YouTube showing “Your watch history is off” instead of videos

YouTube users who sign-in to a Google or YouTube account while using the video streaming site may have their watch history recorded automatically. The feature is turned on by default and YouTube does keep track of all watched videos, searches, comments and even other activity such as live chats.

The watch history is being used by YouTube to power the site’s recommendation engine and for other purposes. The main idea is the following one: if you watch lots of football or cat videos, you get lots of videos that YouTube considers similar in your home feed and other sections of the site.

While that sounds useful, recommendations do not work well for some users. There may be inappropriate videos in the feed and some users prefer to disable recommendations to limit Google’s access to personal data.

Today, YouTube announced a change that is coming for users of the site who have turned off the watch history on YouTube. Rolling out over the next few months, Google is going to disable sections of the site that it says require the watch history to power video recommendations.

Users get a “your watch history is off” notification on YouTube in those sections on the site instead of a list of video recommendations. There is a link to update the settings, and a search field to find videos using search.

When the watch history is turned off, YouTube is using other signals, including a user’s location, likes and dislikes, to fill the list of video recommendations.

source Reddit

YouTube community manager Hazel mentions the Home feed on the site as the sole example of such a section. She writes: “Starting today, if you have YouTube watch history off and have no significant prior watch history, features that require watch history to provide video recommendations will be disabled – like your YouTube home feed. This means that starting today, your home feed may look a lot different: you’ll be able to see the search bar and the left-hand guide menu, with no feed of recommended videos thus allowing you to more easily search, browse subscribed channels and explore Topic tabs instead.”

It needs to be clear that this change affects YouTube users who are signed-in to the site and have the YouTube watch history turned off. Also, it applies only if there is no prior watch history, which could be the case if the watch history was turned off, but the history was not deleted.

YouTube claims that it wants to make it clearer that the site’s video recommendations feature relies on the watch history. The notification that the site displays might encourage some users to turn on the watch history to get recommendations again.

Google users ma change the Watch History feature on YouTube, and other history features, on the Activity Controls website of the company.

Closing Words

Is the change an attempt to get more users to turn on the watch history on YouTube? It remains to be seen how this evolves in the coming months as more and more users on the site are hit with the change.

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