YouTube Oddities

https://github.com/mattwright324/youtube-metadata/wiki/YouTube-Oddities

by xk3 • 2 years ago

318 148 2 years ago

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.

pomian• 2 years ago

If you can, install an old version of Firefox, and that allows you continue playing the YouTube video, with screen off, etc. (For example 68 esr)

noisem4ker• 2 years ago

...or use an up-to-date version with this recommended extension:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/video-backgro...

...or use NewPipe instead:

https://newpipe.net/

(also available with SponsorBlock integration)

beeboobaa• 2 years ago

Or install the latest Firefox with https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-backgro... (also available on Android)

sosodev• 2 years ago

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.

optymizer• 2 years ago

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

p1necone• 2 years ago

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.

rezonant3• 2 years ago

This is somewhat true, and frustrates me to no end as someone who builds web video stuff. For what it's worth it's only somewhat true. If you exit the browser while video is playing, the video is paused. If you then go to the Media Notification that Chrome added for the video and hit play, it will continue playing in the background.

The same is true on iOS, but using the media center instead of the media notification, in which case it will work.

On Android native apps this isn't really true at all, but you should use a background service to handle playback to avoid getting killed by the OS on low memory situations. This does not work for YouTube on the web, because they simply use the web visibility API to stop you from resuming the video if you try, unless you have premium.

NolF• 2 years ago

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.

rezonant3• 2 years ago

Yes this is perplexing. I have asked YouTube reps point blank about this but have never received any useful answer. As far as I can tell, it seems to be because the members only stuff uses the same system as YouTube's paid video rentals/purchasing system. If you rent a video on YouTube (or if you own one) you'll note that the behavior is the exact same: it acts as if you don't pay for YouTube Premium.

My guess is that the original "YouTube Sponsors" feature (which is now "YouTube Memberships") was built on top of the video rental/purchase system and now it is too hairy / not worth it to fix it in the eyes of the YouTube product managers.

I really wish they'd fix it.

Suppafly7• 2 years ago

Man I don't do rentals but I'd be pissed if I did and background play didn't work considering how much I've paid for premium over the years.

troupo• 2 years ago

However, it is possible for 249 countries to appear in the allowed list. It's not clear why this happens as it is the same has having no restriction at all. It seems to occur most frequently with music videos, potentially they had actual blocks at one point and the only way it can be undone is to move everything to allowed?

Most likely this is the list sent by the rights holder.

bombcar• 2 years ago

Or they're carefully prepared for new countries to appear. No need to allow break-away rebellious countries the ability to watch the latest music video.

pimlottc• 2 years ago

I like to imagine there being some orthodox regime that gets so offended by the video that they form a new country to stop people from watching it.

dylan6042• 2 years ago

I've had to deal with rights, and it is annoying that they list them out individually. They also have a restricted list. They totally do not seem to understand the concepts of how white listings and black listings work. Rather than white listing all of them, just black list none. I've fought this for well over a decade. It's just a shit show to deal with.

zb3• 2 years ago

Let me recommend this song: https://www.youtube.com/wach

user_78324• 2 years ago

That's a weird thing... but a solid song, thanks!

verticalscaler2• 2 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/wath

^ And that one pops a "confirm channel subscription" pop up - is this an inside joke or bug?

varun_ch• 2 years ago

YouTube has a weird legacy feature that lets certain channels set up redirects to other channels (but can be pretty easily cheesed to redirect to arbitrary paths, like the subscription confirmation URL). This, combined with another legacy feature, non @handle, channel URLs (/c/username, which can be shortened to /username), is being abused to set up redirects on commonly mistyped URLs. People buy/hack old accounts that have these features available/have valuable channel URLs and use them like this.

There's a whole underground world of social media account trade for this.

PetitPrince• 2 years ago

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.

rwmj• 2 years ago

It looks like the kind of video spam that now shows up in searches for technical questions.

jsheard• 2 years ago

Those seem to be getting more common, it's very annoying. Another genre is autogenerated "product review" or "comparison" videos that are just ChatGPT-generated fluff copy read out by text-to-speech voice over a slideshow of product images, presumably to push an affiliate link in the description. Most of them get few if any views but they're so easy to make they just take the shotgun approach and hope some win the SEO lottery: https://i.imgur.com/xebU9os.png

That channel has some hits, they posted a monitor "review" which pulled 20k views and a few dozen comments from real-looking people seemingly unaware the channel is run by a Python script.

vdaea2• 2 years ago

They are automatically generated I would say. The text is copied from somewhere else.

