[HN] YouTube no longer suggests videos if your ‘watch history’ is turned off

They could, you know, show you new videos of the channels that you’ve subscribed to. That’s not based on your watch history and also something that you have subscribed to because you like the content. But of course that wouldn’t generate the same amount of ad revenue, so now you can choose between letting YouTube decide for you, or nothing, in an attempt to let you enable your watch history again.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

YouTube announced Tuesday that its newest update disables all its video recommendations for users who have their watch history turned off, solving an arguably annoying problem for those who may not want to be bothered by a sea of suggested videos.

YouTube viewers are used to having a home feed full of thumbnails since the video-sharing platform shows recommendations based on watch history settings.

However, thanks to the latest update, users can turn off their watch history and experience a simpler homepage that feels less cluttered and chaotic.

Instead, there will just be the search bar and the left-hand guide menu with shortcuts to Subscriptions, Shorts and Library.

“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,” Google writes in today’s post.

Those affected by the buffering reported that content keeps freezing on their iOS devices (both iPhone and iPad).

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For anyone seeing this and wondering, there is a way to get around it

temporarily turn on watch history watch one vid, can be literally anything, blank etc turn it back off go to https://myactivity.google.com/ turn off history from there do not delete the video from history or it will go back

This is not my method, i had seen it somewhere else, but i dont remember where

Fine with me. I go on there to find specific videos and have no interest in clicking a recommended video.