YouTube's privacy settings now block you from seeing suggested content
I've always been a bit of a privacy enthousiast. Have had everything blocked that Google and by extension YouTube wants to scrape off you. This means I've also blocked my view history.
Recently YouTube started giving out a warning on the homepage that you have blocked your view history, that you can change it in your privacy settings and that it helps them serve you better content. What it also means is that your homepage is just one big popup to guilt trip you into sharing your data. The homepage won't show any suggested content anymore.
While it is in their interest to do so and since they are a company wanting to make money it is understandable. Nevertheless it seems harsh from going to see content that you might like to only seeing a big warning sign right now.
What are you experiences with this?
I'm with @GunnarRunnar on this one, I'm not entirely sure what exactly your issue is. If you don't allow YouTube to know what you've watched in the past, how do you expect them to recommend you things to watch now?
The only things left then are your subscription feed and anything very popular at the moment, both of which already have their respective feeds.
I've talked about it fairly often on HackerNews.
My likes and subscriptions. The recommendations aren't perfect, but it's far better than with my watch history on. If I truly value a video and/or its creator, I like and subscribe.
I can watch a Mr. Beast video or two without millions of his clones clogging up my recommendations. I can receive wisdom from a dog once in a while and not have to worry about low quality junk inundating my feed.
It keeps me focused on my interests and productive - for the most part.
If I'm paying for YouTube Premium, I should have at least somewhat control over what and how I want to consume my content. I want to be the customer for once, and not the product - that's all I ask for from Google.
Yea I hate watch history as a metric of stuff I wanna watch. I watched a few videos on how to tie a knot and now my feed is littered with it.
I liked it when it was more heavily based on likes and subs.
It’s like when you buy a set of towels online and now all you see are ads for towels, they’ve really got you pegged as a serious towel connoisseur, surely you must be looking for even more towels to fill out your ever expanding towel collection.
Half the time they don't even respect that. Saying "not interested" also doesn't have the same weight as watching something, which seems wrong.
I'm always worried about selecting "not interested" -> "I've already watch this" like is it going to reduce how much it recommends videos from that creator or videos like it or is it going to add it to my watch history. I really need a way of saying "I like this content but I've seen this specific video elsewhere and want it out of my recommendation feed". STube has a "marked as watched" feature that artifically sets the watch time to the end of the video so it does go into history, would be nice if such a feature was standard.
So go into your watch history, search for knots or whatever, and delete them all. Boom, no more knot recommendations.
Thanks, I'm sure you're trying to be helpful but this is not a desirable solution for me. I gave one example of how the recommendation feed gets polluted, but there's so many other ways like a friend shares me a link or I happen to let video autoplay when I fall asleep or some other reason. I don't want to be constantly having to be micromanaging and pruning my watch history
After reading these comments, this sounds like something I DO want. How do I enable this empty page? My subscriptions have always been set to private and my home page is still full of garbage. Is there some new setting to get to this blank state?
On the browser, you can set your bookmarks to go straight to YouTube.com/subscriptions (not the official URL but just an example) and thenn whenever you start typing "you" then your browser will automatically recommend YouTube.com/subscriptions.
At least that is how it works for me in Firefox on my computer. I rarely go to the main YouTube page.
Aye, I do that already. But I watch youtube on places other than my PC's web browser, where I don't have that luxury. I'm interested in cleaning up the home page itself, which it sounds like this post is about, but I'm not able to replicate the OP's situation.
the homepage blanking happens when view history is disabled, not with subscription privacy.
Presumably the issue is that at first glance, it feels like YouTube decided to fuck users with a disabled view history just for kicks. Yesterday the homepage was populated just fine without history being on.
Personally, it's a welcome option considering how easy it is otherwise to enter an unplanned distraction spiral!
One additional pro tip: You can wipe your view history at any time, and IIRC you can have it auto-clear after a few months.
YouTube's generic homepage is full of awful clickbait so I don't really see a problem. I do think it's weird to trust them to serve you videos but not to keep track of what you watch. Seems like if you don't trust them you wouldn't use the service at all.
