From what I understand, they're removing all recommendations from the home page if you have watch history turned off, likely because they can't give you any decent recommendations without data to recommend from. All you'd see is the search bar.

Personally, I think this is a great change. Default YT home screen has some of the worst recommendations I've ever seen, and if I'm telling them not to track my watch history, I probably don't want to see whatever content they're promoting to the average user either.

[–] Catweazle@social.vivaldi.net 1 points 1 year ago

@TehPers @faintedheart,which is a pity that there is no real alternative to YT. Of course there are other similar services, PeerTube, Odisee, etc. but none have anywhere near as much content. The only possibilities to avoid it is to use a front-end, CloudTube, some Invidious fork, Piped or a desktop-client like FreeTube, also possible to search for the videos with Andisearch and view them sandboxed in the search results. But this fails with some videos with extra YT protection.