Imagine being mad at this 😂
For anyone who wants to stay logged out of YouTube, but wants to see content they follow, I recommend the pocket tube extension for Firefox.. or Chrome if you really have to... It lets you create subscription groups so you can see exactly the content you want when you want it.
I'm not mad, but I will say I underestimated how much worse it is when it isn't curating to me. Yeah, I'd rather not have the bad suggestions, but good lord the default YouTube suggestions are nauseatingly bad.
The Algorithm can't find a rhythm 🥁
i like this change
This is great news. I watch videos occasionally but I wouldn't say I'm a user. I don't want to be recommended videos. I want to watch the one I searched for, or my friend linked to me, and go on with my life.
just be prepared that the "default" YouTube recommendations are all clickbait + Mr. Beast + whatever fad is going around. The default recommendations are really really bad.
the trick is to be signed in with history cleared and turned off. Then your 'recommendations' homepage is just a blank screen begging you to turn on history tracking again
Though i don't trust it not to track me secretly regardless, but that's a different issue.
Lol the users being upset about this is the strangest part, I never ever want to see the recommended feed, how can I opt into this while signed in? XD
delete and pause your watch history, at least that's how it works for me.
Yeah, I actually want my watch history though, been helpful a few times trying to remember some obscure vid I watched like 4 years ago
Subscriptions page really needs an overhaul, at least it mostly actually shows all the videos posted these days, would be nice if we could categorize them in some fashion, or if it auto-groupes videos from the same creator, an example... I like Kyle Kulinski's Secular Talk, but he posts like 4-10 segments a day so it fills up my subs page
This is amazing. I saw YouTube only showing a search bar when I went there, and it was liberating. I could search and watch the video on the topic I wanted, then promptly leave. Without all the Hot and recommend shit being shoved down my throat.
Exactly! I love this new feature :)
Uh, how could Google show any personal recommendations without storing any data to base that on? If anything this seems to be Google actually doing what they say they're doing.
They could do what they did back in the day; show recommended videos based on the current one.
show recommended videos based on the current one.
They still do in my recent experience.
It's just not based on any longer viewing history than the current session.
The homepage rhat starts the viewing session will generally be just what's popular with the general audience in the approximate location they can geolocate from your IP address. If you are logged out and try a few different locations on a VPN, you'll get different homepages to start a new (logged out) session from.
Google has been perfectly happy to track you with browser fingerprints – just if they showed personalized results, it would be giving their hand away …
All that is left is letting people without a watch history default to seeing their subscriptions instead of a blank page. That's the whole point of subscribing: I want my own curated experience. I don't want to watch BS YouTube thinks I want to watch.
It was a mistake letting YouTube decide on behalf of everyone that recommendations was a better experience than letting the users decide for themselves what to watch. The recommendations are no less of an echo chamber. Worse, the recommendations are gamed with churned, garbage content. It's the same problem as google search.
We need a return to form of user-curated content. Down with algorithmic recommendations.
Don’t threaten me with a good time!
Honestly, so glad they are making this change. Now I don't have to see the bottom of the barrel popular slop every time I use the incognito mode thing on Revanced.
YouTube without suggestions? You mean how it was back in the early days?? I would LOVE that.
What? That's literally a feature I got with a plugin. YouTube feels so much better without the algorithmic reinforced "hype" videos with no content and it's good for your mental health too.
Best. Change. Ever.
" shows a simple YouTube homepage without any videos or tips on what to watch."
I've had watch history off for like 7 years now and I haven't had videos on my homepage for at least 2 years now. Hasn't bothered me a bit, I only watch my subscription page and find new people with the recommendations based off of their videos.
This is too good to be true. How long until Google reverses this decision? 😂
They change their mind about 100 things bi-weekly. I'm frankly numb to it. I never know what's going on, just keep riding the unpredictable rollercoaster.
like remember a few weeks ago for one day YouTube had an option to choose from recommended videos based on our favorite color scheme? So weird & pointless but i chose Blue lavender then They presented me with a bunch of videos with a blue lavender-ish thumbnail, and I chose one to watch, then everything went back to normal and they never gave me the colors option again.
Love it!
I hate the recommended screen, I just use an extension called unhook: hide YouTube recommended, but now I find out they're doing it as the default? That's sick
Yeah... this isn't a bad thing as far as I'm concerned. I have never used the front page for anything, besides the search bar, and even that's waning.