Exactly. The algorithm keeps trying to recommend me Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson shit because I watch the occasional news or politics video. No thank you. My feed should be entirely educational science/history stuff, comedy and DnB music. Not some conservative bobblehead explaining why things really went downhill when women started voting, thanks Youtube.
Yeah, I try my best to break/game the algorithm because some of the stuff it tries to push on me is utterly reprehensible neo-conservative tripe.
Yes, this is the part I don't understand. I don't use Youtube for political subjects at all, and yet, the right-wing asshole commentators keep showing up on the opening page. That's when I erase all the Youtube cookies in my browser and start over.
Same. I only follow historians on Youtube, who give only unvarnished facts and avoid indulging in unproven conspiracy theories. I still get alt-right clickbait thumbnail detritus cluttering up my recommendations.
On a security level sure, but on a privacy level I'm not sure how trust plays into this. It's not a matter of trust of what they'll do with my data, they're perfectly clear that they're going to use it for recommendations and sell it. It's only a matter of whether I trust them to not to save my watch history, which if I value my privacy but also accept that I essentially have to use the site, I may as well tell them not to. There's no benefit to giving them explicit consent when I'd rather they not track it and they'll serve me the videos regardless.
Outside of the privacy angle I also prefer that my recommendation come from my conscious choices on the website, like my subscriptions, favorites, and likes rather than using my watch history. It let's me curate what they serve me and prevents a spiral of low quality content being recommended on days where I don't have the mental energy for my usual higher quality videos.
I have no watch or search history enabled on youtube and my recommendations are always great and I don't have to worry about whether what I watch will negatively or positively affect my recommendations going forward. I know TikTok isn't popular on here but that's a constant pressure on that app that I'm glad not to have on youtube.
I'm not certain what kind of warning it does serve for you but this seems just fair for them to block it, even if you discount the fact that the algorithm doesn't "know you" if it can't access your history. If you don't teach the algorithm anything with your view history, it doesn't learn anything that it could serve others either. It's give and take.
I guess it could just work out with some kind of prompt of "select five channels you like" or by your subscriptions (if that's available) and serve you stuff based on that. I wonder how good it would be if that's the data it gets to access. But it's not like it's that good even at the moment, for me at least.
The algo would be perfectly simple to use if you subscribed. That's ease as nodes om a graphdb to interprete as interest and then pass to the algo.
No subs or watch history? Then nothing. But this is particularly egregious nonsense.
Its especially weird that they've completely wiped all homepage suggestions when you realise that they're still giving you suggestions based on your subscriptions in the bar on the right when you're watching a video. I get videos suggested to me that are unrelated to the video I'm watching, but related to my subscriptions there.
Of course it is. Google are shitting themselves over people becoming more privacy savvy and they NEED that data to keep going.
Parasites. The lot of them. Funny how the homepage works fine if you don't login isn't it?
Funny OP talked about the "big pop up to guilt trip you" because it was the opposite for me: I was happy to get it! Having an empty page instead of videos that don't interest me and shorts that I don't want to see is great.
Of course, the ideal would be to have my default homepage set as my subscriptions page to reduce a click, but I guess we can't have it all :)
I suppose you could just bookmark this URL and use that instead? https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions
On Android when you long press the YouTube app there is a Subscription's shortcut you can add to your home screen to go straight to that tab when you open the app.
Thank you for this! Once you get to the popup window, you can drag the subscription option straight to the homepage. So long little annoyance that I've lived with for too long!
I don’t give this recommendation to everyone, because it’s a little oddball and quite a bit janky, but if you’re looking for a privacy-respecting way to watch YouTube, the FreeTube app is decent. You can use the Privacy Redirect browser extension to open all YouTube links in the app.
I like it for a few reasons:
It has downsides, of course. It can be slow, particularly when using a VPN. It’s clunky to use a standalone app instead of just loading the website. You won’t be able to have personalized recommendations, which you indicated you’re interested in. And sometimes it just breaks in weird ways, since it’s an infrequently updated open-source content scraper. But if you're a privacy-paranoid, ad-loathing power user like me you may agree that it’s worth it, despite the drawbacks.
