Tell HN: YouTube is not showing home recommendations when watch history is off
For me, it shows a banner asking to turn on watch history [1].
[1]: https://imgur.com/a/TsmSN2r Yes. This just began today, even though I've had watch history off for a long time, such a long time that I don't recall turning it off. Out of curiosity, I briefly turned watch history back on and "Home" (the YouTube page that shows a mix of content you've viewed and content YT hopes you will view) returned to normal. Then I switched it back off, reloaded "Home" and got a blank page with a plea to enable watch history. It seems as though YouTube tracks and records users' activity on the site regardless of whether or not they assent to having their watch history recorded, but wants users to explicitly assent to being tracked and having their activity recorded before YT will provide their (marginally useful in my experience) 'personalized recommendations'. Yes, all of Google's (and Facebook and everyone else) controls regarding history and tracking of various things is for the user's benefit to keep them activated, because if you disable or delete them, you are the only one who loses access to that juicy data. Whenever I delete an object in cloud storage, I simply whisper, "now accessible to everyone but me..." It's a nice deception, telling you that you have control over all this tracking and history, tricking you into deleting it, and completely losing control. I will say this, though: if you frequently open your phone or apps in front of other people and may have embarrassing stuff pop up, perhaps it's good to disable it. I found myself hiding my screen from a neighbor this week; not a good feel. They still track things like videos you liked and comment on if watch history is off and used to use that for recommendations I just noticed this today and think it is great. Now there is even less reason to browse Youtube videos unintentionally. I don't see why they even allow you to turn watch history off if they want the website to rely on it. Not complaining though. This is nice. I got this as well. Even though I'm avid youtube user, I'll be not turning my history on. Thankfully, the Subscription page has videos of channels I subscribe to - so that's good enough for me. I saw that today, and I don’t mind. Less time distracted by random videos Are sidebar recommendations still here? Sidebar recs are there, but YouTube injected a plea to turn watch history back on, an oversized block with the header "Recommendations not quite right?", followed by "When you turn on watch history you'll get more personalized recommendations." and two buttons: "Leave history off" and "Turn on history". That notification had an "X" at the top right corner to close/hide it, but the "Got it, we won't show you this hint again." message that showed when I opted not to enable watch history had no way to close or hide it.