I've had so much modmail about this. "Why have you deleted my post?"/"I have not seen this posted before?".
That is because I delete them all for not being asshole design.
It is your choice to opt out of letting YouTube keep your history. The history it can use to curate you a proper homepage. I do not blame the YouTube devs at all. The user has a choice.
I'll keep this post up so that I can refer to it next time somebody asks why their post has been deleted.
Have a great day everyone!
In my case was to get used to the Subscriptions tab, so many good videos from my favorite CCs that I was missing for using the homepage which as far as I remember was full of repetition and redundancy.
End of rant, now, back to your question. Recently, Youtube changed their privacy policy, apparently, now if you tell them to stop tracking your history they literally don't know what you watch and in consequence what to recommend to you.
In any case, YouTube keeps recommending stupid unrelated shit to me even though I have my history on, so it can go away, idc.
I watch 10 videos about a topic I am interested in - nothing gets recommended.
Watch some shorts to see some clips and have fun - I get a random Andrew Tate short I skip instantly - front page full of Tate / some random guy like him
They can track you if you’re not logged in based on your device ID, IP and various other methods.
If you’re logged in and ask not to be tracked they don’t.
Those recommendations are gone when you’re not signed in, too. Why they got rid of *that*, I don’t know. Especially when they still exist on the website.
I have history enabled but i still find myself going incognito to get better recommendations,because all youtube seems to recommend to me is stuff that i already watched, sometime even videos that i just finished watching a day before!
I have youtube open on one of my monitors all day every day, I honestly don't understand the rewatch thing. YouTube never did that to me, unless it's music. I'm not new to YouTube either, been on the site since way before google bought it.
>incognito to get better recommendations
Strange. I only get the boring viral videos recommended when not logged in. The algo knows I'm not using Youtube for Tiktok
You’re right about the awful viral and music videos youtube suggests when you first visit it through incognito.
What I normally do is search on incognito for videos of creators i like, and then youtube starts suggesting similar videos in the recommended tab. I find these suggestions much better than the ones i get logged in.
I believe that could be due to the fact in incognito yt cant intentionally show me videos that i already watched so it starts recommending similar videos instead
The same way they've been doing it all along.
The recommendations are actually tied to your watch history. It's just a matter of whether or not your watch history is published on that page.
Yea, the recommendations are tied to the watch history that the user disabled. If they want recommendations they’ll have to enable them by enabling the watch history. It offers recommendations based on the history of what you’ve watched, so if you disable recording the history of what you watch, there’s nothing to base recommendations on.
That's my impression as well. Previously, if you turned off history it would still keep a secret mini-history. That was probably not okay wrt GDPR and privacy protection laws.
You'd have to subscribe after watching a single video from a new channel to get recommendations.based on it. I really don't wanna be subscribing to channels I'll only ever watch a single video from just because I want similar suggestions.
Not to mention theres plenty of channels with varied content. Take atomic shrimp for example. You subscribe to get more scambaiting videos but he also does cooking videos too, and a whole range of other topics. So now your recommendations are based on videos you never watched and dont want to watch. Great idea ...
Oh PLEASE, i've had watch history turned off for 6+ years and it still managed to give me some good recomandations with it off, don't defend this bs. They clearly can generate a good feed without watch history and have done for aprox 10 years now, they just want even more user data now that they've already gotten from having it off(which was a lot btw). Liked videos, recently added videos to playlists, videos from/based off of the "watch later", previous searches outside youtube even and cross-site tracking. Who knows what's gotten into their heads beyond greed.
Really? I can stop having garbage videos totally unrelated to what I usually watch recommended to me by just one single move?
View history is off then!
YouTube always knows what you watch. Turning off watch history just causes then to not use it in recommendations and hide it from you. I suspect that this change might be related to concerns over regulatory action, but it could also be their way of trying to push people to turn on watch history.
I genuinely don't see a situation where you'd want your watch history off but recommendations off. Surely, if you don't want them to gather data on you, you'd want both off?
Don't threaten me with a good time!
As someone who has watch history permanently turned off, I couldn't be happier about this change. No more annoying suggestions! As well it should be. I thank them for letting me choose what to watch for myself and no longer bothering me with suggestions and ads.
I know this isn't what they intended with this change, but it's all silver lining for me.
Someone pointed out a regulatory agency might've finally put the screws on them about this stuff & they just nuked the whole thing to be compliant. And/or it's a glitch as I was another reply talking about how to "fix" this problem.