For instance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLWJ0spQ5q0 the text is from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62840146/unix-create-mul...

There are several different intros with him talking but he has the same cold sore in every one of them...

h4ch1• 2 years ago

The videos seem to be done through a turk farm imo.

The start has a random intro to seem more human-like and the Question/Answer is basically copypasted and the font/style of delivery is very mediocre (and very distinctly cheap SEA format). The comments are the biggest giveaway though with multiple "Love from Bangladesh"s.

throwaway4roel• 2 years ago

I worked with him and he was as weird as you'd expect. He got let go after getting in someone's face for saying "oh my god", because it's "taking god's name in vain". (:

He used to do that back then too, AFAIK they were absolutely autogenerated.

(throwaway because I don't want him to harass me, he does do that too)

user_78324• 2 years ago

Would you be okay sharing if he is/was he based in the US? His name seems a bit European/Dutch to me.

seoulmetro• 2 years ago

Of course it's an autogenerated video lol.

What makes you think its not?

huvarda• 2 years ago

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

DiggyJohnson• 2 years ago

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

no-dr-onboard• 2 years ago

This appears to me to be just a compilation of rejected bug bounty reports that were marked as "informational / NA" and are now being disclosed by the author.

sergiotapia• 2 years ago

Youtube Movies is such a wonderful product, it's crazy how I can't pay them $10/month and watch whatever I want in their ubiquitous apps. Even the comments come into play when watching a movie, it's fun to read jokes or some detail I missed. Like look, I can quickly watch The 6th Day a perfect Saturday 10AM movie while the kids are about to wake up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdnX-qQIulw

But because of greed all the content is spread across many many services, each with their own warty app. What a shame!

password43212• 2 years ago

The ubiquity of YouTube is why if I'm going to "buy" (license) a movie I do so there whenever possible.

dingaling• 2 years ago

Every single movie on that link for me says "Preview Only" or "Not available". I've never found a movie in YouTube that I could actually watch.

GaggiX• 2 years ago

I remember the 666 video by removing c or h from "watch" from the URL of whatever video you were watching. Actually kinda eerie.

twisteriffic9• 2 years ago

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 better than when it was constantly recommending the daily wire.

qup• 2 years ago

I've never seen one recommended, just a counter-point. I watch YouTube daily.

johnnymorgan2• 2 years ago

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

enobrev• 2 years ago

Maybe because I watch a good deal of youtube almost every day, but I do not see these sort of results.

crazygringo• 2 years ago

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.

cobertos• 2 years ago

Using YouTube's search through something not tied to your account like NewPipe will solve this issue of recommendations in search.

adl• 2 years ago

I've seen them pop up (hehe) while searching for multi-tools and bushcraft videos. Never seen one before.

jabroni_salad• 2 years ago

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 how far up their ass their head is.

taocoyote• 2 years ago

I have my childrens accounts under my main account. If they watch a lot of certain types of videos, that will show up as a suggestion under my main account. I'm positive its not because they are using my account, I watch videos with them.

I also have a second account for watching more technical videos and that leaks into my main account suggestions.

twisteriffic9• 2 years ago

I've checked, believe me. They don't show up in the feed, only in search results.

verve_rat4• 2 years ago

Nope. I get the exact same thing (to the point where I no longer search for things on YouTube, the thumbnails can be pretty disturbing). I've audited my history to check for that sort of thing.

I think YouTube has just put me in a gender/age/location bucket and figures other people in the same bucket like that thing.

(But actually, who the fuck is watching this shit.)

Edit: plus if this was history pollution then this gross shit would show up on the home page or else where. It is exclusively in the "you might also like" shit that youtube hides in the search results.

nicbou• 2 years ago

Nope, I got the exact same thing too.

wolverine876• 2 years ago

Recommendations also are based on non-YouTube sources, as we might expect. I recently watched some things on streaming and they showed up in YouTube.

It's possibly coincidence, of course, but why wouldn't YouTube use the same profile data as everyone else?

renewiltord• 2 years ago

Literally never seen this shit. Not even once. This is like someone saying it's horrible that there's porn all over the computer and how computers are evil.

dspillett2• 2 years ago

Never watched them myself, and doubt anyone did with my account, but I sometimes get such videos presented as if it is something I'd want. I have had lodgers and sometimes have guests who will obviously have appeared from my IP addresses while on my wireless so that may be part of why I get certain things (one of the lodgers was Italian - that was many years ago, and I still occasionally get adverts in the language). Also it only takes one accidental click to register as “engagement” - maybe I have done that with a slip of the mouse/finger at some point.

lupusreal2• 2 years ago

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.

sumtechguy• 2 years ago

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.

whitakerlol3• 2 years ago

No. I currently am the only guy using my google account. This happens every single time. Definitely a case of IP recommendations.

