slowly, over the next few months. We are launching this new experience to make it more clear which YouTube features rely on watch history to provide video recommendations and make it more streamlined for those of you who prefer to search rather than browse recommendations. You can change your YouTube watch history settings at any time based on whether you prefer us to provide video recommendations or not.
youtube suggestions are genuinely terrible for the individual and humanity as a whole
I disagree. Spotify and YouTube are the only platforms that actually do a good job recommending me content I’m interested in. Other places like instagram, twitter and lemmy needs heavy curation to be usable.
I’m a bit confused.
Will this affect only the home feed or also the recommendations beside a playing video?I’d assume that “related” suggestions would still work, unless Youtube decides to break them out of spite.
My history log has been shit lately. When I search this log, it seems many of the videos I’ve watched are missing, but if I search my browser history I can find them normally. That’s the only reason I turn on my watch history, as my browser’s history gets deleted automatically after 6 months.
As long as NewPipe still works, I do not care.
deleted by creator
Good thing my browser destructs all history every day
Do they think this is some kind of threat?
Fuck the recommendations - all I get is the same 15 suggestions across multiple categories, most of them I’ve already watched or in my subscriptions.
The beauty of YouTube used to be the random jewels of clips that would surface, now it’s just corporate friendly pop stars latest music videos and the same shitty content over and over and over again.
It’s impossible to just stumble across anything unique on yt now.
Totally agree, there’s so much good content on there but all I see are the same 10-ish content creators and it fucking sucks.
Any 3rd party site that gives better YT recommendations?
Good. For some reason YouTube keeps throwing sports content at me, even though I loathe sports (aside from F1). Hopefully now I’ll be able to remove it from my watch history & get rid of it from my feed.
You can already remove videos from your watch history.
Yes, but now it should mean something.
It already does? I use it to remove videos that my wife or kid accidentally watched on my account. Removing the vids keeps them out of my algorithm.
Thats
i don’t want video suggestion. they are shit.
They become good if you use youtube a lot and subscribed to a lot of channels. After some time they become really, scary good.
I am borderline worshipping the algorithm for constantly bringing me new music to dig. A good 80% of the artists I’ve picked up in the last few years came as recommended by youtube or GPM/YT Music. And we aren’t just talking well known artists, either. Lots of good indie shit too! Idk, I guess if the internet is going to be allowed to know anything about me, it’s gonna be my music tastes.
I just use newpipe, subscribe to all the channels I care about and watch them. To discover new people I use the fediverse
Huh. This presser just taught me I can disable watch history. That’s awesome. Unintended consequences of them trying to force people to turn it on will be teaching others that this setting exists.
I already curate my own watch history and occasionally go on a remove spree when my recommendations get stale or full of shit I don’t really care about.
They could at least add a filter to remove shorts; but no, they do this.
No? I’m seeing zero shorts in my feed
They did the opposite and shoved a pointless shorts section in the middle of your subscription page so you can’t see what you actually want to look at.
I know I’ll catch shit for this but I kinda don’t mind shorts. Sometimes I don’t have anything specific to watch and I just wanna waste 10 mins…
The content quality varies wildly and it doesn’t seem to have a very good algorithm but it succeeds in helping me burn 5-10 mins while I’m waiting on someone or something.
I think YouTube expects people to burn hours on it like TikTok but I don’t see that happening.
I don’t mind them existing either. My issue is with how they show up in the subscription feed now. I’d prefer separate feeds for shorts.
Still, it sucks that they’re pushing them so hard on everyone. I tried to see the appeal, but I can’t stomach short form content at all. I get whiplash!
That’s what I use lemmy for.
Thank goodness! Finally, I won’t have to suffer through “suggestions” that are unrelated to anything I’ve watched and are just pushing clickbait. It does make sense though. They can’t suggest anything, if they can’t digest what you’ve watched.
I feel like folks have a very different YouTube experience than I do. My suggestions are all already related to either my watch history or are from my subscriptions.
It’d be nice if they would stop pushing Shorts though.
I usually use yt on a wifi network with upwards of 200 other people, so I’m sure the suggestions are relevant to us as a unit, but not so much to me as an individual.
And, yes. The shorts can die.
Certainly possible! My husband watches a completely different type of content than I do and I never get recommendations from his feed unless we watch something that we’ve watched in a shared chromecast feed, and then only very rarely.
Well, they could suggest popular content, which seems to be mostly what I get. It’ll be good to not have a bunch of nonsense I’m going to ignore anyway I guess.
Cool cool cool, disabled watch history and cancelled YouTube premium. GG YouTube.
This initially sounded like they were forcing users to their history under the guise of providing suggestions, however it really just means “no history, no suggestions”
I’m ok with this
If they also kill autoplay it would be super.
Isn’t that a toggleable option?
On the TV version of YouTube, I still have no idea how to turn that off. It’s much easier on desktop and mobile.
I can see how autoplay can be useful, though.
What I don’t like is that it’s opt-out.
So every time I use a new browser, I have to disable it yet again.
Technically couldn’t they do this without “history”… Isnt that what cookies are for? I mean they can already show me shit based of what I say with my phone in my pocket, lol.
Not legally because of various data tracking laws around the world. Maybe they can where you life, but then then need to be 100% sure they have that right. By making this clear they can argue in court they need to track this data, and that you have the option to not have it tracked.
Cookies are a way of establishing persistence between a device and a site (most commonly a server session).
They could technically put some of your history in the cookie, but it wouldn’t be retained between devices nor if you logout/clear-cookies.
To keep it consistent and build those suggestions across devices and logins, it needs to be saved on a server somewhere, which is essentially… history tracking.
I’m COMPLETELY okay with this.
G O O D. Their suggestion engine provides no diversity. Once you watch one video about something, that something is all they show you
Yes, I do wish it had a longer memory. It feels like only the past few days of watching has any impact on suggestions, if you’ve neglected to watch videos about a certain topic for over a week it’s basically ancient history and never comes up again. I’d love to get a varied mix of things I’ve been interested in for the past 6 months or even longer.
I’d even like a ranking scheme like we have here on the threadiverse. Show me videos with a lot of activity, ones that have been showing a lot of promise, what’s been happening over the past 12, 24, 48, or 72 hours.
I guess what I’m saying is I want long form video content like YouTube to be delivered and ranked like comment threads on Lemmy and the older link aggregator(s)
I see no downside here I hate suggestions 90% are crap. I prefer to discover things on my own. I don’t want your suggestions and turning off autoplay be cherry on the top.
They could go back to suggesting only videos related to the one you’re watching but they really want The Engagement Algorithm to be the only one available :(