I've heard of this before. As far as I've heard, it'll literally wipe your home page clean if your view history is completely empty; but even putting one item in there will restore it to working order. So enable history, watch one video, disable it again and you should get something if that's your issue. The quality of any recommendations would presumably depend on the quality of data you feed the algorithm.
Yeah I've had the same experience. For me, turning off watch history was a necessity to prevent the feedback loop of getting increasingly suggested the same kind of video, which gets old very fast. Annoying that they can't do suggestions based on my subscriptions (they still manage to suggest "related videos" to the one I'm watching after all), but I guess that just means I'm going to do less mindless browsing of YouTube from now on, which is probably for the best.
I doubt anyone will like my strategies for Youtube. I have a Google account, mostly for Gmail, but I log out immediately after looking at mail. At Youtube, I log in sometimes, to subscribe to a channel I want to support, but almost never watch videos while logged in.
Without logging in, I deliberately choose videos from the channels I like, which tends to bring similar types of videos on the opening page whenever I go to Youtube. If there is something offbeat that I want to watch, I copy the link address and open it in Brave, which I've got set to never save cookies or links or anything else.
Eventually, Youtube starts showing weird stuff on the opening page that I have no interest in, so I wipe all the Youtube cookies from my main browser, Vivaldi, and start over.
I have to wonder how much useful info Google gets from this, but it is probably more than I am comfortable with.
A good option to follow channels while not logging in is to use an RSS reader. Every channel has an RSS feed. I do this and can watch the video without even going to YouTube because the video is embedded in my reader.
Yup, I have rss subscriptions to the channels that I follow, and they're set up to open via NewPipe x SponsorBlock. Works like a dream.
I didn't notice this because my YouTube bookmark goes straight to my subscriptions page. The homepage was always trash, filled with lowest-common-denominator garbage content that I actively despised, especially with history turned off.
I agree with other posters here in that if you actually want YouTube to recommend stuff to you then you'll need to enable your history and let them profile you. If you're just looking for something to recommend generic popular content there's still a Trending link in the sidebar that works with history disabled.
Tbh I don't see why your subscriptions isn't sufficient information to profile you with.
It almost certainly is sufficient information, but the problem is that YouTube's incentives don't align with your desires as a user. Presumably they have a sophisticated recommendation engine based on watch history that drives traffic to the content that makes them the most money. When it comes to users with history disabled, the decision of what to do probably comes down to:
Write and maintain a whole new recommendation engine for just these users based on their subscriptions to give them an improved experience.
Let these users live with a poorer experience and nag them to enable history in order to convert some percentage of them back into the normal recommendation engine.
That option 2 is clearly the only sane choice for Google seems obvious to me. Why would they waste resources catering to an insignificantly tiny subset of users who, by virtue of disabling history, have indicated that they are actively opposed to Google's core business model? As long as they are an advertising company, users who do anything at all to subvert the normal conversion funnel are going to be seen and treated as second-class, maybe even to the point where Google will actively discourage them from continuing to use their services if they only stand to lose money on those users.
I personally follow YouTube channels I'm interested in using RSS. The videos are even embeded in the reader. If you want an easy way to self-host your own RSS reader, check out PikaPods. You can run your own Miniflux RSS feed reader for $1 a month. I'm not affiliated with them, just a happy customer.
I love this change. I only care for content I'm subscribed to and wished the app would open directly into the subscriptions tab. While I do see the question about enabling history every time I open it, I think it's better than loading the regular feed, maybe it's just my perception but seems to load faster.
I've just made a separate account for youtube. I know they still collect data from there as well but at least its not connected into my actual emails etc.
Where do you find this setting?
OP: don't give me recommendations
YouTube: you got it, dude!
OP: what the heck, dude, why am I not getting any recommendations? This is straight up discrimination against privacy concerned citizens.
/Sorry for a reddit style comment.