I have had YouTube watch history off for years now, and the platform’s new attempt to get people to turn it back on by blanking out the homescreen is... well, it’s wonderful. Honestly more platforms should blank out recommendations on the homescreen and just let you search for things. Thanks, YouTube! (We have a how-to if you want to get this enabled for yourself, of course.)
College football conferences: super confusing, ultimately made up, and surprisingly important to the future of entertainment. Oh, and if you haven’t seen The YouTube Effect yet, this podcast will still make total sense, but you should add it to your watch list for sure.
For no reason other than I immediately thought of it when Planet of the Bass landed, I implore you to watch (or re-watch) Elektronik Supersonik by Santo Cilauro (AKA Zlad), a YouTube classic.
But I won’t make you watch the original 17-year-old upload — I mean, you can if you want — instead, I present it here in crispy HD.
Bill Hammack, AKA The Engineer Guy, explains why he calls this Nerf three-dart blaster’s cascading air mechanism “the epitome of good engineering” in this video on TikTok and YouTube.
It’s an old video, but watching his explanation of how the blaster’s series of valves trigger just one barrel at a time — and how to defeat its design to fire more than one dart — is immensely satisfying.
The crackdown is coming. Search Engine Land spotted the latest test, which tells users to unblock ads or they’ll be blocked from watching any videos. A previous test showed a warning saying people could watch three videos before being blocked.
YouTube spokesperson Oluwa Falodun previously told us:
We take disabling playback very seriously, and will only disable playback if viewers ignore repeated requests to allow ads on YouTube.
[Search Engine Land]
It’s likely that your YouTube home page has become pretty crowded with so many recommendations, ads, and other elements that you can hardly find anything. Well, now there’s a solution. If you’re willing to pause your current watch history and delete your past history, you might eventually end up with a nice, clean, even bare YouTube home page. Here’s how.