This is an amazing way to view youtube .... this isn't a degradation of the service ... it's the first good useful thing they've done in years
That's fine, all the videos they suggest suck anyway. No I don't want to watch Madonna's Like a Virgin video when I've been watching Letterkenny clips, YouTube.
Wouldn't the recommendations be crap anyway? When they don't know your watch history?
I like to tell myself I even get better search results when signed out (YouTube doesn’t seem to try as hard to insert extra filler)
I'm so tired of searching for something specific, getting two or three results relevant to my search, then it just goes into my subscriptions and other recommended channels. I'm really really hoping a new video site comes up soon to replace YouTube. You can't even use YouTube as a video host anymore. I tried uploading some gameplay of me and my friends fucking around. Had music in the background. I put the video as unlisted, marked it as mature, I'm not a partner or anything that would get me paid, and YouTube refused to allow me to upload it without first muting the music parts. All I wanted was an easy way to share a personal video with my friends, but no, YouTube needs to make money off of every little thing that gets uploaded so I end up fucked even though I have no intentions of making "content".
Dont forget to mention getting unrelated shorts shoved down your throat everywhere. I seriously deleted my decade old youtube channel over this. Fuck Google.
“Youtube-shorts block” (or one of several similar addons) that forces shorts to be treated as normal videos
But that you need a half-dozen addons just for Youtube alone to either make it usable or to restore functionality it used to have …
I never watch YouTube while logged in if I can help it, and I've never subscribed to a channel either. I've just bookmarked the /videos page of the channels I like, and check them regularly.
As someone who subscribes to many channels, likely over 100, that post anywhere from daily to a few times per year, fuck that.
You should also consider using Grayjay or something instead to avoid that tedium.
Love it
Recommending things when you're not logged in means they're tracking you without your consent. Why would anyone want that?
No they usually recommend what is trending to users who are not logged in or have no watch history
That said i personally really don't mind the change
I've started using Invidious as a YouTube front end and it works really great for me
I moved to a newpipe fork about a year ago. I stopped using their suggestions altogether. I'm not going to lie it was a couple of months before I was able to get used to it. I've come to believe that having YouTube on permanent autoplay based on their algorithmic calculations of what I'd want to see is not entirely healthy for me.
At current, once I've watched everything from my chosen creators for the day. That's it I'm done, I go and find something more useful to do.
Now I see only the shows from my chosen creators,and if one of those guys recommends a different creator that they enjoy I'll usually throw a follow in that direction. Very organic very much not in someone's pocket. I've avoided TikTok like the plague. I think that, as much as possible, no companies financial statement should have a serious impact over my content consumption.
Is that a problem?? I mean I leave myself logged in all the time because I use google music and I absolutely hate their recommended videos and the algorithms behind it.
No fucking google I don't want to watch some douche canoe movie reviewer complaining about the latest movie being woke just because I watched some other movie critic that's actually thoughtful and insightful or at least funny to me without delving into sounding like a dog with the constant "woke...woke woke...woke woke woke woke".
Their algorithm sucks. I don't want to see a how-to video I saw 12 years ago. It's there nothing else on the internet?!?!
I honestly thought this was how it always worked...seems like a good thing if they're at least appearing to not track people who aren't signed in, especially since in every other way they will try to get your data fighting tooth and claw. (Not saying they aren't tracking habits of non account users though)
Considering the right-wing garbage YT is constantly trying to slip into my recommendations - a habit of YT that has mysteriously gotten a whole lot worse in the last few weeks - I'd say they are threatening me with a good time.
It's pretty obvious they're only doing this to try to push people who like the recommendations to create an account. But can't people just create throwaway accounts to temporarily relieve their recommendation fix?
Their recommendations are useless anyway. I don't want to see 200 rock hard abs videos just because I watched a clip of Roseanne doing sit-ups.
I stopped letting YouTube save my watch history years ago because their suggestion algorithm became too intrusive: watch a quick cooking tutorial, get nothing be cooking channels, look up the proper way to use a toggle bolt, YouTube wants to teach me how to re-shingle a roof. It was out of control.
First, they took away my home screen, because they claimed they couldn't reccomend videos without my watch history (even though they'd done it for years). Then they took away the shorts tab, because they said they couldn't reccomend shorts without my watch history (even though they'd done it for months). So now I just have my subscriptions, a curated list of things I actually want to watch. They've punished me with the product I wanted this whole time.
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