1y ago

YouTube will soon require watch history to be enabled to show video suggestions

support.google.com New Features and Updates for YouTube Viewers - YouTube Community

On the flip side, this also means users have the option to have a cleaner, less cluttered interface.

Full text:

[AUGUST 8, 2023] A new viewer experience that better corresponds to your YouTube watch history preferences

One of the benefits of having YouTube watch history on is that it enables YouTube to provide video recommendations you may be interested in; however, we know some prefer to clear and turn off your YouTube watch history. Starting today, we’re changing how you see recommendations on YouTube, based on your Watch History settings:

Starting today, if you have YouTube watch history off and have no significant prior watch history, features that require watch history to provide video recommendations will be disabled – like your YouTube home feed. This means that starting today, your home feed may look a lot different: 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.

We’re rolling these changes out slowly, over the next few months. We are launching this new experience to make it more clear which YouTube features rely on watch history to provide video recommendations and make it more streamlined for those of you who prefer to search rather than browse recommendations. You can change your YouTube watch history settings at any time based on whether you prefer us to provide video recommendations or not.

Technology @lemmy.world

YouTube will soon require watch history to be enabled to show video suggestions

support.google.com /youtube/thread/139222780

49 8

Technology @beehaw.org

YouTube will soon require watch history to be enabled to show video suggestions

support.google.com /youtube/thread/139222780

3 3

68 comments

This initially sounded like they were forcing users to their history under the guise of providing suggestions, however it really just means "no history, no suggestions"
I'm ok with this
- If they also kill autoplay it would be super.
  
  I can see how autoplay can be useful, though.
  What I don't like is that it's opt-out.
  So every time I use a new browser, I have to disable it yet again.
  
  Isn't that a toggleable option?
- I see no downside here I hate suggestions 90% are crap. I prefer to discover things on my own. I don't want your suggestions and turning off autoplay be cherry on the top.
- They could go back to suggesting only videos related to the one you're watching but they really want The Engagement Algorithm to be the only one available :(
- G O O D. Their suggestion engine provides no diversity. Once you watch one video about something, that something is all they show you
  
  Yes, I do wish it had a longer memory. It feels like only the past few days of watching has any impact on suggestions, if you've neglected to watch videos about a certain topic for over a week it's basically ancient history and never comes up again. I'd love to get a varied mix of things I've been interested in for the past 6 months or even longer.
- I'm COMPLETELY okay with this.
- Technically couldn't they do this without "history"... Isnt that what cookies are for? I mean they can already show me shit based of what I say with my phone in my pocket, lol.
  
  Cookies are a way of establishing persistence between a device and a site (most commonly a server session).
  They could technically put some of your history in the cookie, but it wouldn't be retained between devices nor if you logout/clear-cookies.
  To keep it consistent and build those suggestions across devices and logins, it needs to be saved on a server somewhere, which is essentially... history tracking.
  
  Not legally because of various data tracking laws around the world. Maybe they can where you life, but then then need to be 100% sure they have that right. By making this clear they can argue in court they need to track this data, and that you have the option to not have it tracked.

They could at least add a filter to remove shorts; but no, they do this.
- They did the opposite and shoved a pointless shorts section in the middle of your subscription page so you can't see what you actually want to look at.
  
  I know I’ll catch shit for this but I kinda don’t mind shorts. Sometimes I don’t have anything specific to watch and I just wanna waste 10 mins…
  The content quality varies wildly and it doesn’t seem to have a very good algorithm but it succeeds in helping me burn 5-10 mins while I’m waiting on someone or something.
  I think YouTube expects people to burn hours on it like TikTok but I don’t see that happening.
- No? I'm seeing zero shorts in my feed

Do they think this is some kind of threat?
Fuck the recommendations - all I get is the same 15 suggestions across multiple categories, most of them I've already watched or in my subscriptions.
The beauty of YouTube used to be the random jewels of clips that would surface, now it's just corporate friendly pop stars latest music videos and the same shitty content over and over and over again.
It's impossible to just stumble across anything unique on yt now.
- Totally agree, there's so much good content on there but all I see are the same 10-ish content creators and it fucking sucks.
  Any 3rd party site that gives better YT recommendations?

Thank goodness! Finally, I won't have to suffer through "suggestions" that are unrelated to anything I've watched and are just pushing clickbait. It does make sense though. They can't suggest anything, if they can't digest what you've watched.
- Well, they could suggest popular content, which seems to be mostly what I get. It'll be good to not have a bunch of nonsense I'm going to ignore anyway I guess.
- I feel like folks have a very different YouTube experience than I do. My suggestions are all already related to either my watch history or are from my subscriptions.
  It'd be nice if they would stop pushing Shorts though.
  
  I usually use yt on a wifi network with upwards of 200 other people, so I'm sure the suggestions are relevant to us as a unit, but not so much to me as an individual.
  And, yes. The shorts can die.

