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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

#11

Post by outsidetheparty »

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 turn off collection of new data but not mentioned that they still have the existing data around -- I expected trickery but found none.

(Except for one small detail: I can't figure out how one is supposed to discover that this page exists in the first place; the support update we're discussing contains a link to it, but I can't find it anywhere in the YouTube preferences or advanced settings or anywhere else.)

(Oh, and it had no visible effect on my YouTube home screen, I'm not seeing the empty page I hoped for, just the same garbage videos it usually prompts me with for no clear reason. So there's that too.)

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

#12

Post by dangus »

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 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?

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

#15

Post by jsnell »

outsidetheparty wrote: post #11

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…

> I can't figure out how one is supposed to discover that this page exists in the first place

Click on "History" in the YouTube sidebar. It'll take you to https://www.youtube.com/feed/history. Not only does it shows the watch history, it has embedded controls for clearing the entire history, deleting individual entries, turning off new collection, as well as links to the more granular activity control pages.

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

#16

Post by tmm »

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 don't want is for something I've seen to be recommended at the end of a video (where there is no clear indication if you've seen before it or not) or polluting the sidebar of suggestions.

I'd also very much like suggestions to fall off the list if I don't watch them in a day or two. Sometimes suggested videos stick around for weeks. I don't want to click "don't recommend this channel" or "not interested", because I might want that channel's content recommended later, and I might be generally interested in the topic, but not enough to want to watch it now.

And while we're dreaming of features: let me disable shorts permanently. I refuse to support vertical aspect video (and based on the minuscule number of views the recommended-to-me shorts get, people interested in the sort of content I am agree).

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

#17

Post by netsharc »

WorldMaker wrote: post #8

This sounds like a feature I've wanted for a while. I'm seriously trying to decide if deleting my watch history is worth the major benefit of disabling the YouTube homepage and recommendations area.

The Improve-YouTube browser extension can disable sections of the screen, the homepage is just the search for me, I haven't seen the recommendations on the right side for months now, and I don't miss it.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/improve-youtube-%F...

On mobile, NewPipe is an alternative player where you can enable and disable many parts of YouTube (comments, recommendations, trending...).

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

#18

Post by wintermutestwin »

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.

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).

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

#19

Post by outsidetheparty »

jsnell wrote: post #15
outsidetheparty wrote: post #11

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…

> I can't figure out how one is supposed to discover that this page exists in the first place Click on "History" in the YouTube sidebar. It'll take you to https://www.youtube.com/feed/history . Not only does it shows the watch history, it has embedded controls for clearing the entire history, deleting individual entries, turning off new collection, as well as links to the more granular activity control pages.

You're absolutely right, thank you. I was so hung up on "preferences" or "settings" being the place to look that I missed the link that was literally named the thing I was looking for!

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

#20

Post by wanderingmind »

I'm tired of youtube recommendations and comments full of vanity praise and flamewars. These days I use ublockorigin to kill most of youtube recommendations and comments to just use it as a searchbar. A lot of it is adopted from reddit[1]

www.youtube.com###contentContainer

www.youtube.com##.ytd-two-column-browse-results-renderer.style-scope > .ytd-rich-grid-renderer.style-scope

www.youtube.com###below

www.youtube.com###related

www.youtube.com##ytd-comments

www.youtube.com##ytd-live-chat-frame

www.youtube.com##yt-live-chat-app

www.youtube.com##ytd-thumbnail > a#thumbnail > div#mouseover-overlay

www.youtube.com##ytd-browse[page-subtype="home"] /annotations_module.js$script,important,domain=youtube.com /endscreen.js$script,important,domain=youtube.com

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/sif7x3/how_to...

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