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.
They could do what they did back in the day; show recommended videos based on the current one.
They still do in my recent experience.
It’s just not based on any longer viewing history than the current session.
The homepage rhat starts the viewing session will generally be just what’s popular with the general audience in the approximate location they can geolocate from your IP address. If you are logged out and try a few different locations on a VPN, you’ll get different homepages to start a new (logged out) session from.
Yep.
Though there is still a reason to be upset IMHO, because I’ve had history turned off for several years now, but until recently I always had a home page with ‘recommended’ videos regardless, which to me indicates that they were not honoring my request before the recent data regulations went into effect in the EU, or were otherwise using data from other services or browsing history to base recommendations on.