YouTube is gradually rolling out an update affecting its platform’s homepage. If you have disabled the watch history, it will show almost nothing.
YouTube is not particularly stingy with its privacy options. For many years we can keep subscriptions private or do not save the history of the videos you watch. Granted, this prevents the platform from recommending videos to us based on what we like, but if you’re not interested in customizing the homepage, having the choice is always nice.
A recent YouTube blog update, however, seems to indicate that Google would like you to enable history, even if it means forcing your hand a little: “Starting today, if you have deactivated the history of videos watched and you do not have a significant previous history, the features that require the history to offer video recommendations will be disabled – such as the YouTube homepage”. It’s unclear what Google means by “significant prior history.”
YouTube Home Page Won’t Show Anything If You Disable Watch History
Once this update is deployed in the next few months, your home page may therefore be almost empty. No “trendy” videos, no videos from your subscriptions… Just the search bar at the top and the column menu on the left. Google says it does this “to clarify which features require viewing history to recommend videos and render [la navigation] easier for those who prefer to search rather than browse the recommendations”.
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It is still difficult to understand why displaying the most popular videos (all genres combined) or those of the channels to which one subscribes requires an active history. Under the guise of facilitating the user experience, one might think that Google mainly seeks to recover data. Unless the firm is preparing the ground to make the current operation an exclusive option to YouTube Premium, the price of which has recently increased? Let’s hope not.