Re:YouTube no longer suggests videos if your ‘watch history’...
by chii on Saturday August 19, 2023 @11:54PM
(#37195967)
> What's weird to me is once upon a time the home feed was your subscriptions feed.
it's not weird if you examine it from the point of view of user retention metrics.
A subscription recommendation runs out, since you have small number of subscriptions (compared to the whole of youtube). Google wants to keep you clicking, and watching the next video. Algorithmically recommending videos instead of your subscription means you now have effectively infinite list of videos to watch, keeping your eyeball youtube.
They eventually started trickling in suggestions based on watch history and today that's most of the feed.
I can see the argument that not having watch history means they shouldn't be building the per-user dataset to feed into the model to get the history based suggestions. Sure, but then... why not use the subscriptions, the information that users have provided you and what they thought that feature was for?