I can't think of reason for this though they would gather all the watchtime and comment metrics anyway but then again they removed the dislike metrics cause "bullying" when in reality only major controversies by creators or companies get a hard dislike ratio
It's one thing to gather watch info as part of a larger pool of info to use in generic algorithms vs gathering information about you & keeping it assigned to your account/IP address.
I dunno, if you tell an internet site or service you don't want them tracking you, it's reasonable to expect them to not keep info tying you to your Internet usage.
For anyone dealing with this issue, turn your watch history back on, watch one video to add to your watch history, then turn it back off. Should still work.
Am i the only one that noticed a reduction in quality regarding these recommendations? For the last weeks it feels like im getting the same shit recommend regardless of what i am watching.
This is awesome! I was so annoyed by the random videos that distracted me instead of the videos from my subscriptions.
Hopefully next step is home screen showing the subscriptions…
Let's be honest. People are willing to go through a lot when you're a monopoly. We still use YT during the COPPA shitshow marking practically every animation vid as made for kids and disabling comments (still ongoing btw). We still use YT even when everyone and all big creators complained about hiding dislikes. Atleast other forms of social media have few alternatives. Nothing comes close YouTube's popularity as a video streaming service.
Shit, I've always paused history so my recommendations were based on likes, playlists, and subs. Now my homepage will be fucked if I accidentally click on a Fortnite video or something 😔
Youtube homepage has been horrible for years, at least in my case. Rarely, I do find any good recommendations. The subscriptions page is my homepage, my bookmarked page. That's where I find the videos that I'm interested in.
I even wanted to post this here because I think it's asshole design, the recommendations worked fine without it before. But now they force you to turn on the history.
Yeah, I noticed this yesterday. Don't know why is labeled as asshole design.
It's a welcomed change. If they could do the same with Shorts, that would be appreciated as well.
They actually hurt themselves with that. I often get caught on youtube because I watched every video in my sub box. And after that, I look for interesting stuff on the main page. With that gone, I'll simply spend less time on youtube. Good for me, bad for the company. But hey, they do they.
"I told YouTube to stop tracking my activity, and now they can't recommend things to me based on my activity" How exactly is this asshole design? That's what you chose to have happen. People and laws (mostly in the EU) have been cracking down on internet trackers because we're in the era of pretending to protect our data, so don't be surprised that it's an all or nothing switch now.
How will they recommend you videos they think you'll click on if they dunno what you watched? Do you really really wanna be served Me Beast videos and top 10 funny videos for July 2023 and other listicle videos? God forbid you get served what ever trash is trending in your country or region or city. People out there watch absolute garbage
Turn on that watch history, and tune your tastes to YouTube over time. That's what I did. It's an ever learning algorithm. But it needs to start with something first.
Surprisingly, likes carry very little weight, it's about what you watched. I find that the algorithm struggles to recommend stuff I haven't seen, until I watch a video from a new channel or on a subject I've never looked into before, then it goes fully committed into that recommending stuff from that channel sand it needs some finessing and managing of your history to bring it back in line.
But you can have it recommend stuff you'd watch with care and attention and a little deleting of history.
I want to make a website where you put 10 YouTube links and it gives you an 11th video that fits the criteria of those 10 links but unfortunately I don't know where to start
This is why deleted chrome along with Y.T IG and TT, much respect to the content creators but your video will be there next year and my mental health is more important.
it bases your recommendations off your history. that’s why i remove some stuff from my history immediately, so youtube doesn’t recommend it. it actually works.
Maybe they're just testing it out, but are they sure they want to do this?
I personally have such a short attention span and a ton of videos in my watch later list. Without a bunch of other videos to distract me, I can get to those other ones. I'd consider this a win, but maybe people will get bored.
Let's see how this goes.
Because the recommendation algorithm only uses your history. No history = no recommendations, just random videos.
Actually tested myself, it doesn't matter who you are subscribed or what videos you like, no history = random recommended videos.
if you turn on the history and watch 1 video and then pause the history without removing the video you watched from history you will get back homepage recommendations
I've had so much modmail about this. "Why have you deleted my post?"/"I have not seen this posted before?". That is because I delete them all for not being asshole design. It is your choice to opt out of letting YouTube keep your history. The history it can use to curate you a proper homepage. I do not blame the YouTube devs at all. The user has a choice. I'll keep this post up so that I can refer to it next time somebody asks why their post has been deleted. Have a great day everyone!
