Sad or Rad? The new YouTube experience

Early august, YouTube rolled out an update to enhance user experience. Now, if you have your watch history turned off, selecting home feed(home screen) button on your youtube app will result in this message:



Excited and relieved, or saddened? To me, this is an unwelcomed feature. I oftentimes find myself aimlessly browsing through recommendations, to find some random channel with interesting or useful information. Now, most random youtubers will arguably have a more limited exposure to audience.

Since I don't subscribe to channels, I will have to go and visit them manually and any unknown, but potentially useful channels will stay unknown to those of us who don't have watch history turned off.

 

Yeah, this is lame. I admittedly like to listen to the "my mix" playlists that YouTube makes automatically more than I should.

 

You can still get that random generated mix happen. Once you click on the song you like, scroll down and you'll find a window that says "Mix - xxxxxxxxxx" and it'll play a youtube generated playlist for you.



I've noticed an unusual side effect of having no home screen recommendations. I don't spend much time in youtube anymore. In order to find something that I might like to see, I have to personally look for it. Otherwise, no bueno.

 

You could just subscribe to channels you like. I believe youtube will still recommend relevant and somewhat random content.

 

Even if you subscribe, you still have to go and visit them manually. If you don't have history enabled, you don't get recommendations, so the home screen stays blank, hence no use in subscribing.

 

It's a kindness to the guys/gals that sub/watch the borderline softcore stuff or "fishing" channels with scantily clad yootoobers. When their spouse opens the app it doesn't rat on them.

I don't care either way. They are always watching what you watch anyway.

 

Ahh, so that’s why OP doesn’t have watch history enabled

 

Ah snap, was I that obvious?

 

Apparently not to me lol.

 

Gang, I was just playing along. That is not the problem I run into at all. My issue lies within google youtooble tracking and watching. I refuse to enable history out of principle.

 

I’m not confident that they don’t track you anyway. Everything we do is being aggregated into marketing profiles that are sold and traded all over. It’s all in the fine print.

When the service is free, you’re the product.

 

Since my watch history is on, I will never see that.

Note, if you watch something that you don't want it to show in history, there is an option to remove it from said history.