Comment by jstanley
3 days ago
Weirdly I've had history turned off for just over 10 years (I can tell from the date on the most recent entry), but my YouTube homepage shows me videos related to things I've watched recently anyway.
I just deleted the all-time history and now the homepage is blank as you say.
I don't think they're really deleting your viewing history, else the homepage wouldn't have looked the way it did before I deleted "all time".
I have clicked "stop showing me Shorts" several times but they keep coming back, so I don't think the homepage works properly anyway.
EDIT:
On further consideration, I think what was happening with the homepage was that it was showing me videos related to channels that I subscribe to. (But not always videos from channels that I subscribe to).
However I don't see why they can't still do that even after I delete my all-time watch history? Not that I want them to.
But if you did want them to, you could probably turn watch history back on, click on any single video, and then turn it off again, and you'd probably have a home screen dictated by your subscriptions.
Or else they just ignore the setting and it's all a lie anyway.
> On further consideration, I think what was happening with the homepage was that it was showing me videos related to channels that I subscribe to
I think so too. I turned my history back on and watched part of one video in order to make sure I had the steps right for clearing and disabling history again. In that time, after having at least 1 video in the history, the front page was like what you said. The first recommendation made me want to click on it. It was called "why c++ is terrible" or something like that. Cleared/disabled again and back to normal (blank home page).
Internet companies will stop storing user data the same day AI companies stop training on copyrighted data.