7 ms·
YouTube using antipattern to force people enable history
If your history is off Youtube's landing page will show no videos and will "encourage" you to enable the history.
Any ideas why are they using this trick?
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoBecause the feature doesn't work without it?
- rany_ 3y agoA month ago it didn't work that way. You used to be able to disable watch history and have it base recommendations on your subscriptions, liked/disliked content, etc.
- piotrke 3y agoI was waiting for this feature for years! I often go to youtube to find explaination to different things, but usually I ended up watching 10 other very interesting videos and even sometimes forgetting what for I came in the first place! It's either a weak will of mine or great algorithms serving what I would love to watch. Now it's an easy game: only what I came for and no distractions! Best move ever, YT!
- addisonl 3y agoI love and share this view—whenever a website uses dark patterns like this to try and get me to do something I just close the website and thank them for helping me reduce my screen time!
- Kibae 3y agoThe Unhook extension for Chrome [0] and Firefox [1] is a great way to keep yourself from falling into the YouTube blackhole. [0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-youtube-rec/khncfooichmfjbepaaaebmommgaepoid https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-yout... [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recommended-videos/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...
- nicbou 3y agoIt's unbelievable how effective this extension has been for me. YouTube has become something I catch up with, just like RSS.
- simonsarris 3y ago> and even sometimes forgetting what for I came in the first place! I do that too but thankfully I have history enabled so I just check there.
- blondin 3y agoindeed! i only see subscriptions and videos i care about now. and through my subscriptions, i discover videos related to what i care about. they should do away with the home page all together for people who have watch history turned off. best move ever!
- bromuro 3y agoIt’s true! Finally no recommendations, no pushed subscriptions, no tricks to subconsciously force me to keep watching. Now if only they could do the same in the video pages.
- sp332 3y agoWhat videos would they recommend to you anyway?
- CharlesW 3y agoThey could show what's popular across the platform, what's new and/or popular in your subscriptions, etc.
- grotorea 3y agoDo users here actually want youtube to show you "what's popular across the platform" i.e. the default youtube homepage?
- bravetraveler 3y agoI do, but on closer thought, perhaps I shouldn't It's good in the "I just want to peruse and find something unusual/interesting" sense If nothing else, absently happening across what's new or popular It's a massive time sink and probably best spent elsewhere
- dawnerd 3y agoThe same ones they used to? They can surface up videos from channels you’re subbed to that you haven’t watched. They could show you videos you started to watch like netflix does. They could show next up for playlists. Lots of options if they actually cared about their product and not just getting you into an algorithm loop
- ilkke 3y agoMysteriously I'm also seeing videos I already watched(!) and what I can only imagine is videos that someone paid to promote and Google doesn't care I'm not remotely the target audience
- duskwuff 3y ago> They can surface up videos from channels you’re subbed to that you haven’t watched. They could show you videos you started to watch like netflix does. All of those things depend on tracking your viewing history.
- WeylandYutani 3y agoI use revanced on my phone I don't even know what YouTube is supposed to look like.
- JimtheCoder 3y agoI'm not sure it's a trick. It's just a thing IMO.
- dawnerd 3y agoIt’s weird since their homepage already showed suggested videos based on who you subscribed to. Not sure why they’d kill their metrics over watch history that you know they totally track anyways.
- 8note 3y agoMy main guess is that it uses a separate data pipeline to make those suggestions, and that that data pipeline is not cost effective. Thus, they simplified it down to one recommendation tool, that uses history in it
- CharlesW 3y agoBut it worked fine with or without history enabled previously, and continues to work in other clients (like the Xbox client). Whether or not you believe it was malevolent, this was a user experience choice.
- jamesdwilson 3y agoCorrection: If your display of the videos from your history is off. I am sure they are still logging them.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoI'm not so sure. I got called out on this theory. It would violate GDPR and stuff. Most articles I can find seem convinced that if you disable YouTube history, it's disabled and not logged. If you delete it, it's deleted and it's gone. I suppose Google could secretly or surreptitiously log it and save it, but nobody seems able to prove that. There are certainly a lot of other trails left. Any link, dislike, or comment you leave is a historical marker. Every URL you visit goes into your browser history, so is that disabled too? All your DNS queries, though these won't pinpoint individual videos.
- sublinear 3y agoWhy would you ever even log into youtube?!
