In order to get recommendations on your homepage you need to enable your Youtube history in order for videos to be "tailored for you". This is complete BS, as recommendations were perfectly fine before, and I have never had history enabled. This is just a stunt to get people to give their personal data to google. Now I know google has always been bad but this is what really gave me the wake up call, the final straw if you will.
This has prompted me to look for an alternative, specifically an open source alternative. Unfortunately, there are no suitable candidates to my knowledge. However, there is a small, open source alternative which is federated (similarly to Lemmy) called PeerTube. I believe with enough users it could potentially become a viable alternative. Please consider reading more about it. I have not joined yet but I will research more tomorrow. Thanks for hearing me out, just wanted to spread awareness.
If Google doesn't keep your watch history then how it can make recommendations? It seems like people who don't want Google to keep the watch history are probably also people who don't want Google to feed them videos algorithmically.
Also: Do you think doing this really keeps Google from keeping track of what you watched? I bet they keep all that history already.
It's still a good idea. Here's why: They are legally bound to it, thanks to EU laws, and if they still do it they could get into a world of shit. So they are really careful about what they are doing with that data. And that's a small W in my back. Otherwise I could get money in court. And I do like money too.
This is exactly the reason why I turned off my history. I go to my subscriptions panel anyway.
Pretty sure they could rig something up from subscriptions. I dunno, maybe a chronological subscription feed??
But why would they when they could strongarm you into enabling watch history.
Precisely.
Exactly! OP should welcome this change if anything. It would seem that so far Google has kept a watch history no matter if enabled (visible) or not to feed it's recommendation algorithm. Now you have the choice to disable it.
It already did this, I'm guessing based on subscriptions or something, but as others have mentioned they probably have my history anyway. It's honestly less about the fact that I can't get recommendations and more about the fact that they are trying to force people to turn on history. But tbh even without this I am happy to have found a federated version similar to Lemmy.