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YouTube Oddities

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Re: YouTube Oddities

#121

Post by a_gnostic »

chch wrote: post #82
nonethewiser wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is fascinating. Wonder why that video in particular (or any single video that in theory) would need its text style changed.

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…

It don't work [1].

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYgsVCfLhWg&wadsworth=1

Re: YouTube Oddities

#122

Post by huvarda »

PetitPrince wrote: post #6

> Roel Van de Paar, at this current time has 2,035,484 videos uploaded. > https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPF-oYb2-xN5FbCXy0167Gg What the hell. It doesn't seems to be autogenerated video.

I've come across that channel while looking for answers to programming problems and it's so annoying. He just rips stackoverflow questions/answers and puts a little intro at the beginning

Re: YouTube Oddities

#123

Post by sumtechguy »

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.

yt has this weird thing if you click on one vid. it will decide you want to see anything related to that one vid.

yt will also throw 'random' things into your feed.

Also I have seen just hovering over a video on desktop counting as 'viewed' in my history. So you may have inadvertently 'looked'.

Use the do not recommend feature. That seems to calm it down.

Re: YouTube Oddities

#124

Post by flenserboy »

roygbiv2 wrote: post #99
adra wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can see your YouTube watch history through the account settings. I've found the watch recommendations are VERY sensitive to oddball videos watched a long time ago. Through the same interface though, you should be able to seek out and delete watch history for garbage that may throw off your recommendations. It's mostly worked for me.

Watch history now include videos you've only hovered over. Very annoying since if you hover over something and then watch it later it doesn't start from the beginning, it starts from where it left off from the hover.

Interesting. I have autoplay turned off in my browser, & I don't get recommendations of the like you mention, which makes me think that that's enough to keep that "feature" from activating.

Re: YouTube Oddities

#125

Post by DiggyJohnson »

PetitPrince wrote: post #6

> Roel Van de Paar, at this current time has 2,035,484 videos uploaded. > https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPF-oYb2-xN5FbCXy0167Gg What the hell. It doesn't seems to be autogenerated video.

Interesting that YouTube seems unable to sort his videos my most popular - at least on my iOS app.

Re: YouTube Oddities

#126

Post by ToucanLoucan »

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…

I think part of that is just reactionary politics on both ends of the spectrum play really well in social media in general, which YouTube is (of course) slowly turning into because everything fucking is. Anywhere the attention economy is, there is always a market for loud, irritating people doing loud, irritating things because they attract audiences, both in the people who agree with them, and the people who think they're fucking jokes.

I honestly wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if in the near future we have sociologists who pin the catastrophic political divides we now experience down to, at least in part, the fact that so many massive institutions in our society at this particular moment are finding the absolute most ridiculous people and giving them the largest megaphone in the history of our species to scream into because it makes them money.

Re: YouTube Oddities

#127

Post by eimrine »

jabroni_salad wrote: post #24
crazygringo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> search results the real problem is that youtube has decided to just put normal recommendations on the search result page in the place where search results should go. I use the extension 'unhook' with the setting 'Hide Inapt Search Results' to remove that misfeature. this feature was presumably somebody's baby and I'd really like to read their writeup where they unironically exalt its virtues so I can try to gauge h…

> I'd really like to read their writeup where they unironically exalt its virtues

Increased engagement by putting content after search box.

Reduced search box to such the number that 99.7% searches still can accomplish successfully.

Significantly reduced DB load.

New incentive for the AI team to keep pacing its algo towards AI-only search.

Re: YouTube Oddities

#128

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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…

I mean I like easter eggs, but why not make it so that CSS is only downloaded on that page? Adding 286 bytes to every one of the billions of pageviews YT gets every day seems wasteful.

Re: YouTube Oddities

#129

Post by twisteriffic »

eimrine wrote: post #127
jabroni_salad wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> search results the real problem is that youtube has decided to just put normal recommendations on the search result page in the place where search results should go. I use the extension 'unhook' with the setting 'Hide Inapt Search Results' to remove that misfeature. this feature was presumably somebody's baby and I'd really like to read their writeup where they unironically exalt its virtues so I can try to gauge h…

> I'd really like to read their writeup where they unironically exalt its virtues Increased engagement by putting content after search box. Reduced search box to such the number that 99.7% searches still can accomplish successfully. Significantly reduced DB load. New incentive for the AI team to keep pacing its algo towards AI-only search.

> New incentive for the AI team to keep pacing its algo towards AI-only search

Please no... Facebook is already doing this in marketplace and it's beyond awful. Like "search for an oscilloscope and get a vibrator" level of awful.

Re: YouTube Oddities

#130

Post by xenophonf »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #128
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…

I mean I like easter eggs, but why not make it so that CSS is only downloaded on that page? Adding 286 bytes to every one of the billions of pageviews YT gets every day seems wasteful.

That would entail adding a branch instruction and risking a cache miss on every single video playback in order to save a couple hundred bytes in a data stream at least four orders of magnitude larger.
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