31–40 of 57 posts
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..."
> 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 o…
> 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.
The amount of ads I see people watch is ridiculous, I can't stand them at all anymore.
> 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 o…
> 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.
That, and Premium views apparently pay creators more than ad-supported views [1], so I justified it that way.
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.
youtube.com##[page-subtype="home"]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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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 resurrect…
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 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"]
I had `||www.youtube.com/|`, but it didn't always work.
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 find it's pretty easy to curate your YouTube recommendations like this.
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.
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...)
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.