Suppafly7• 2 years ago

They are super popular so they occasionally float up to the top recommendations by the algorithm. There are all sorts of niche things that get recommended to people whenever the algorithm changes a little. You always seem comments like "never thought I'd watch a video about X but the this came up on my feed."

throwanem2• 2 years ago

Do you use the "not interested"/"don't recommend channel" options on these, or report them?

If not, it may be worth a try. They seem to do a lot to steer Youtube's recommender away from the more gamy regions of its latent space; for example, something like a year ago I saw recommended such a video, immediately reported it for "violent or repulsive content", and thus far haven't seen another. The same has been true for the occasional weirdo along the stripe of modern Russell Brand.

To be clear, I don't think the report was acted upon by Youtube, but I do think the signal inherent in the action must be accounted for in its recommendation model.

Also to be clear, this is no defense of Youtube. It's pretty trash these days, and even the most innocuous recommendations I get have very little to do with anything I'm actually interested in, but this does seem to keep it from getting the idea I might want to see incels and gore.

twisteriffic9• 2 years ago

There's no option to block a channel or "don't recommend" from search results, at least in the android app. Afaik that's only available in the feed.

humblepie• 2 years ago

You're not alone. I've seen it on my account, and all I watch is old jazz stuff and nothing else. My wife's account who just watches mostly bakery has been getting these cartoon or AI generated "child slavery" depictions.

mtlmtlmtlmtl3• 2 years ago

Do you have history enabled?

yen2233• 2 years ago

I searched "Fluke 87v power on options" on YouTube in an incognito page, and all I got were results around the multimeter.

Like literally, my screen only had pictures of multimeters.

For good measure I repeated the search in my main Youtube account. Same thing.

not1ofU2• 2 years ago

google ignores incognito mode https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39078417

twisteriffic9• 2 years ago

https://i.postimg.cc/J49KjXZ2/Screenshot-20240215-183710.png

It's likely some coincidence of my previous viewing history, though how woodworking, small engine repair and distributed systems pointed to grossout videos I have no idea. I've heard of at least a dozen other people that this happens to so far across a wide range of viewing habits.

vdaea2• 2 years ago

This happens to me even though 1) I never log in and 2) I clear my cookies daily.

The other day I was looking for recipes and I had to see disgusting video thumbnails of faces full of zits interspersed with thumbnails of the food I wanted to cook.

There's a ublock origin filter here that hides suggested videos and other crap from the search results page https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/wiki/solutions/youtube...

numpad0• 2 years ago

I don't speak web front end so I can't explain, but it seems a lot of those are fed from ad system and joined on-browser, "we already have a perfect system for this, why not just..." style.

For me, enabling more adblock volunteer maintained filters, custom element filters, and parameter removals took it away, at costs of YouTube showing me ever niche-er and increasingly monotonic selections.

nonethewiser2• 2 years ago

Well not for me

Tommy430• 2 years ago

Honestly, the search has been broken for a while. Half of the search results aren't even related and another thing I hate is YouTube Shorts.

Anyways, for me, I just loathe how the whole site is designed in general. Opening YouTube today on a modern browser is slower than opening it on IE6 back then and the whole site relies on a JavaScript framework even though frontends like Invidious, Piped, and YT2009 (and possibly even more) show that you don't need JavaScript or have to make the entire site rely on it just to view content.

shiroiushi• 2 years ago

Opening YouTube today on a modern browser is slower than opening it on IE6 back then

This is true for so many things on computers these days: websites, various software, etc.

mathieuh• 2 years ago

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 matter how many times I tap "Not interested" on the Shorts section every week it's back.

lupusreal2• 2 years ago

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...)

ToucanLoucan• 2 years ago

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.

samlinnfer• 2 years ago

Do you use adblock?

gwern• 2 years ago

I wonder how many of these are https://www.hyrumslaw.com/ in action? Like the long-channel name seems like something you'd lock down as soon as you notice you made the classic error of trusting client-side validation of limits, but then you might decide to not truncate the offender's name.

remus• 2 years ago

Most of them I imagine. To be honest the list is shorter than I expected for something as big and old as youtube!

tech234a• 2 years ago

"Interacting with any video from the old channel in the YouTube interface will redirect you back to the new one. The old channel name and reference will never display except in the API."

