Welcome to Youtube, person who has never been to Youtube before. Here’s what we have to offer:
I do miss the Mr. animal slop, clickbait nonsense with hundreds of millions of views, and occasional original content
no ads no algorithm no preset slop machine
a gentle reminder to use my own decisions in what to search and watch
true zen
No matter how frugal the surface, underneath it’s all still there. Also something to remember when using Google search. the fact that it’s all white and clean does not mean it’s minimal.
Each day I go to the YouTube app on Roku to my subscriptions tab and watch whatever is new. Then I go to Recommend and it’s 90% or more previous videos from those same subscriptions and very little new creators it hasn’t showed me.
After almost a year of this it figured out last week I might like AronRa, a person I’m very familiar with. And after countless videos on anthropology, evolution and paleontology he should have come up so much sooner. So much for big data.
But what is completely lacking is a “show me completely random stuff, old, new, not in my algorithm, short, long, completely against my algorithm, etc.” it lacks almost any way to discover new stuff that isn’t 100% related to content you already have.
YouTube gets more uploads than any one person can possibly watch and yet it’s almost incapable of showing me something unless I explicitly tell it to find it for me.
Best we can do is some Jordan Peterson videos and something where trump appears to be yelling.
You watch one ContraPoints video about Jordan B Peterson and the next thing you know … Still not any JBP video recommendations. So I guess there is an upside to the failure of big data.
Signed in? There’s your problem.
Start fresh - search for, I dunno, “bread recipes” and bang-zoom, your suggested next video is something about how wonderful fascism is.
Good to know. As my posting history on Lemmy will show I definitely watch bread recipes videos. In fact I became a mod for c/cooking today.
Congrats! And condolences. 😄
Still remember the first time I saw this. It was the last time I touched YouTube for a looong time.
It would cost them absolutely nothing to show a feed of hot/high rated/popular videos. Throwing in some entropy such that it doesn’t only show the most viewed videos globally wouldn’t be hard at all either. They’re just openly stating that they don’t want you there at all if they can’t track your viewership.
Trust me, this is way better than getting clickbaited and having slop in your watch history dictate your recommendations.
Its not this simple, it looks like this to me on my fairly locked down browser (firefox), but on a fresh profile (image attached), that page is populated. I assume its a cookie setting, as I see the same behavior when I turn off tracking protection and ad blockers. I didn’t play around beyond that.
It’s cookies for sure. I use Firefox Focus on my phone and it clears cookies after every session. Blank front page of YT.
Private browsing window with Librewolf on my computer? Blank front page.
I assume its a cookie setting, as I see the same behavior when I turn off tracking protection and ad blockers.
It goes way deeper than that. Fingerprinting is a whole thing. Your IP, combined with some characteristics about your browser, operating system and hardware… pretty unique.
Interesting to see what YT “thinks” about you.
I see 1995 twice there.
Probably cookies, I did another quick test and created a new profile. The front page was unpopulated. I went to a technology connections video, and the refreshed the front page. It was populated, cleared stored information, (history, cookies, cache, etc…) and when I refreshed the homepage it was blank again.
The fairly default browser I used to take the screenshot is to watch some free with ads movies on youtube, most recently was waterworld, fun to watch, makes no sense.
YouTube should have never sold out to Google. Such a shame
Tried this on a private window, and yes, that’s what it looks like. Thought I’d click on Shorts and let the first 3 seconds of the opening auto-play video play. Then back to the home page and wow, full of absolute trash.
How am I not surprised? Shorts is video equivalent of cancer.
Holy shit it works, and transforms the front page into an ABSOLUTE NIGHTMARE
I’m like, “Is this what normal people in 2025 watch?” I feel like an alien on earth, except the planet changed and not me.
WHY IS EVERYTHING SO FAST AND THERE IS SO MUCH TEXT AND MANY FILTERS AND EFFECTS STOP MAKING SUCH DEEP EYE CONTACT WITH ME AND MOVING AROUND AT A BREAKNECK PACE
I have ADHD and this is NOT made for me, it makes me DEEPLY uncomfortable. Every video seems like that gif of Morshu from Link: Faces of Evil sped up to hell moving around but explaining a shitty fake lifehack or something.
I hate it all.
You guys are signing in?
Not in my htpc.
I’m not defending yt, but I am curious to know how specifically this isn’t mostly an overreaction if possible
Looks wonderful to me!
This is always what my YouTube homepage looks like because I only access it in ghostery browser, using a ghost tab by default (like incognito/private/inprivate, but because ghostery, also blocks tracking, cookies, etc.)
I typically completely close the browser between links (it’s my default link handling browser for Lemmy), so it gets reset frequently enough to have nothing on home if I actually navigate there.
They probably got tired of those videos where people see how quickly you can fall down an alt-right rabbit hole directly from the home page on a fresh account.
Yeah and you can get to the most popular short form stuff with one click but not long form. Its like. Well since we are trying to compete and take over this area here we will put some minimal effort forth.
The only way to use YouTube.
I can get this when logged in too! Just disable history! Its great.
Just came here to say this.
The suggested videos are terrible.
