The homepage will look a lot different if your watch history is off.

YouTube is changing the homepage experience for users who have their watch history turned off. They will now see an almost blank homepage with just a search bar and buttons for Shorts, Subscriptions and Library. This is intended to make it clear that personalized recommendations rely on watch history data. The new design aims to avoid extreme thumbnails and instead focus search. Some users have already started seeing this change, though it may not be fully rolled out yet. The goal is to both help those who prefer searching over recommendations, and potentially encourage users to turn their history back on. Overall this represents a major interface change focused on watch history preferences.


What’s been your experience with youtube recommendations? For me they are consistently hot garbage.

It’s not about privacy. It’s about not having shity recommendations.

Fair enough. When my history was off, the recommendations were bad. I just made my bookmark link directly to the Subscriptions page.

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