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YouTube will now show a blank homepage if you don’t have watch history on

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Re: YouTube will now show a blank homepage if you don’t have watch history on

#41

Post by joe_guy »

sdfghswe wrote: post #25
lazycouchpotato wrote: post #3

> 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.

A lot of very talented people make a living by posting videos to YouTube.

YouTube gives them a platform to remain independent content authors. It's not perfect. Nothing is.

YouTube shares ad revenue with them. That's their living. If you pay for premium, you do not see ads but YouTube still pays them for your view. I don't know the full details, I'm sure it isn't perfect.

I'm not sure what part of that you were concerned about knowing, but I am glad I can not view ads and that I can consume a lot of great independently content for a very minimal monthly cost.

Re: YouTube will now show a blank homepage if you don’t have watch history on

#42

Post by schiffern »

ehnto wrote: post #39
hollerith wrote: post #24

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.

My self discipline hack was only navigating to my subscription feed, that way it "ends" and there is only a handful of videos to check each day. 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 also block Shorts with uBlock Origin.

https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/wiki/solutions/youtube...

Re: YouTube will now show a blank homepage if you don’t have watch history on

#43

Post by Anon_C0ward »

"We are launching this new experience to make it more clear which YouTube features rely on watch history to provide video recommendations" - this almost sounds like a veiled threat like: We're doing this to show you that you really DO want to drink the Kool aid because you definitely won't like what we have in store for you otherwise.

At the very least, it seems like they expect most users to dislike the idea and leave history on.

Re: YouTube will now show a blank homepage if you don’t have watch history on

#44

Post by __del__ »

euroderf wrote: post #21
tmm wrote: post #16

How about a "don't recommend things I've already watched" option? The thing is, I like having a watch history and I like having suggestions based on it. If I watch something that I don't want affecting my suggestions, I'll delete it from the history after watching. The things I watch on YouTube, I generally have zero interest in watching again, and if I really want to, then I'll find it in my history. What I really d…

> The things I watch on YouTube, I generally have zero interest in watching again, and if I really want to, then I'll find it in my history. There's an exception to this that I suspect is not uncommon: there's music one likes to listen to when one is chill/buzzed; having to poke into (or worse: dig thru) one's watching history is a procedure-intensive buzzkill. > (where there is no clear indication if you've seen bef…

youtube is clearly able to treat music tracks differently from ordinary videos. its android app won't allow you to play music in the background (a dark pattern driving sales of youtube music premium subscriptions)

Re: YouTube will now show a blank homepage if you don’t have watch history on

#45

Post by jillesvangurp »

ehnto wrote: post #40
1letterunixname wrote: post #9

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.

To be fair, the content creators are building the castles, consumers just visit. If my favourite creators all build new castles somewhere else one day, I'd go there.

And there's some really nice content on the platform which other platforms just lack. Considering how much Youtube I watch for free and how much I pay Netflix for not a whole lot of good content, I think Youtube is somewhat getting a rough deal here. But it is what it is. I'm actually considering cancelling Netflix. Their content has gone down the drain in the last years and I spend an order of magnitude more time watching Youtube content at this point.

Content creators on the other hand seem to be doing fine in Youtube. This is what matters to me. I follow about 120 channels and a few dozen of those are very active and getting lots of sponsorship deals. Several of the wonderful people I follow seem to be getting a full time salary out of their activities while maintaining good production quality.

The endless promotion of a handful of the same companies sponsoring their content on these channels is a bit weird but I just fast forward through that with the arrow keys. These companies seem to be spending a lot on Youtube marketing, which I guess is working for them. And I get some satisfaction out of watching stupid VC cash being funneled into the pockets of people I actually care about. At least it looks to me like VC funded companies buying traffic by spending their investment like this. Old trick in the valley that makes the investment portfolio look healthier than it is. Whatever it is, thank you! I never see ads on Youtube because ublock origin doesn't let any of those through. Works really well. Hence I'm not paying for a premium account (yet).

Yes Youtube recommendations kind of suck. Don't they all? Glorified more of the same shit dressed up as machine learning snake oil. Very hard to escape the recommendation bubble of stuff I've already seen and stuff I'm never going to watch no matter how often Google recommends it. I mostly just watch my subscription feed instead. Which is just stuff I follow in order it gets published. Exactly the way I like it.

Honestly, It's not like Amazon, Spotify, Netflix, etc. have much better recommendation algorithms. This whole space seems to have hit a local optimum about ten years ago where it drives enough of their business that they stopped trying to improve it. All the generative AI stuff that people are talking about lately isn't being applied for recommendations yet. I suspect, Google has actually reduced investments in this team years ago. It's been sort of a constant and I've not really noticed any changes in the quality of the recommendations. It was bad five years ago and it still is in more or less the same way.