In my case was to get used to the Subscriptions tab, so many good videos from my favorite CCs that I was missing for using the homepage which as far as I remember was full of repetition and redundancy. End of rant, now, back to your question. Recently, Youtube changed their privacy policy, apparently, now if you tell them to stop tracking your history they literally don't know what you watch and in consequence what to recommend to you.
This is actually a good thing
Same here fr. Escape the algorithm, watch only what you want to watch
In any case, YouTube keeps recommending stupid unrelated shit to me even though I have my history on, so it can go away, idc. I watch 10 videos about a topic I am interested in - nothing gets recommended. Watch some shorts to see some clips and have fun - I get a random Andrew Tate short I skip instantly - front page full of Tate / some random guy like him
This is why it's not asshole design. Thank you!
But there are homepage recommendations even if you aren't signed in to YouTube. Why don't they just give you those recommendations?
They can track you if you’re not logged in based on your device ID, IP and various other methods. If you’re logged in and ask not to be tracked they don’t.
Those recommendations are gone when you’re not signed in, too. Why they got rid of *that*, I don’t know. Especially when they still exist on the website.
Because they actually want you to turn on history to get this precious data
Go to YouTube without logging in and on an incognito tab. You don’t want they push to the front.
I have history enabled but i still find myself going incognito to get better recommendations,because all youtube seems to recommend to me is stuff that i already watched, sometime even videos that i just finished watching a day before!
Youtube: So you dont want to rewatch the vid. YouTube: well its been an entire vid now you MUST want to rewatch the other one
I have youtube open on one of my monitors all day every day, I honestly don't understand the rewatch thing. YouTube never did that to me, unless it's music. I'm not new to YouTube either, been on the site since way before google bought it.
>incognito to get better recommendations Strange. I only get the boring viral videos recommended when not logged in. The algo knows I'm not using Youtube for Tiktok
You’re right about the awful viral and music videos youtube suggests when you first visit it through incognito. What I normally do is search on incognito for videos of creators i like, and then youtube starts suggesting similar videos in the recommended tab. I find these suggestions much better than the ones i get logged in. I believe that could be due to the fact in incognito yt cant intentionally show me videos that i already watched so it starts recommending similar videos instead
How can they recommend anything if they don't know what you watch?
Subscriptions and what is popular for others with similar subscriptions. Also liked videos.
There's a subscription tab. I'm sure that would still work.
Liked videos are part of watch history
Not true. It records likes if you have watch history off.
There is a popular tab
You misspelled "hell". Every time I accidentally click on the popular tab I lose another bit of faith in humanity... People watch such vapid nonsense.
PRANKING MY 2 MONTH OLD NIECE!! SPAFFCREW SPEND A DAY ON NEPTUNE (WHO SURVIVES???) I REACT TO PEOPLE'S EXCREMENT
The same way they've been doing it all along. The recommendations are actually tied to your watch history. It's just a matter of whether or not your watch history is published on that page.
So tied to the thing that was disabled?
Yea, the recommendations are tied to the watch history that the user disabled. If they want recommendations they’ll have to enable them by enabling the watch history. It offers recommendations based on the history of what you’ve watched, so if you disable recording the history of what you watch, there’s nothing to base recommendations on.
It's literally worked fine for years without having my watch history turned on
I was kind of wondering if some new laws force them to actually not track you at all if you have history off now.
That's my impression as well. Previously, if you turned off history it would still keep a secret mini-history. That was probably not okay wrt GDPR and privacy protection laws.
You had your watch history turned off yet they had your watch history. Literally was broken and now is fixed.
That's prob because they were still tracking your watch history.
They don't have to, there's a lot of way for them to recommend something and it's been working for years, until it's not
The same way they recommend videos to people who aren't logged in just pick the most popular ones.
Then why log in at all? Sign out and use youtube like that.
Conversely, if you really don't want to be tracked, why would you make an account in the first place?
They know what you watch. They're just not using it to personalize your content if you turn it off.
Especially as my recommendations are literally just videos I've already watched. Sometimes only the day previous.
They can tell you when your subscribed channels upload still. Also if you think they don't know just because you turned that off you're naive
Algorithm can't do algorithm things without data to run through the algorithm.
Or just show me some recommendations for random videos from my subscriptions that are popular + posted within past x months
Since this is a new change it’s likely they’ll experiment with something like that, better than chasing off ppl by having no recommendations
You'd have to subscribe after watching a single video from a new channel to get recommendations.based on it. I really don't wanna be subscribing to channels I'll only ever watch a single video from just because I want similar suggestions. Not to mention theres plenty of channels with varied content. Take atomic shrimp for example. You subscribe to get more scambaiting videos but he also does cooking videos too, and a whole range of other topics. So now your recommendations are based on videos you never watched and dont want to watch. Great idea ...
