YouTube rolls out big changes to its desktop homepage

YouTube is launching some major changes to its desktop homepage today.

The biggest change is literally making everything bigger. YouTube is removing a few rows of content to bring larger, more visually pleasing thumbnails to the website’s frontpage. The video previews, which you see when you hover over a thumbnail before clicking it, will also be higher quality.

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In addition, video titles will run longer, leaving less of a possibility that the title will be cut off before you can read what it is exactly you’re clicking on. YouTube is also adding the channel’s icon next to each video on the homepage, making it even clearer to users who exactly is behind each video.

With larger thumbnails, YouTube centers video recommendations and even extends the number of rows of recommended videos. YouTube is also finally rolling out a way for desktop users to remove suggestions from certain channels.

YouTube’s recommendation engine has a long, troubled history of promoting conspiratorial, age inappropriate, and extremist content. The ability to curate what channel recommendations appear on a user's homepage might be the most important new feature in this update.

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Users simply need to click the “three-dot menu” that appears under each thumbnail, then pick “Don’t recommend channel.” YouTube says you can still find videos from this channel in search, on the channel page, and if it trends, but at least the platform won’t specifically promote it to you. The company also launched a similar feature on its mobile platform earlier this year.

The video giant is also rolling out an easy way to pick what clips users want to watch next by simply hovering over a thumbnail and adding the video to their queue. This can be done while you're watching your current video and without interruption via an embed on the homepage.

YouTube says even more new homepage customization features, such as the ability to follow specific topics, are coming “soon.”