YouTube Wants You to Enable Watch History to Get Recommendations, but There’s a Workaround

If you have your YouTube watch history disabled and you are now being prompted to turn it on if you want to receive recommendations, you're not alone. Watch history on YouTube is used to generate personalized recommendations on the platform—when it's disabled, suggested videos and channels are instead pulled from your likes, saves, and subscriptions rather than from videos you've watched. While some YouTube users want to be able to see a list of what they've viewed, many have watch history turned off for privacy reasons or to keep junk out of their algorithm in favor of a more curated experience. Some Reddit users have recently reported that their recommendations have disappeared from the YouTube homepage, replaced with a prompt to enable their YouTube watch history.

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