YouTube, like any service that curates content for you, is heavy on delivering personalized content for you. This is how it keeps people on the platform. In order for the platform to do this, it needs to have access to your watch history. Well, if you disable your watch history, your YouTube home feed will look desolate.
Disabling your watch history can have its benefits. If a friend or child uses your account, and they have very different tastes, you can turn off your watch history temporarily. You don’t want their videos to throw off your recommendations.
Also, if you know that you’re going to search up a bunch of different videos that are off the beaten path for your recommendations, you can disable it. Say, if you have to do research for something specific or your friend recommends videos you know you’re not going to like.
Well, if you disable your YouTube watch history, your home feed will look different
Well, calling it a home screen is rather generous, as you won’t have a feed. YouTube announced this (via Android Central), and it will be rolling out gradually over the coming months. If you disable your watch history, your home screen will be stripped of all video. You won’t see results based on your previous video nor will you see a feed of the most popular videos.
Instead, all you’ll see is the search bar up top and the navigation panel on the left of the screen. You’ll still have access to everything in the side panel, however. So, you’ll still be able to browse the channels you’re subscribed to, check out your library, and go through the trending videos.
YouTube says that this is to streamline the experience for people who want to prefer to search for videos rather than look at recommendations. If you turned off your history on YouTube, don’t be surprised if you open YouTube to a blank screen.