YouTube is no longer showing recommended videos to users logged out of a Google account or using Incognito mode, making people concerned they are being bullied into always being signed into the service.
This change, which is now rolling out, shows a simple YouTube homepage without any videos or tips on what to watch.
As noted by some on X, users who have cleaned their search and watch history or turned off their history settings also see no suggestions when they’re logged in. Some people think YouTube is being pushy about this, trying to make users turn on their history settings.
My guess,
- It was too hard to create a non-authenticated algorithm which could let users delete their past participation.
- They realized their non-auth algorithm was exposing too much info about what is going on during the upcoming election. And they are afraid that people will see all the fasc recommendations.
It has stopped doing this for me too though. I’m European. I’m assuming it’s because they really want to stay on the correct side of European law.
so many companies telling on themselves when they would rather remove functionality or block countries rather than just comply with privacy regulations …
Uh, how could Google show any personal recommendations without storing any data to base that on? If anything this seems to be Google actually doing what they say they’re doing.
Google has been perfectly happy to track you with browser fingerprints – just if they showed personalized results, it would be giving their hand away …
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I like to tell myself I even get better search results when signed out (YouTube doesn’t seem to try as hard to insert extra filler)
I’m so tired of searching for something specific, getting two or three results relevant to my search, then it just goes into my subscriptions and other recommended channels. I’m really really hoping a new video site comes up soon to replace YouTube. You can’t even use YouTube as a video host anymore. I tried uploading some gameplay of me and my friends fucking around. Had music in the background. I put the video as unlisted, marked it as mature, I’m not a partner or anything that would get me paid, and YouTube refused to allow me to upload it without first muting the music parts. All I wanted was an easy way to share a personal video with my friends, but no, YouTube needs to make money off of every little thing that gets uploaded so I end up fucked even though I have no intentions of making “content”.
Dont forget to mention getting unrelated shorts shoved down your throat everywhere. I seriously deleted my decade old youtube channel over this. Fuck Google.
“Youtube-shorts block” (or one of several similar addons) that forces shorts to be treated as normal videos
But that you need a half-dozen addons just for Youtube alone to either make it usable or to restore functionality it used to have …
