I’ve been using NewPipe lately and it’s given me a greater appreciation for the YouTube recommendations. Because NewPipe just uses the basic, generic recommendations that YouTube shows everyone that isn’t logged in, and holy shit I’d forgotten how just bad “mainstream” YouTube is.
Comment on YouTube stops recommending videos when signed out of Google
Horsey@kbin.social 3 months agojust be prepared that the "default" YouTube recommendations are all clickbait + Mr. Beast + whatever fad is going around. The default recommendations are really really bad.
deweydecibel@lemmy.world 3 months ago
abhibeckert@lemmy.world 3 months ago
just be prepared that the “default” YouTube recommendations are all clickbait
That’s not what Google is doing. They’re literally showing an empty page with a search box (and a sidebar of categories).
It’s clearly being A/B tested though - I only see the empty page sometimes.
Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
Wait… that makes no sense. You won’t see them now. There are no recommendations.
archomrade@midwest.social 3 months ago
the trick is to be signed in with history cleared and turned off. Then your ‘recommendations’ homepage is just a blank screen begging you to turn on history tracking again
Though i don’t trust it not to track me secretly regardless, but that’s a different issue.
kinsnik@lemmy.world 3 months ago
wouldn’t that have all the bad things about not having personalized recs (ie: seeing only popular clickbaity videos) while getting none of the benefits (ie: making harder for google to track you)
archomrade@midwest.social 3 months ago
It just doesn’t show you any recommendations at all - i think it depends on you also ‘deleting’ your account history in addition to turning off history tracking
it does still (in theory) enable them to track you for other outside services, possibly even for pre-roll or mid-roll advertisements, so it really depends on what your priority is
if watching on desktop with adblock on, you can get the best of both worlds - no recommendations and no ads (disclaimer: i have not yet been given the boot for using adblock, YMMV).
AFAIK - Watching on the youtube app does not allow you the benefit of adblocking, at least not in my experience.
PlantJam@lemmy.world 3 months ago
That home page is perfect. No junk and a message explaining why there’s no junk and how to get it back if you want it.