It's pretty obvious they're only doing this to try to push people who like the recommendations to create an account. But can't people just create throwaway accounts to temporarily relieve their recommendation fix?

Their recommendations are useless anyway. I don't want to see 200 rock hard abs videos just because I watched a clip of Roseanne doing sit-ups.

I stopped letting YouTube save my watch history years ago because their suggestion algorithm became too intrusive: watch a quick cooking tutorial, get nothing be cooking channels, look up the proper way to use a toggle bolt, YouTube wants to teach me how to re-shingle a roof. It was out of control.

First, they took away my home screen, because they claimed they couldn't reccomend videos without my watch history (even though they'd done it for years). Then they took away the shorts tab, because they said they couldn't reccomend shorts without my watch history (even though they'd done it for months). So now I just have my subscriptions, a curated list of things I actually want to watch. They've punished me with the product I wanted this whole time.

deleted by creator

Not a Bug.

Fantastic news.

This is more of a feature than a problem IMO.

Most services (like meta/Facebook/Instagram/anything owned by zuck', the service formerly known as Twitter....) are going to a model of: you need an account to even see anything posted publicly.

Not just extremely limited information like LinkedIn, like, instant redirect to "you need to be logged in to see this" or simply a login page.

At least you can still find something you want to see, and go and watch it... With ads and everything, sure, but the information is there and accessible.

they also dont recommend anything on your homepage when you're signed in if you don't have your watch history turned on (as if they're not tracking it anyway)

lol, who cares

YouTube definitely not bullying users into staying signed it so that Google can aggregate more data about you /s

will this affect invidious/piped?

Meh. For all the YT I consume, I haven't visited the site in years. yt-dlp, sponsor block, invidious, and newpipe keep me far away, while still having all my subs stored in a json file. Simple, easy, no algo suggestions, just organic heard about them from word of mouth sub on an alternative platform. No ads, no sponsor or patreon mentions, no like, no subscribe. Is bliss.

EDIT: Typo fix and slight rewording.

You search for one thing and it starts showing recommendations.

I fail to see how this is a bad thing. Youtube's old default homepage would show scam and content mill recommendations.

As with what others are saying here, pulling out algo nonsense is good, however I do worry that it slowly devolves into something similar to what's happening with Twitter where you can barely look at anything without being pushed to login. It's unusable unless you have an account. Websites shouldn't operate like that.

I noticed this a few days ago or so and I was delighted by it. I never sign in to YouTube and hated the garbage recommendations on the homepage.

Service to humanity.