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.
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 …
I just use uBlock to hide shorts. Works fine.
I went through and cleared all of my old watch history, search history, everything from YouTube. It immediately started recommending the same things I’ve already watched. It continues to recommend seven year old videos regularly. Videos I know it knows I’ve watched already since it clearly didn’t erase any of my history like I asked. The shorts shit is awful. It’s even worse if you tell YouTube not to track you, it freaks out and only plays the same shorts over and over
This is the craziest thing. I make a search, I want to see search results.
“Here’s some totally unrelated videos for you!”
No! I want search results!
“Here’s the annoying ass you’ve blocked five times!”
No! Search results!
“Here’s the video you just watched!”
I did a search! I want to see search results and nothing else. The last possible thing I’d watch is what I already finished before searching for a different very specific thing.
“Here’s the worst cancer in your country for you!”
JUST GIVE ME SEARCH RESULTS!
Yes!! That’s the other thing, why is YouTube constantly recommending videos I’ve already watched? I get it all the time where videos I’ve literally watched the day before are being recommended to me. Even more so for videos I’ve watched the week prior. The other thing that’s been annoying the shit out of me is that YouTube is so desperate to send me down political rabbit holes. My political leanings must be a mystery to them since I like liberal stand up comedy, gaming, Linux, and guns, so I’m getting hit with political garbage from both sides. Can I please just have an option to tell YouTube what I want instead of it poorly guessing? Oh wait, that’s the search function, which doesn’t work