Finally a decent change. More reason to disable watch history.
this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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Technology
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I never open youtube to watch what’s on the homepage, so that’s a plus for me. I also don’t watch using an account so it doesn’t matter either way.
If the watch history is off, why don't they just use the favorites and liked videos to form recommendations?
They can do almost anything they want to my Freetube backend as long as it keeps working
What’s been your experience with youtube recommendations?
I've never had a YouTube account, so YouTube doesn't have any persistent data on me as an individual to do recommendations unless it can infer who I am from other data.
They seem to do a decent job of recommending the next video in a series done in a playlist by an author, which is really the only utility I get out of suggestions that YouTube gives me (outside of search results, which I suppose are themselves a form of recommendation). I'd think that YouTube could do better by just providing an easy way to get from the video to such a list, but...
I've never had a YouTube account, so YouTube doesn't have any persistent data on me as an individual
Pretty sure they do anyway
This is some sort of bug?
jokes on them i use an extension that removes the home page and any recommendations on the site.
@trashhalo I have the watch history disabled for years now. And the results for the home feed recommendations was more or less of content from the subscriptions I had, with a sprinkle of other content when scrolling down. Wasn't too bad, at least better than what can be seen when logged off. But overall I don't care if the home feed recommendations get disabled for me. Not worth trading off the watch history to Google. It's fine for me.
There is still recommendation on the video itself, for related content. Also you can discover other channels by searching or with third party sites sites (where it gets shared). There is plenty of opportunities to discover new content. I personally rely and use mostly the Subscriptions feed view with my 137 subscriptions.
I already leave it on as the watch history can be pretty handy especially when I accidentally close a video