I Deleted More Than a Decade of YouTube Watch HistoryAnd It's Awesome

Key Takeaways

Deleting my YouTube Watch History improved my feed drastically, focusing on subscriptions and recent views.
Subscribing to channels did not work as expected, leading to irrelevant recommendations.
Curation of extensive watch history is impractical, making a fresh start beneficial for tailored content.

I joined YouTube just short of thirteen years ago, and for twelve of those years I never so much as touched my Watch History. Then I nuked it all from orbit, just to be sure—and it's the best quality of life thing I've done for myself since getting a good mattress.

The Sad Death of My YouTube Feed

At some point before I pulled the trigger, I started to notice a decline in the quality of the videos YouTube suggested to me. After several revamps under the hood, I just wasn't seeing the interesting stuff I used to. People were still making it. If I took the extra step to go looking for the sorts of videos I wanted, I'd find them in no time. So why wasn't YouTube suggesting the right videos to me?

The Subscriptions: They Do Nothing

What's worse, is that subscribing to a channel doesn't seem to work the way it used to. Over these many years, I have subscribed to a huge number of great channels, and everything those channels release would be of interest to me. However, not only was I missing new videos from channels I wanted to watch, I was getting recommendations from channels I did not subscribe to and would not subscribe to.

Consequently, when I opened my YouTube app there was basically nothing on the front page that I wanted to watch. Nothing that I should be watching either for work or leisure. YouTube did introduce the concept of "ringing the bell" on channels where you want to be notified of every single release, but I don't want all 100 of my subscribed channels to send notifications to my inbox every time they release a video. So that solved nothing.

This is when it occurred to me that my watch history might no longer be compatible with whatever YouTube's latest algorithm was trying to do. After all, I'm not the same person I was thirteen years ago. I don't watch the exact same content I do now as I did in my early 20s. Since YouTube bases its recommendations on your past behavior, maybe it's my past behavior that's now catching up with me and ruining the experience.

I Can’t Curate All That HIstory

It should be said that I did not have to delete all of my watch history in order to improve my recommendations. You can go through your history manually and remove only what you don't want taken into account. However, as we've established, in my case, the sheer amount of history was massive. There's no way that I could curate that much, and it would be an enormous time investment.

Maybe someone who's only been on YouTube for less than a year could realistically curate their watch history if they don't watch that much, but I think most people just won't have a practical way to do it. Which is why I just decided to delete it all.

The Good and Bad of Nuking My Watch History

After taking the plunge, there was an immediate and dramatic improvement in the YouTube feed. Now YouTube only has my subscriptions and the latest watch history to go on. So, as I watch new videos that reflect what I want to watch, the better my feed has become.

I never really cared about Watch History as a way to find videos I've watched before, other than perhaps the ones I watched the day before, so the main negative here is that now YouTube is recommending videos to me that I have already seen. On the one hand, this is a good sign, because for the most part, these are videos that I actually liked. So if YouTube is recommending them again, I'm on the right track. On the other hand, it can be a little annoying to start up a video only to realize I've already seen it years ago. Though, sometimes I do just watch them again!

The main golden opportunity this blank slate has provided me, is applying the gift of hindsight. When I watch videos now, it's with foreknowledge of how they will affect my future. So I take the time to like or dislike videos, and I even delete videos from my watch history immediately if they really aren't my cup of tea. A radical fresh start like this isn't for everyone, but if you've felt like YouTube just doesn't know you anymore, then this might be the right time to delete your YouTube Watch History.