How to turn off and delete your YouTube watch history


Many app homepages have gotten incredibly busy, filled with suggestions and ads, many based on your previous searches or stuff you’ve read / written / watched in the past. YouTube is certainly no exception — in fact, it’s one of the worst offenders — but recently, Google’s video service announced that users now have a choice. If you turn your watch history off and “have no significant prior watch history,” all that confusion will disappear, and your homepage will only show the search bar and the Shorts, Subscriptions, and Library buttons.

In other words, you’ll have a clean, simple, easy-on-the-eyes YouTube page.

The change in the home feed is being slowly rolled out over the next few months, but it doesn’t hurt to be ready for it. The process is nearly identical for both the web version and mobile versions of YouTube. Here’s how.

You can stop YouTube from saving your watch history with the “Turn off” button.

After all the pop-ups and warnings, you can finally turn off your YouTube watch history.

When your setting for saving your YouTube memory is finally off, you can delete all your old activity.

If you really want to clean up your YouTube page, you do need to delete that history — because otherwise, you’ll still be getting recommendations based on everything you watched before you hit that Pause button.

If you didn’t take advantage of the pop-up’s Delete old activity link, you can still go back and delete your history.

If you didn’t delete your old activity before, you can do it later on the YouTube History page.

There is a good chance that, despite all this, you would still not see much of a change in your recommendations. (I was certainly still seeing a lot of recommendations.) According to Google, the changes in YouTube are only being rolled out over the next few months, so it may be a while before you see a change in your YouTube homepage. But at least you’ll be ready.



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