- zoklet-enjoyer 3y agoMany reasons. Subscriptions, saved videos, upload videos
- hggh 3y agoYou can use RSS/Atom instead of subscribe
- t-writescode 3y agoYouTube Premium. No ads.
- hggh 3y agoTorrent. Ad blockers.
- zoklet-enjoyer 3y agoThis is fine. Just makes me actually watch the stuff I subscribed too
- Sloppy 3y agoIf you are not logged in to YouTube you get generic crappy recommendations, why not this for someone without history turned on? I use the YouTube recommender extensively and understand the issues about getting increasing crap in recs. I really have no interest in fake science crap or conspiracy theory crap! So I aggressively "do not like" videos or channels that turn up with this junk. I'm not sure I could use YouTube without the recommender and would not use it if I got constant crap. The "do not like" tells the recommender not to send that particular type of crap and though more crap will inevitably drift in, the result is a pretty useful feature.
- fckthisguy 3y agoThat's pretty much what's been happening for the last decade. I turned off search history an age ago and I've had a slightly tailored (based on subscriptions) but mostly generic home page since them. It's not a cas where they can't. They decide on this course of action. On a related note, they already show an (almost) totally generic feed for Shorts. If you turn search history off, you see a lot of Andrew Tate, anti-trans, and "masculinity is under attack" messaging. It's disgusting to think that's what Google are showing to new sign users.
- jsnell 3y agoDupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37053817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37053817
- rawling 3y agoTell HN: YouTube requires watch history on for home screen https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37158674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37158674 Tell HN: YouTube is not showing home recommendations when watch history is off https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37157835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37157835 YouTube Will Display a Blank Home Feed If Your Watch History Is Turned Off https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37151135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37151135 YouTube will stop showing videos on the homepage if your watch history is off https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37066718 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37066718 YouTube no longer suggests videos if your ‘watch history’ is turned off https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37058189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37058189 YouTube will stop showing videos on the homepage if your watch history is off https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37054233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37054233 YouTube will now show a blank homepage if you don’t have watch history on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37053817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37053817 Ash HN: YouTube home page blank when history is off https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36963702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36963702
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoSick of this. Like, OP, you're either paying attn or search or something. Day after day repeated posts
- Astronaut3315 3y agoI kind of like it this way. It’ll help me focus on watching what I came for and nothing more. I’m absolutely going to leave history off.
- tortoise_in 3y agoStill they didn't got me lol
- agubelu 3y agoI don't really care since I immediately switch to the subscriptions tab as soon as I open the app, and my bookmark on my desktop browser is set to subscriptions too. Just another anti-user annoyance, like having to click 3 different menus to hand-pick a specific video quality on the app and having it not stored as your preference. Thankfully it's all fixed by Revanced. By the way, a bug that I found a few minutes ago on YT for TV: if you're watching a video with subs on (manual subs, not autogenerated) and an ad rolls in, it switch to automatic subtitles for the ad, and then doesn't switch back when the ad is over.
- karaterobot 3y agoI use FreeTube now, but when I used to go to Youtube, I used a plugin which was very bluntly titled Replace Youtube's Home with Subscriptions, which I recommend to all. The Youtube home page is a clear example of putting growth above user preference, and one of those reasons why everybody uses YT, but few people really ... like it.
- TrianguloY 3y agoYou can long tap the app icon (depends on the launcher) to open the app shortcuts. One of them is to open the subscriptions tab. You can long tap + drag to move it to your desktop (again, depends on the launcher) so this way you can open YouTube directly to the subscriptions!
- agubelu 3y agoI didn't know this, thanks!
- montag 3y agoSeems pretty benign as far as dark patterns go.
- zb3 3y agoVery good move by YouTube, helps me avoid getting distracted and increases my overall happiness :)
- ulrashida 3y agoJokes on them: I'm very happy that slow loading and often useless display has been disabled on page load. It had a bad habit of recommending dozens of shows over five years old A QWLL. That option is staying off forever.
- blondin 3y agothe hilarious thing is that this pattern is orthogonal to their "mini player" feature which is supposed to keep your video playing while you are browsing. now you have a "mini player" on an almost blank page.
- ro_bit 3y agoA half decent workaround is to enable watch history, watch one video, and then pause watch history again without clearing the video. For some reason this shows recommendations again
- cobertos 3y agoAnd here I am thinking "I can disable the YouTube homepage by disabling history?? Sign me the fuck up!"
