YouTube’s decision to present users with a blank home feed if their watch history is off has completely ruined the experience.
YouTube announced it would stop showing recommended videos in users’ home feeds if their watch history was disabled, but few users were prepared for exactly how bad the experience would be. Users are presented with a completely blank home feed, save for a message asking the user to turn their watch history back on. The service does not even make recommendations from a user’s subscriptions, nor does it show them what new videos from the creators they follow.
Users have taken to Reddit to complain about the new feature and call out YouTube for being anti-consumer. The real rub is that even Premium subscribers are not immune from this change.
“Even though I am a premium subscriber, Youtube changed to this awful homepage experience just because I am not turning on my watch history and hence not giving Google my data,” wrote user kingcobra0411. “It used to be showing trending videos irrespective of my watch history.”
“So it’s, ‘Let us take your history or we take your recommended feed,’” wrote user sir_swankington. “I swear youtube gets more and more anti-consumer every update.”
Yet another user said YouTube’s change had an unforeseen benefit:
My watch history is off and now my home page is blank. At first i was upset with no recommendations and was going to find ways around this (never gonna turn on watch history) but than I realized.
I watch alot of youtube and the Home page being off has inadvertently helped me reduce my watch time and made me more productive. The weird part is why they even did it, but oh well feel better off just seeing my sub feed.
In response, another user pointed out that there is a way to work around YouTube’s change:
Turn on your watch history, watch one video, turn it off again. It just doesn’t show anything on the frontpage if your watch history is empty (which it is if you’ve had it always turned off)
Given how aggressively anti-consumer YouTube has become, it’s unlikely this workaround will last long. YouTube clearly wants to collect every last scrap of data it can, regardless of whether a user is already paying for YouTuve Premium, so it’s probably only a matter of time until the company shuts down this workaround.