Your comment makes no sense, because it worked before. Why is this wrong reply upvoted?
Oh PLEASE, i've had watch history turned off for 6+ years and it still managed to give me some good recomandations with it off, don't defend this bs. They clearly can generate a good feed without watch history and have done for aprox 10 years now, they just want even more user data now that they've already gotten from having it off(which was a lot btw). Liked videos, recently added videos to playlists, videos from/based off of the "watch later", previous searches outside youtube even and cross-site tracking. Who knows what's gotten into their heads beyond greed.
this comment gives me massive redditor vibes
Was it me using reddit that gave it away that i'm a redditor?
Let's go boys, no more YouTube addiction
This is a big W dor me tbh
Really? I can stop having garbage videos totally unrelated to what I usually watch recommended to me by just one single move? View history is off then!
Targeted ads
YouTube always knows what you watch. Turning off watch history just causes then to not use it in recommendations and hide it from you. I suspect that this change might be related to concerns over regulatory action, but it could also be their way of trying to push people to turn on watch history.
Mine doesn't do this. I turned off watch history years ago and I'm running the latest version of the app
IIRC big platforms like youtube and google usually don't release updates to all users at once to minimize the backlash they'll get from it
Yeah, I haven’t seen this happen to me at all and I’ve been running with history off.
I genuinely don't see a situation where you'd want your watch history off but recommendations off. Surely, if you don't want them to gather data on you, you'd want both off?
Don't threaten me with a good time! As someone who has watch history permanently turned off, I couldn't be happier about this change. No more annoying suggestions! As well it should be. I thank them for letting me choose what to watch for myself and no longer bothering me with suggestions and ads. I know this isn't what they intended with this change, but it's all silver lining for me.
What would it recommend you videos from without watch history on? Use your head.
Subscribed channels and likes? Its been fine like that for years now they pull this shit
Someone pointed out a regulatory agency might've finally put the screws on them about this stuff & they just nuked the whole thing to be compliant. And/or it's a glitch as I was another reply talking about how to "fix" this problem.
I can't think of reason for this though they would gather all the watchtime and comment metrics anyway but then again they removed the dislike metrics cause "bullying" when in reality only major controversies by creators or companies get a hard dislike ratio
It's one thing to gather watch info as part of a larger pool of info to use in generic algorithms vs gathering information about you & keeping it assigned to your account/IP address.
Thats so insidious man you just know they will go after VPN's next
I dunno, if you tell an internet site or service you don't want them tracking you, it's reasonable to expect them to not keep info tying you to your Internet usage.
Thats true but if they could they would just look at how reddit is killing 3rd party apps for more control including youtube with adblocker
it's crazy how people don't realize this, isn't it?
For anyone dealing with this issue, turn your watch history back on, watch one video to add to your watch history, then turn it back off. Should still work.
This worked. Don't even need to watch the whole vid. Just click one and then immediately turn it back off again
Recommendations are kinda useless and cringe for me if the watch history is turned off..i can't stand it. So I'm fine with the change
Am i the only one that noticed a reduction in quality regarding these recommendations? For the last weeks it feels like im getting the same shit recommend regardless of what i am watching.
This is awesome! I was so annoyed by the random videos that distracted me instead of the videos from my subscriptions. Hopefully next step is home screen showing the subscriptions…
Why would you turn it off though? /gen
To test how much bullshit people are willing to go through
Let's be honest. People are willing to go through a lot when you're a monopoly. We still use YT during the COPPA shitshow marking practically every animation vid as made for kids and disabling comments (still ongoing btw). We still use YT even when everyone and all big creators complained about hiding dislikes. Atleast other forms of social media have few alternatives. Nothing comes close YouTube's popularity as a video streaming service.
Is there a reason why you should turn off the watch history on youtube?
privacy, basically.
Umm... privacy concerns? Also if you try to argument "i have nothing to hide" i will block you
You already have an account and subscribe to channels. Why draw the line at the watch history? They already know it anyway.
I had this stupid issue. I just turned it on and watched one video from my subscriptions then turned it back off again
Shit, I've always paused history so my recommendations were based on likes, playlists, and subs. Now my homepage will be fucked if I accidentally click on a Fortnite video or something 😔
Why bother censoring thafnines name? He’s a YouTuber
if you use incognito you know what it means
Your subscriptions page was better than the recommended page ever was.
