Why would I have my watch history turned off? I assumed that Google knows what I watched whether or not I tell them to keep that info available for me.
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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Asklemmy
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Before youtube disabled recommendation for people with watch history turned off, having watch history turned off made it so your recommendations were only based on channels you are subscribed to and possibly videos you've liked, commented on, ...
There are some categories where I only ever search for the category, then watch a video, but never subscribe to any channel. Those videos were never recommended to me. Meanwhile on my girlfriends pc with watch history turned on, as soon as I watch a single video from a channel she's not subscribed to similar videos appear all over the front page.
I use subscriptions only for a long time and occasionally throw off dead weight there. No need for such a feature to be honest. I get most new interesting channel either by recommendations from youtubers i subscribed to or from random links like on lemmy. Which happens rarely, like, I subscribe to 5 new channels max per year, and remove about the same number each year.
After switching to Newpipe, yes a bit
Honest question:
what about newpipe is secured against google cracking down on ad evasion through ~~utilizing their api~~ (just read their FAQ, they don't use the api. Though still, I imagine google has other options to crack down on this type of use)? I imagine google is one bad day from breaking things like newpipe because people are circumventing their ads?
I think that they dont use the Api is the reason why it works. Maybe they use RSS too, Freetube does that as Fallback.
If Google implements WEI we are fucked. And they could somehow bind an ad server to the content, only it the server is used, content is loaded
As someone who routinely watches YT through Invidious and NewPipe, I haven't changed my habits.
Yeah, I catch myself sometimes to switch to NewPipe. But sometimes the videos just don't play. And sometimes it works fine
Was unusable for some weeks once, now fixed again and just works. Sometimes crashes but videos always play