This is youtube being salty about people not wanting them to keep track of their watch list. because even without it youtube could make a lot of bucks by just suggesting based of other parameters. They are betting on nudging people the way they want.

Their recommendations are always a bit shit anyway, so I'm not too bothered about this on a personal level.
- Lately I have been spending more time looking for videos that actually interest me than I have been watching videos. It's all either extremely similar, or stuff I have already seen. I often end up just closing the app without having watched anything at all.
  
  Once they had to change the algo because it was shoving people down the right wing pipeline at an alarming rate it got a lot worse. They basically had to nerf it and start over and it’s never recovered to the point it used to be at. The recommendations used to be significantly better, but that also coincided with alt right content doing extremely well.
  
  It seems to be getting worse every day. I used to always find something interesting to watch, and now my feed seems to be the same 10 videos or so, and the rest is stuff I've already watched? I feel stuck in such a small bubble!
- same feel.

Kind of makes sense - the suggestions are based on your watch history after all.
I cleared mine a while back, and it also reset my feed to whatever random popular stuff they suggest. As it rebuilt the history, it became nice again.
At least it makes it somewhat clear what it's suggesting you stuff based on. Can't have suggestions if they don't have data on your watching habits.

Holy shit there's a way to avoid recommendations coming soon???????
Can this be the social media trend for the rest of 2023? Please?

I'm perfectly fine with that. I don't want recommendations, I want a search engine.

As long as NewPipe still works, I do not care.

On the flip side here, almost everything I watch is from recommendations and this is going to be a change that drastically changes how I use the platform. I’m probably just going to have to turn watch history on, which is what they want, but it’s also apparently now the only way to get a decently curated YT feed.
No, the subscription box doesn’t do that. I don’t want to only see things I subscribe to. I specifically want to be recommended things to watch on my homepage.

Huh. This presser just taught me I can disable watch history. That’s awesome. Unintended consequences of them trying to force people to turn it on will be teaching others that this setting exists.

This is nice because one of the most annoying things has been to randomly watch a video and then they start suggesting all of this content that is not relevant or is bothersome. Like, watch a video on certain topics one time and all of a sudden “check out Ben Shapiro!”
Surely Google is still tracking watch history for analysis for ads and profiling though, right?

youtube suggestions are genuinely terrible for the individual and humanity as a whole
- I disagree. Spotify and YouTube are the only platforms that actually do a good job recommending me content I'm interested in. Other places like instagram, twitter and lemmy needs heavy curation to be usable.

Now we need the option to hide shorts from the recommended page

this wasnt already the case?
- Yes I'm a bit confused as well, how are they supposed to know what to recommend if they don't know what you've been watching?
  Sounds like they kept a watch history anyway but in secret, and turning it off just means that the user can't see it anymore. Exactly like back when turning off location history on Google apps just meant you couldn't see it anymore, but Google still collected and kept the info.

Good. For some reason YouTube keeps throwing sports content at me, even though I loathe sports (aside from F1). Hopefully now I’ll be able to remove it from my watch history & get rid of it from my feed.
- You can already remove videos from your watch history.
  
  Yes, but now it should mean something.

My history log has been shit lately. When I search this log, it seems many of the videos I've watched are missing, but if I search my browser history I can find them normally. That's the only reason I turn on my watch history, as my browser's history gets deleted automatically after 6 months.

I already curate my own watch history and occasionally go on a remove spree when my recommendations get stale or full of shit I don't really care about.

Cool cool cool, disabled watch history and cancelled YouTube premium. GG YouTube.

I just use the Subscriptions feed and skip the algorithm altogether. Combine a bookmark of the subscriptions feed (With Ublock origin , ReturnYoutubeDislikes and sponsorblock) with NewPipe (a fork of newpipe with sponsorblock, specifically), and you get a good YouTube Experience. Otherwise, you can just forget it.
Edit: RSS is also an option if you want to go that route.

i don't want video suggestion. they are shit.
- They become good if you use youtube a lot and subscribed to a lot of channels. After some time they become really, scary good.
  
  I just use newpipe, subscribe to all the channels I care about and watch them. To discover new people I use the fediverse
  
  I am borderline worshipping the algorithm for constantly bringing me new music to dig. A good 80% of the artists I've picked up in the last few years came as recommended by youtube or GPM/YT Music. And we aren't just talking well known artists, either. Lots of good indie shit too! Idk, I guess if the internet is going to be allowed to know anything about me, it's gonna be my music tastes.

The only thing I'll potentially sort of miss is the cynical comedy of the absolutely godawful shit they recommend when they don't have a watch history to base anything on.
- You can get that experience any time by going to Trending.
  You could also pour milk in your boots.

I just miss grouping channels together to have curated independent feeds. They removed it for algorithm based shit.

I'm a bit confused.
Will this affect only the home feed or also the recommendations beside a playing video?
- I'd assume that "related" suggestions would still work, unless Youtube decides to break them out of spite.

Good thing my browser destructs all history every day

68 comments