On Windows, if you use your the volume keys or the play/pause button on your keyboard during one of these videos, you will receive a media status pop-up in the corner of your screen containing the old channel name along with the video title and thumbnail. I've noticed this with a lot of music videos.

Suppafly7• 2 years ago

On Windows, if you use your the volume keys or the play/pause button on your keyboard during one of these videos, you will receive a media status pop-up in the corner of your screen containing the old channel name along with the video title and thumbnail.

Always wondered why sometimes the pop-up description name was different, didn't think about the channel name having changed.

015a2• 2 years ago

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 referencing a very specific video ID; as far as I can tell, the only video in the billions of videos on YouTube to receive this treatment (at least, in terms of a "css selector with video-id in it").

The video: Adult Swim's "Too Many Cooks" skit (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrGrOK8oZG8)

nonethewiser2• 2 years ago

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

chch• 2 years ago

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 following in 2014 when it came out, and I guess someone on the YouTube UI team thought it would be a fun addition to add the text style from the video onto the video page itself. I remember being happily surprised the first time I saw it (similarly to the first time I saw someone added the Wadsworth Constant[1] as an actual feature, though that's unfortunately since been removed).

[1] A user on Reddit once posited in 2011 that the first 30% of every YouTube video was a waste, so they would just click to around the 30% mark to skip to the important part. A reply deemed this the "Wadsworth Constant", after the user, and it tumbled from there. Eventually, YouTube had an official feature where if you added ""&wadsworth=1" to a URL, it would start the video 30% in, for any video! I'd used it several times when sending instructional videos to friends who didn't need to see the intros.

015a2• 2 years ago

Watch the video; its definitely just 'someone at YouTube really liked this video'. The styling of the title is attempting to mirror the actor nameplates in the video.

from-nibly• 2 years ago

Wow Georgia font for a movie about Georgia actors

Narushia• 2 years ago

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

Cthulhu_• 2 years ago

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.

xenophonf3• 2 years ago

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.

smashah• 2 years ago

Did you all notice that when the video says "like and subscribe", the subscribe button is highlighted with a rainbow border? must be new.

Example: https://youtu.be/z815XfakQCE?t=26

albert_e• 2 years ago

Yes i noticed this a few weeks ago

And I confirmed it by rewinding a few times and getting the behaviour to repeat (most if the times)

micael_dias• 2 years ago

Since October so relatively new, the like button also gets animations: https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-67137492.amp

atesti• 2 years ago

Are there not more videos that got corrupted? With this amount of data, youtube must have lost several videos statistically.

INTPenis• 2 years ago

Interesting but I was hoping this was about bugs. Because youtube has some bugs.

I use it a lot, it's my primary source of entertainment. Here is a list of issues;

    1. Casting disconnects after smartphone has been charging for 1+ hour.
    2. Small player window covers playlists.
    3. In profile tab of Youtube Android app Watch Later and Liked Videos will randomly switch places.
    4. Shorts are the worst thing ever for people who cast a lot.
    5. On desktop the "Add to watch later" and "Add to queue" buttons will switch locations depending on where you are in the feed.

alpaca128• 2 years ago

My favorite: if you have a Short video opened and look at comments in the notification window in the top right, a click on any "load more comments" button will instantly teleport you to a random other Short video and close the notifications. This bug exists since Shorts as far as I can tell.

And after at least 5+ years the newline cursor bug in the comment text fields still exists.

pests4• 2 years ago

Android YouTube really needs to allow you to continue using the app and watching videos while casting.

Its a modern thing to have something playing while also maybe scrolling your phone. You can't even view comments or video descriptions without playing the video on the cast device.

Just let me browse and build my playlists or, god forbid, watch two videos at the same time.

pests4• 2 years ago

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.

whitakerlol3• 2 years ago

I haven't heard about this channel specifically but channels like that usually either sub bot or buy channels from seedy hacker forums.

- 10k subscribers - idiotic comments - "Who is..."/ "Why is... everywhere?" video

zeptonix• 2 years ago

LOL 3 month long videos ...

rasz2• 2 years ago

Video without a title

nice, this one breaks one of my userscripts

Knowledge Base, at this current time has 1,054,762 videos uploaded.

Randomly GPT generated clickbait titles to 3-5 minute clips form some livestreams. If I was in control of YT such channels would be dropped for violating policy.

Hunpeter• 2 years ago

A friend told me that the third video in the recommended list (the one that you see on the side when playing a video) often seems to be a (sometimes) barely related one from a small channel you've never watched. I can confirm the same happens to me.

YouTube Oddities

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