YouTube is prompting users to enable watch history. Here’s the workaround.

Before AI became the buzzword of the 21st century, algorithms held the crown. And frankly, algorithmic recommendations have always been useless. YouTube, in particular, has long been criticized for serving up low-quality content — and, more troublingly, serving as a gateway for right-wing rabbis.

The best solution has always been simple: pause your YouTube viewing history. Without running it, your recommendations come from your likes, saved videos, and subscriptions — not from that one iceberg video you clicked on at 2 a.m. that suddenly convinced the algorithm you wanted an endless stream of “SJW-owned” compilations.

However, this recovery appears to be breaking down. Last week, a wave of YouTube users reported that with watch history on hold, the platform had turned off homepage recommendations entirely – replacing their feed with a prompt to re-enable watch history so YouTube could “populate” it.

The issue is not universal. Users who have recently paused their history still see recommendations, presumably because YouTube has enough residual data to work with. The issue is most affecting users who have kept their viewing history turned off for years – a group that hasn’t had any issues until now. For the record, this author’s watch history has been paused without any problems since 2017 – until now, apparently.

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The change did not go well, with many people voicing their complaints on Reddit. The top comment on the Reddit thread said, “I’ve had my watch history turned off since 2013. Why is there a sudden need for this? Maliciously incompetent company.” Another commenter says, “Haven’t had a viewing history in 9 years. Now they’re forcing me to turn it on so they can recommend to me what they recommend on my PC, even though they said they can’t recommend anything because I don’t have a viewing history??? It makes no sense and it’s almost obvious.”

Although this is not the first time that YouTube has prompted users to enable tracking, some see this latest move as a more aggressive effort to harvest search history for ad targeting. There’s also a fair question to ask: Why did YouTube suddenly require watch history to generate homepage recommendations, when it had been doing without it for years?

Mashable contacted YouTube with questions about the change and did not receive a response by publishing time.

Users have already found the solution. Re-enable your viewing history, refresh the page, then immediately pause it again. Your homepage should come back in recommendations. To access the pause page again, go to Settings, click “View or change your Google account settings,” navigate to Data & Privacy, and toggle off YouTube History.