- BasedAnon 3y agoi thought the exact same thing. I've had the the watch history disabled for tiiiime and today i saw that i have no homepage and i went from 'this is strange' to 'wow i feel much better navigating youtube and i'm not feeling very angered or disappointed or distracted'
- wruza 3y agowow i feel much better navigating youtube How do you navigate it? Does search start working once history is gone?
- cobertos 3y agoI've found searching in an app like NewPipe to be loads better than searching on anything YouTube can create a fingerprint for (browser, in YT app). I get a lot of very helpful, low view count videos in DIY, programming, and research of old tech things.
- BasedAnon 3y agoSearch has always worked for me, but I mean the experience of going onto YouTube and then deciding what I want to watch. Instead of seeing a bunch of random stuff I don't care about I can just go directly to my subscription page without any noise.
- demarq 3y agoThis sucks for smaller YouTubers. Discovery is everything.
- simonbutt 3y agoOnce in a while HN provides absolute gems. Would never have known about this anti procrastination feature otherwise!
- verytrivial 3y agoI won't be enabling it. And frankly I'm glad for one less wolf at the door of my attention.
- t-writescode 3y agoI was trying to find a way to provide feedback on this issue; but, I'm supposed to go to their YouTube forums to handle it, and the top voted post on those forums is how they've disabled posting on the forums for several months.
- atulvi 3y agodid you mean Dark Pattern?
- qtETlwyxkD 3y agoUse NewPipe, a massively better interface with features you actually want to use: https://newpipe.net https://newpipe.net
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoTell HN:
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago[dupe]
- naikrovek 3y agoI don't think openly asking you to enable history is a dark pattern, at all. that doesn't matter, though. so, seems to me that what they're doing is encouraging users to watch more videos, so Google can serve more ads, and thus increase revenue. Surely they understand that this has to end at some point, right? They keep taking steps to get users to watch more, so they can serve more ads, "earning" more money from advertisers. Users will continue to resist changes like this, which will encourage Google to get more aggressive about getting people to "play along" which will push more users away, and so on. at some point, SURELY, Google will understand that previous growth rates are impossible to sustain, right? and that this is a normal thing when you have an entire market completely and totally dominated across all demographics? Right? Like, how far are they going to go? until every last video on the Internet is served by them? until everyone either pays for YT Premium or watches 6 ads every 90 seconds? They understand that they are just creating a dystopia so that people click ads, right? They obviously know, because they measure the performance of the company by how many people watch ads, click on ads, and pay for YT Premium. So they're aware that they're creating something unsustainable and they're doing it anyway? for a good evaluation on their performance review? what the fuck? "Successfully wore down enough people so they stopped blocking ads and watched more videos served with ads, wasting literally millions of person-hours per year, and lowering the quality of life for those users so that value can be extracted from their activities more completely, all for the glory of Google quarterly reports." at this point, if you work for any company that puts ads in front of people's eyes, please sit down for a minute and think about how you'll feel after retirement when you recount how you spent your gift of time on Earth. Ask yourself if you are proud of what you have done in exchange for the meager raises you have earned. Is that the best way you could have spent your time? Really? Think about what you've done when you want to watch something on television or in the theater, or even in a book, and you get annoyed by ads which you know were put there solely to "capture value from users." think about how enjoyable it is for you to be a user who is having a penny's worth of value extracted, and ask yourself if 20 minutes of your life per hour of television time is worth that penny you provided someone.
- snapplebobapple 3y agoIts very rare that anyone should consume youtube directly. RSS feeds of subscribed channels are the way to go, then you direct link to videos you want and it makes it easy to switch to an alternate provider if youtube breaks the channel. Its dead simple to set this up with freshrss, for example.
- Etrnl_President 3y agoI uninstalled the app, browse youtube anonymously, and periodically clear cookies. My browser has all the history I need.
- noonething 3y agoBest thing youtube did. I don't get pulled in any direction mentally.
- infinitedata 3y agoI wish you could disable Shorts! Most stupid thing ever.
- bravetraveler 3y agoThey're pretty easy to filter on desktop with uBlock Origin I've been playing a game of cat and mouse, it's disgusting how much they're pushed IMO Every couple weeks I have to change the filter