YouTube will now show a blank homepage if you don’t have watch history on
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
YouTube’s homepage will now look very different if you have your watch history turned off. Instead of surfacing a page full of suggested videos, you’ll mostly see nothing.
The change is all part of a “new viewer experience” Google announced on Tuesday. If you’ve switched your YouTube watch history to off and “have no significant prior watch history,” you won’t see features that need a watch history to provide recommendations.
That means you’ll only see the search bar on the homepage, along with the Shorts, Subscriptions, and Library buttons. This could come as a welcome change for people who hate sifting through increasingly extreme thumbnails to find the play button, but it could also be a way to annoy users into turning the history…