RANT: YouTube is changing the homepage for users with history disabled

In case you haven't seen this, YouTube announced a "new viewer experience that better corresponds to your YouTube watch history preferences", but I can't help but feel they are just trying to bully me into turning watch history on

UPDATE: Still using YouTube with my history off! Still no recommendations. I don't see them ever rolling this back sadly :(

While I wouldn't describe myself as someone who overly cares about his online privacy, I am definitely conscious about the ways I give data to companies like Google. I've had all the history features in my Google Account turned off for over a year now, and this of course includes YouTube's Watch History.

As someone who spends a lot of time in the platform, I was increasingly uncomfortable with the fact that Google knew about every single video I watched, how long I watched it for, how many times, and other stuff like this. This is why I decided to turn watch history off, and it definitely made my recommendations in the platform a lot worse. YouTube would recommend videos that I had already seen, and I would often find myself struggling to find something new to watch. This however, was understandable. As a Computer Science student, I can imagine that the watch history data is pretty key on finding relevant recommendations, so I was okay with them not being as good, they were still usable.

This changed until yesterday. I opened my YouTube homepage and was greeted by a new message, prompting me to turn my watch history back on, and no more recommendations on the home page.

This is a rant post, so there's no hiding it: this made change made me angry. It feels like Google is strong-arming me into turning watch history back on so they can use my data for training their algorithms and sell me more products.

This is what the Youtube team said about why this change came to be:

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

This is just PR-speak. There is a lot more users using the recommendations instead of search to find what to watch, and both features co-exist with one another. If I'd rather browse instead of using recommendations, I would just do that. There is no need to kill the recommendations entirely.

As I said before, I spend a lot of time in YouTube, so this change just made my everyday experience worse, at least until I re-enable the watch history, which I might be forced to depending on how unusable the site becomes. If there really is a group of people that prefers no recommendations, it would have made more sense to give them a setting to disable it.

Idk man, it's just bad, specially because there's no real YouTube competitor, and its the main place most people watch long-form videos. Thats it, rant over.