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The company has tweaked this recommendations feature and starting now, if users have YouTube watch history off and have no significant prior watch history — features that require watch history to provide video recommendations will be disabled.
So some users may just see a black screen on their YouTube home feed and a pop-up saying, “Your watch history is off.””This means that starting today, your home feed may look a lot different: you’ll be able to see the search bar and the left-hand guide menu, with no feed of recommended videos, thus allowing you to more easily search, browse subscribed channels and explore Topic tabs instead,” the company said in a support page.
The ‘good’ and the ‘bad’
So one of the benefits of having YouTube watch history on is that it enables the platform to provide video recommendations users may be interested in. This pretty much helps most of the users to just watch what appears on the screens. They don’t have to always type and search for content and waste a few minutes scrolling through the videos.
If there’s a need, they can always search for a particular type of content. However, some prefer to clear and turn off YouTube watch history. Those users will have to type/ speak to search videos every time they come to the platform, which sometimes could prove to be a tedious task.
“We are launching this new experience to make it more clear which YouTube features rely on watch history to provide video recommendations and make it more streamlined for those of you who prefer to search rather than browse recommendations,” the company said.
YouTube said it is rolling these changes out slowly, over the next few months. Users can change their YouTube watch history settings at any time.