Why is YouTube doing this now?

[red-striped-zebra]

So back in the good, old days of YT--a week ago, to be precise--it opened with a homepage splashing with a variety of videos for non-logged lurkers, directed to whatever country I had set the VPN to. A convenient mask. I could of course, navigate from there to whatever video I wanted.

As of now, I am getting this on both, Firefox and Brave:

Clicking on the red button merely refreshes the page. I don't know if its an OS update (which happened a couple of days ago on my system) or site-wide decision by YT to gatekeep content from users without browser history that triggered this move. Anyone else getting this message?

[ricardogroetaers]

So back in the good, old days of YT--a week ago, to be precise--it opened with a homepage splashing with a variety of videos .....
Clicking on the red button merely refreshes the page. I don't know if its an OS update ...... or site-wide decision by YT ......Anyone else getting this message?

Yes, I'm getting this "message".
Nothing to do with the operating system.

In my opinion, it's better this way.
Instead of showing a bunch of videos that the user hasn't asked for and doesn't want to see, now the user searches for the videos they want.
I don't think it's fair to show several videos without the user asking, which would only prioritize certain channels over others.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Curious. I just went to Youtube and got the usual load of of selections.

I prefer the way Youtube has been doing it since I see something from time to time that interests me that I wouldn't have known to search for. If a selection is of no interest to me (i.e. the majority of them), I just ignore it. I still can do a search if I'm looking for something more specific although I'll usually try on Freetube first.

Youtube does a much better job of finding videos that I might want to watch than FreeTube, which is what I use for subscribing to channels. I know its because Youtube has spied on what I watch but that's how Youtube knows what to offer me (what Youtube can collect on me is limited since I don't have an account with them). Freetube's surfing selections are completely random, resulting in what I consider to be mostly garbage.

[Hoser Rob]

I was getting that page with the search for videos option and I thought it was better too. Then the last time it was like before. Dang.

[AZgl1800]

I only see the Selections that I am subscribed to.

I keep getting a request to "join" a channel, but I dismiss that and go on.
I do send a few $$ on Patreon to a couple of channels that I really enjoy,
but being retired keeps the budget pretty low.

[Schultz]

I just tried it and also got this new thing. I'm not concerned about it anyway because I use Invidious.

[ajgreeny]

I am not seeing this "new" page either.
I still get a selection of many videos of musicians I have watched in the past, not the same videos but different songs etc etc, along with videos about subjects that I have viewed in the past.
I don't think I have ever subscribed to any channel on youtube and most of what I wish yto view comes from using a search-engine.
This is just the way I like it!