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FYI YouTube home screen does not show any videos if watch history is off

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: FYI YouTube home screen does not show any videos if watch history is off

#2
They wrote a blog post about this change last week as if it was a good thing.

It's not a good thing: "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."

I'm still not enabling my watch history.

Re: FYI YouTube home screen does not show any videos if watch history is off

#7
post #4

Good. This is exactly what people who disable watch history wants.

How so?

I don’t enable watch history but would still like to see recommendations. Could be based on geography, or overall trends, or time of day. Or whatever.

Also, I find it funny to think Google isn’t tracking my watch history even if they aren’t showing it back to me. So why not try to have a positive user behavior.

I don’t like Google’s attitude of “we’re going to purposely make our product shitty unless you enable all the data settings we want you to and that maximize our revenue.”

They do the same thing with Maps and it’s offputting and one of the main reasons I no longer use them. The idea that I can’t set local cookies for common locations and must enable cloud saving is so stupid. So they made their map client worse by not allowing local places. I don’t mind my own phone knowing my home address, but don’t want it in my google profile.

Re: FYI YouTube home screen does not show any videos if watch history is off

#8
post #5

Youtube needs a refresh suggestions button

“I’m feeling lucky” and “Just show me a random video” would be fun.

Also just having weird stuff like “show me a video that most closely matches this color scheme” or “find me the antipode of this video”

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