In this guide, we will make you aware of the reason why you are unable to watch YouTube videos if the Watch History is turned off. A subset of users generally prefers to keep their watch history disabled. And the reason for the same could be aplenty. For instance, if you want to view an off-topic video only once but don’t want your feed to get populated with such videos, or you just want to get surprised by what YouTube has to offer, or, simply from the privacy point of view.
Up until this point, if you had your history disabled, then you might end up with random videos on your feed which might not be in sync with your interest as Google wasn’t able to gather enough data regarding the same. And truth be told, that is completely understandable and the users themselves understand these drawbacks before they proceed ahead to disable this feature. However, that might no longer be possible.
Why You Cannot View YouTube Videos if Watch History is off
There is a high possibility that you might no longer get any videos on your YouTube homepage if your watch history has been turned off. You will simply be greeted with the ‘Your Watch History is off’ message, across both the app as well as the website.
Initially, users attributed it to another one of those bugs which will soon be ironed out. However, turns out that it might actually be a feature being implemented by Google! According to TeamYouTube_Hazel on Reddit, here’s what is actually happening:
If your watch history is turned off and you don’t have significant prior watch history, features that rely on your watch history to provide video recommendations will be disabled, and that includes the home page.
Currently – for those who have watch history off and no significant prior watch history – YouTube serves recommendations based on limited signals like likes, dislikes and location.
This leads to less relevant recommendations, since it is based on limited understanding of your viewing preferences. Keeping this in mind, the team is working to make it more clear where we’re using watch history, and create a user experience that better corresponds with your YouTube watch history preferences.
So here’s what actually happening. For those users who have their watch history disabled, Google currently uses metrics such as your likes, dislikes, and comments across numerous videos and then shows you the video belonging to those domains. However, that data is not concrete enough and hence the videos that you are getting on your feed might not exactly be in sync with your actual requirement.
This has left the users highly infuriated because they were already aware of the repercussions that upon turning off history, they would be getting random videos on their homepage and that is completely fine for them [because at least they would still be getting videos on their feed. And truth be told, up until now, Google has done quite an impressive job in still showing us videos that are mostly in our interest using just the “limited metrics” that they have].
Moroever, some users are even attributing this change to the fact that Google just wants to scrap as much user data as possible [and the ability to disable history was proving to be a major roadblock]. With that said, we would love to hear your take on this matter. So make sure to drop in your valuable opinions in the comments section below. Dear Google, getting random videos on our feed is still way better than having an empty feed!
Slo Non
I have my history turned off because I want youtube to recommend other videos that I would not have known about, It’s called expanding your mind and youtube clearly doesn’t support that. It’s just another version of “our experts have deemed this as false information” so it’s removed. I can decide for myself I don’t need your help. Time to find the replacement for youtube, rumble looks promising.
M
Comments have to be moderated?
Sadique Hassan
Yup, unfortunately, they needs to be.
HangLibs
ONLY IDIOTS PAY FOR ANYTHING YOUTUBE OFFERS.
Warp Nine
Google, GO F*** YOURSELF UP THE A** WITH A HOT IRON FIRE POKER! You have dozens of subscribed channels and thousands of likes. For NEARLY 2 DECADES, this has been MORE THAN ENOUGH info to populate the home screen with relevent videos. GOOGLE == C*A and they want to coerce people into consenting to data harvesting, to identify dissenters and isolate, censor, and gaslight independent thinkers.
number9ark
This is fine Google sucks anyway ,I don’t watch but 1 channel anyway so long YouTube .