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.
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The change is all part of a “new viewer experience” Google announced on Tuesday.
That means you’ll only see the search bar on the homepage, along with the Shorts, Subscriptions, and Library buttons.
This could come as a welcome change for people who hate sifting through increasingly extreme thumbnails to find the play button, but it could also be a way to annoy users into turning the history back on.
Google says it’s going to roll out this feature “over the next few months,” but several users across the web are already seeing the change.
In place of YouTube’s recommended videos is a notice that reads, “Your watch history is off.
“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.
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