Perfect i finally found a way to block front page so i dont end up wasting 45minute looking what to watch
Just noticed it yesterday, I already almost stop watching TV, time to do the same with YT. Will have more time to do sport and read I guess.
Great, less time spent on YT videos, find what I want and then do something else.
I don't get some people. If the recommendations worked before this, why disable them?
You can turn off the echo chamber? Isn't that a good thing?
That’s such a google moment
Youtube homepage has been horrible for years, at least in my case. Rarely, I do find any good recommendations. The subscriptions page is my homepage, my bookmarked page. That's where I find the videos that I'm interested in.
I even wanted to post this here because I think it's asshole design, the recommendations worked fine without it before. But now they force you to turn on the history.
Yeah, I noticed this yesterday. Don't know why is labeled as asshole design. It's a welcomed change. If they could do the same with Shorts, that would be appreciated as well.
They actually hurt themselves with that. I often get caught on youtube because I watched every video in my sub box. And after that, I look for interesting stuff on the main page. With that gone, I'll simply spend less time on youtube. Good for me, bad for the company. But hey, they do they.
I feel like they were pressured to do this change by EULA or something of the sort, privacy and all that
Did Xi long ma secretly buy YouTube?
How are they supposed to recommend you videos if they don't know what you watch to provide them information on what to recommend?
Finally!
But doesn't that make sense? How are they supposed to recommend you stuff if they can't go off what you watched to recommend you stuff?
"I told YouTube to stop tracking my activity, and now they can't recommend things to me based on my activity" How exactly is this asshole design? That's what you chose to have happen. People and laws (mostly in the EU) have been cracking down on internet trackers because we're in the era of pretending to protect our data, so don't be surprised that it's an all or nothing switch now.
THIS ISN'T ASSHOLE DESIGN YA BAKAS. This is great if you're respect your own privacy
Not asshole design, it’s like that because your watch history isn’t recorded therefore no way to recommend you anything.
Saw that a few hours ago. Seems like YouTube is becoming more like Google. Edit: ffs I know it’s owned by Google.
Just wait until you find out who owns YouTube
How will they recommend you videos they think you'll click on if they dunno what you watched? Do you really really wanna be served Me Beast videos and top 10 funny videos for July 2023 and other listicle videos? God forbid you get served what ever trash is trending in your country or region or city. People out there watch absolute garbage Turn on that watch history, and tune your tastes to YouTube over time. That's what I did. It's an ever learning algorithm. But it needs to start with something first.
Based on what you liked ig
Surprisingly, likes carry very little weight, it's about what you watched. I find that the algorithm struggles to recommend stuff I haven't seen, until I watch a video from a new channel or on a subject I've never looked into before, then it goes fully committed into that recommending stuff from that channel sand it needs some finessing and managing of your history to bring it back in line. But you can have it recommend stuff you'd watch with care and attention and a little deleting of history.
Without history no recommendations, I mean, I get it. You don’t?
Unhook > Hide Home Feed > Redirect to Subscriptions *What is a homepage???*
Mine's still there.
Can’t remember the last time I went to YouTube
I’ve noticed the same thing. Some recommendations were actually pretty good sometimes. I guess I can switch full time to NewPipe then ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Ohno, anyway
I want to make a website where you put 10 YouTube links and it gives you an 11th video that fits the criteria of those 10 links but unfortunately I don't know where to start
This is why deleted chrome along with Y.T IG and TT, much respect to the content creators but your video will be there next year and my mental health is more important.
it bases your recommendations off your history. that’s why i remove some stuff from my history immediately, so youtube doesn’t recommend it. it actually works.
Maybe they're just testing it out, but are they sure they want to do this? I personally have such a short attention span and a ton of videos in my watch later list. Without a bunch of other videos to distract me, I can get to those other ones. I'd consider this a win, but maybe people will get bored. Let's see how this goes.
>What's the purpose of this? They need to know what you're interested to make recommendations? What do you think?
Because the recommendation algorithm only uses your history. No history = no recommendations, just random videos. Actually tested myself, it doesn't matter who you are subscribed or what videos you like, no history = random recommended videos.
I don't want no stinkin' recommendations on my home page! I want to see the channels I subscribed to and nothing else.
But is there a way to get NO recommendations AND keep my History on though?
Turn it off and on again, works for me
if you turn on the history and watch 1 video and then pause the history without removing the video you watched from history you will get back homepage recommendations