Re: YouTube will now show a blank homepage if you don’t have watch history on

#46

Post by karmakurtisaani »

tmm wrote: post #16

How about a "don't recommend things I've already watched" option? The thing is, I like having a watch history and I like having suggestions based on it. If I watch something that I don't want affecting my suggestions, I'll delete it from the history after watching. The things I watch on YouTube, I generally have zero interest in watching again, and if I really want to, then I'll find it in my history. What I really d…

The absolutely worst thing about shorts is that you can't easily move around the part that is playing in the video. I say easily, since there is an extremely shitty dark pattern that allows this feature, but it involves liking the video and having to reload it from your favourites. Enshittification at its finest.

Re: YouTube will now show a blank homepage if you don’t have watch history on

#47

Post by karmakurtisaani »

__del__ wrote: post #44
euroderf wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The things I watch on YouTube, I generally have zero interest in watching again, and if I really want to, then I'll find it in my history. There's an exception to this that I suspect is not uncommon: there's music one likes to listen to when one is chill/buzzed; having to poke into (or worse: dig thru) one's watching history is a procedure-intensive buzzkill. > (where there is no clear indication if you've seen bef…

youtube is clearly able to treat music tracks differently from ordinary videos. its android app won't allow you to play music in the background (a dark pattern driving sales of youtube music premium subscriptions)

Using PlayTube allows playing music in the background. It works reasonably well too.

Re: YouTube will now show a blank homepage if you don’t have watch history on

#48

Post by 3LazTjBv-f »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #45
ehnto wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the content creators are building the castles, consumers just visit. If my favourite creators all build new castles somewhere else one day, I'd go there.

And there's some really nice content on the platform which other platforms just lack. Considering how much Youtube I watch for free and how much I pay Netflix for not a whole lot of good content, I think Youtube is somewhat getting a rough deal here. But it is what it is. I'm actually considering cancelling Netflix. Their content has gone down the drain in the last years and I spend an order of magnitude more time wa…

> Honestly, It's not like Amazon, Spotify, Netflix, etc. have much better recommendation algorithms.

YT has a dislike button that:

- doesn't prevent video from being at top of search results

- doesn't remove it from recommendations

- doesn't remove it from autoplay nor mixes

Even Netflix deals with that better.

Amazon and other e-commerce sites all have "toilet seat collector" problem with recommendation systems, I don't know if it can be improved upon.

> Hence I'm not paying for a premium account (yet).

I gave it a try for a month - as there is no adblock available for my TV. It somehow makes all sponsor segments much more annoying. I don't give a damn about Brilliant, I don't neead a reminder it exists every 15 minutes. And if I get yet another VPN ad that includes bullshit claims about security or anonymity, then I will drop the channel - I guess the "Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect" doesn't work within single video stream.

Re: YouTube will now show a blank homepage if you don’t have watch history on

#49

Post by winternett »

__del__ wrote: post #44
euroderf wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The things I watch on YouTube, I generally have zero interest in watching again, and if I really want to, then I'll find it in my history. There's an exception to this that I suspect is not uncommon: there's music one likes to listen to when one is chill/buzzed; having to poke into (or worse: dig thru) one's watching history is a procedure-intensive buzzkill. > (where there is no clear indication if you've seen bef…

youtube is clearly able to treat music tracks differently from ordinary videos. its android app won't allow you to play music in the background (a dark pattern driving sales of youtube music premium subscriptions)

A huge problem is that YT allows users to enter their own hashtags, which turns into a complete cluster of spammy tag use, They also allow users to upload their own thumbnails, instead of only using actual thumbnails from the videos, which also feeds bias.

There are very clear solutions to problems on the platform, they just choose the wrong direction so much because it feed their constant need to increase YOY profit, and it's annoying users off the platform.

An empty home page is not a good idea at all, and it forces users into opting into tracking, which is not kosher, and likely going to become a legal issue if anyone authoritative is doing their job any more.

Re: YouTube will now show a blank homepage if you don’t have watch history on

#50

Post by winternett »

PicassoCTs wrote: post #27
wintermutestwin wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I finally got around to subscribing to YouTube Premium, and they already burned me once by raising prices. The first burn is that you are paying them with money AND your data (which they now can link to your CC#). I'd be more than happy to pay for a service like YT to get it ad free as long as it doesn't harvest my data (for any damn purpose).

The willingness to pay, actually makes you a more valuable customer to premium services, it reclassifies you for the 2nd tier web. Like a higher-refined product for advertisers.

Subscriptions are indeed being used to trigger class-ism covertly by companies more than ever, but it's a terrible form of discrimination because many can use bootleg credit cards, or even decide to cancel subscriptions/// Those that cancel or don't pay suffer unknowingly on basic service now pelted with even more ads to subscribe, and possibly even their uploads are held back when they are not a premium user. This needs to be killed as a practice, otherwise the future is going to be pay to breathe everywhere... Dreadful.
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