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YouTube Oddities

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Re: YouTube Oddities

#111

Post by Narushia »

015a wrote: post #75

My favorite YouTube oddity: If you hunt over the CSS the site downloads on, IIRC, every page; you'll eventually come across this selector: ytd-watch-metadata[video-id=QrGrOK8oZG8] h1.ytd-watch-metadata { color:#e6d140; font-family:Georgia,serif; font-size:250%; font-variant:small-caps; font-weight:normal; transform:skew(-5deg,0deg); text-shadow:1px 1px #000,1px 1px .1px #000 } A selector that appears to be referencin…

Not exactly the same, but back when Gangnam Style passed 1 billion views, they added a small looping animation besides the video title (it was PSY doing the dance). Not sure how long it was there, certainly not anymore.

Edit: I found a video of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7Di3sxO8zw

Re: YouTube Oddities

#112

Post by josefx »

marcellus23 wrote: post #47
johnnymorgan wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you never see content that has no connection to your viewing habits? It happens all the time and I got hit with the warts and pimples a few months back, just a counter point, I watch YT daily. It's mostly shorts where you will see it

My recommendations are generally very relevant to the kind of stuff I've been watching and like to watch. I've never seen something as totally out-of-left-field as pimple popping -- even in shorts. I wonder what's causing this behavior to be so different for different users? I am very liberal with the thumbs-down button on anything I don't like. I'm also using YouTube premium, although I doubt that would significantl…

Youtube can crawl its way into irrelevancy if you leave it running unsupervised for too long. I had autoplay try to make me listen to Disney music for a while after letting it run over night and the recommendations can stick around for ages after that. Not sure how it got there, not my usual taste in music.

Re: YouTube Oddities

#113

Post by lupusreal »

crazygringo wrote: post #14
twisteriffic wrote: post #10

Least favourite behavior of YouTube these days is the mass of pimple popping and wart removal videos that show up near the top of search results for damn near anything. "Fluke 87v power on options"? Pimple popping. "Generator repair"? Wart removal. And it isn't just one, it's dozens of them, to the point where there might only be one or two relevant results and the rest are basically gore/grossout videos. It's still…

I think somebody watched a lot of pimple-popping videos while logged into your account. You might want to take a look at your viewing history: https://www.youtube.com/feed/history Because that's definitely not a default. I've never seen YouTube recommend one of those in my life.

That explaination doesn't hold water. I see the same kind of grossout videos occasionally surface in search results. I never engage with content anything like that. I don't use an account, but I do have a cookie set for personalized suggestions. This cookie is never more than a few months old. I don't share this device with anybody. I'm not getting recommendations from other people sharing my IP, all my video recommendations make sense for me except for these gross out videos. There isn't another trace of other people's interests, for instance zero sports content despite sports being extremely popular with the general population. Finally, several other people have reported this same sort of behavior from youtube.

Aside, I find it really disheartening how quickly people on this site of all sites are to conclude "I don't see that, so you're holding it wrong". The most likely explaination is these results are some experimental feature run amok. You should know that companies like Google run all kinds of AB tests on the unwitting public, so one person not seeing something should never be taken as proof that another person is imagining it! This kind of "I'm not seeing it so you must be doing something wrong" comment is effectively gas-lighting when it comes from people who work in or near the industry and should know better.

Re: YouTube Oddities

#114

Post by pests »

Can someone tell me how @Seed has so many subs but no videos and odd content / comments?

Buying / deleting videos / etc?

He has people in his comments accusing him of commenting on their private videos / videos in private playlists.

