YouTube is no longer showing recommended videos to users logged out of a Google account or using Incognito mode, making people concerned they are being bullied into always being signed into the service.
This change, which is now rolling out, shows a simple YouTube homepage without any videos or tips on what to watch.
As noted by some on X, users who have cleaned their search and watch history or turned off their history settings also see no suggestions when they’re logged in. Some people think YouTube is being pushy about this, trying to make users turn on their history settings.
I noticed this a few days ago or so and I was delighted by it. I never sign in to YouTube and hated the garbage recommendations on the homepage.
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.
As with what others are saying here, pulling out algo nonsense is good, however I do worry that it slowly devolves into something similar to what’s happening with Twitter where you can barely look at anything without being pushed to login. It’s unusable unless you have an account. Websites shouldn’t operate like that.
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”.
This is the craziest thing. I make a search, I want to see search results.
“Here’s some totally unrelated videos for you!”
No! I want search results!
“Here’s the annoying ass you’ve blocked five times!”
No! Search results!
“Here’s the video you just watched!”
I did a search! I want to see search results and nothing else. The last possible thing I’d watch is what I already finished before searching for a different very specific thing.
“Here’s the worst cancer in your country for you!”
JUST GIVE ME SEARCH RESULTS!
Yes!! That’s the other thing, why is YouTube constantly recommending videos I’ve already watched? I get it all the time where videos I’ve literally watched the day before are being recommended to me. Even more so for videos I’ve watched the week prior. The other thing that’s been annoying the shit out of me is that YouTube is so desperate to send me down political rabbit holes. My political leanings must be a mystery to them since I like liberal stand up comedy, gaming, Linux, and guns, so I’m getting hit with political garbage from both sides. Can I please just have an option to tell YouTube what I want instead of it poorly guessing? Oh wait, that’s the search function, which doesn’t work
Dont forget to mention getting unrelated shorts shoved down your throat everywhere. I seriously deleted my decade old youtube channel over this. Fuck Google.
I went through and cleared all of my old watch history, search history, everything from YouTube. It immediately started recommending the same things I’ve already watched. It continues to recommend seven year old videos regularly. Videos I know it knows I’ve watched already since it clearly didn’t erase any of my history like I asked. The shorts shit is awful. It’s even worse if you tell YouTube not to track you, it freaks out and only plays the same shorts over and over
“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 just use uBlock to hide shorts. Works fine.
i like this change
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.
Yep.
Though there is still a reason to be upset IMHO, because I’ve had history turned off for several years now, but until recently I always had a home page with ‘recommended’ videos regardless, which to me indicates that they were not honoring my request before the recent data regulations went into effect in the EU, or were otherwise using data from other services or browsing history to base recommendations on.
Google has been perfectly happy to track you with browser fingerprints – just if they showed personalized results, it would be giving their hand away …
Not personal recommendations, they won’t show anything. It would be like loading up Lemmy/Reddit and not seeing anything until you logged in or subscribed to a community.
Cookies… But yes i noticed it too recently that you dont even get a homepage / trending list anymore when turning on proper privacy settings.
They kinda don’t! It’d be trending videos near your IP locations + your watch history for this browser session
Imagine being mad at this 😂
People love to complain
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’ll throw in, YouTube channels are all fully functional RSS feeds, and you don’t need to interact with YouTube at all to get your subscriptions.
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.
I haven’t paid any attention to any channels but the ones I was already subscribed to the last couple years or so (mostly watching on NewPipe and Grayjay), and whenever I look at yt on my desktop where I’m not logged in, it’s just this cesspool of clickbait/ragebait and I’m like… people watch this shit? And they enjoy it, apparently?
Fire me into the sun, thanks.
The Algorithm can’t find a rhythm 🥁
My guess,
- It was too hard to create a non-authenticated algorithm which could let users delete their past participation.
- They realized their non-auth algorithm was exposing too much info about what is going on during the upcoming election. And they are afraid that people will see all the fasc recommendations.
I think it’s number 2. Now I can’t see what the “default” presentation is (which always had 1 conspiracy theory thing).
It has stopped doing this for me too though. I’m European. I’m assuming it’s because they really want to stay on the correct side of European law.
so many companies telling on themselves when they would rather remove functionality or block countries rather than just comply with privacy regulations …
Best. Change. Ever.
will this affect invidious/piped?
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.
wouldn’t that have all the bad things about not having personalized recs (ie: seeing only popular clickbaity videos) while getting none of the benefits (ie: making harder for google to track you)
It just doesn’t show you any recommendations at all - i think it depends on you also ‘deleting’ your account history in addition to turning off history tracking
it does still (in theory) enable them to track you for other outside services, possibly even for pre-roll or mid-roll advertisements, so it really depends on what your priority is
if watching on desktop with adblock on, you can get the best of both worlds - no recommendations and no ads (disclaimer: i have not yet been given the boot for using adblock, YMMV).
AFAIK - Watching on the youtube app does not allow you the benefit of adblocking, at least not in my experience.
*edit: this is what I see on my home page
That home page is perfect. No junk and a message explaining why there’s no junk and how to get it back if you want it.
Agreed.
I’ve been using NewPipe lately and it’s given me a greater appreciation for the YouTube recommendations. Because NewPipe just uses the basic, generic recommendations that YouTube shows everyone that isn’t logged in, and holy shit I’d forgotten how just bad “mainstream” YouTube is.
Wait… that makes no sense. You won’t see them now. There are no recommendations.
just be prepared that the “default” YouTube recommendations are all clickbait
That’s not what Google is doing. They’re literally showing an empty page with a search box (and a sidebar of categories). Similar to going to google.com.
It’s clearly being A/B tested though - I only see the empty page sometimes. Other times I get the usual Mr Beast recommendations (this is with no login, not with a login but watch history disabled).
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
Oh no ! Anyway .
Best feature so far
Exactly
It’ll be rolled back when they realize engagement drops.
Don’t threaten me with a good time!
