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Comment by gray_-_wolf | Hacker News Reader

Yes, except youtube history. Not sure the turning off actually does anything.

It might just be an EU thing, but turning off youtube history is incredibly effective at fixing "the algorithm".

It refuses to show me an algorithmic home page entirely, the only option is the chronological subscriptions feed. Perfect!

Video suggestions in the sidebar are always (mostly) relevant to the video I'm currently watching.

The problem is if you turn of history and even browse while not logged in, they absolutely still apply the algorithm to your "fresh" cookie based ID. This is how I use YT, and I have my browser set to delete on browser close. So I see the "fresh" YT, but withing 2 video watches, the algo is already making itself visible

Again, might be an EU thing, but even my logged-out youtube sessions seem completely un-personalised (I likewise use sites in fresh sessions by default).

Opening youtube.com in a fresh, logged-out browser session gives me a blank home page, with this dialog:

> Your YouTube history is off

> You can turn on watch and search history at any time to get the latest videos tailored to you.

> To update your selection, turn on YouTube History and confirm your settings to accept the use of cookies and data

Can't you just go to the subscriptions page instead of the home page? That seems like such a trivial complaint. You can even bookmark it if you don't want an extra click.

It wasn't a complaint! I would rather they made subscriptions the default, but like you say, I navigate directly to the page I want so I'm unbothered.

I do the same thing, but I find that youtube history is very unreliable when you go back more than a year or two and the UI / tools for digging through it are beyond terrible

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