Re: YouTube Oddities

#115

Post by lupusreal »

mathieuh wrote: post #104
twisteriffic wrote: post #10

Least favourite behavior of YouTube these days is the mass of pimple popping and wart removal videos that show up near the top of search results for damn near anything. "Fluke 87v power on options"? Pimple popping. "Generator repair"? Wart removal. And it isn't just one, it's dozens of them, to the point where there might only be one or two relevant results and the rest are basically gore/grossout videos. It's still…

It keeps recommending me far-right political videos for some reason. I think it's because I like watching Forgotten Weapons and InRangeTV, even though Forgotten Weapons has essentially zero politics in it and InRangeTV is run by a left-libertarian. Even after doing the "never recommend me this channel" thing it keeps recommending me this Jordan Peterson-type shit about "leftist woke idiots getting owned". Plus, no ma…

My guess is InRange is to blame in your case. In my experience, youtube has an "engages in political content" bucket they can put people in that doesn't discriminate between the flavor of politics; watch any sort of political content and it will start recommending any sort in turn, even political content from viewpoints you cannot stand and would never watch. I guess a lot of people rage-watch political content they dislike, so this sort of category makes practical sense for youtube.

This happened to me a few times. Thankfully, clearing cookies is an easy fix for me since I don't use an account; people who do may have to spend some time sanitizing their view history. I now avoid all content that has even a whiff of content that might be automatically classified as political advocacy. I still watch occasional FW videos, although not the ones where I think he'll discuss firearm laws, and InRange is out because Karl too frequently discusses the law and political landscape w.r.t. online privacy/etc. Since reaching the above conclusion and making these changes, my front page has been clear of anything with even a suggestion of partisan politics. It's all machine and mechanism videos, the way I like it.

(Except for the occasional grossout pimple video in the search results, but that's another story...)

Re: YouTube Oddities

#117

Post by cedilla »

pests wrote: post #108
chch wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Less a need, more an easter egg. The short itself is based on the stereotypical American family sitcom;s opening credits, which would tend to show a character doing something 'representative' of their character, while showing the actor's name on screen that played that character. Without too much spoilers for the video itself, the names popping up is a pretty key aspect of the video itself. It gained a pretty good fo…

There is another video, that I can't find right now, where YouTube has paused the views in the <100s. It's part of the joke or title but I always thought that was neat too. Not sure if it was just cosmetic or they did something in the backend.

You probably think of Numberphile explanation of why YouTube videos (used to) stay at 301 views for a while - leading to lots of confusion when the site showed 301 views with 5728 comments and 37592 likes.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=oIkhgagvrjI

Re: YouTube Oddities

#118

Post by NolF »

p1necone wrote: post #30
Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #2

Okay just in case someone who knows reads this. Why doesn’t Youtube Premium background play work with members-only videos? Became a member of a channel with spoken content and can’t even lock my phone when playing a member’s only video. Posts and complaints on this go back years, with zero explanation from Youtube as to why this is, if it’s intentional or a bug, etc.

Youtube background play being a paid feature is so brazen. Google are disabling a basic UX feature in their OS and then letting you pay for it in one app that they control.

My understanding was that ads pay to be viewed, they can't get paid if you have it on background play and not watching. So they made it a premium feature and get paid by the subscription.

Re: YouTube Oddities

#119

Post by optymizer »

sosodev wrote: post #27
Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #2

Okay just in case someone who knows reads this. Why doesn’t Youtube Premium background play work with members-only videos? Became a member of a channel with spoken content and can’t even lock my phone when playing a member’s only video. Posts and complaints on this go back years, with zero explanation from Youtube as to why this is, if it’s intentional or a bug, etc.

YouTube premium is ridiculously janky for the price. I’ve gotten ads in weird, new parts of the app multiple times as they’re experimenting with new strategies. Like while scrolling shorts for example.

I didnt see ads on my main account, but a few times they played ads on my kids profiles on Chromecast, which was puzzling.

Re: YouTube Oddities

#120

Post by samlinnfer »

twisteriffic wrote: post #10

Least favourite behavior of YouTube these days is the mass of pimple popping and wart removal videos that show up near the top of search results for damn near anything. "Fluke 87v power on options"? Pimple popping. "Generator repair"? Wart removal. And it isn't just one, it's dozens of them, to the point where there might only be one or two relevant results and the rest are basically gore/grossout videos. It's still…

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