11 ms·

YouTube Oddities

318 points by xk3 3y ago

Fr0styMatt88 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
    ...or use an up-to-date version with this recommended extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/video-background-play-fix/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/video-backgro... ...or use NewPipe instead: https://newpipe.net/ https://newpipe.net/ (also available with SponsorBlock integration)
  - beeboobaa 3y ago
    Or install the latest Firefox with https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-background-play-fix/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-backgro... (also available on Android)
- sosodev 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - rezonant 3y 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 3y 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.
- rezonant 3y 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.
  - Suppafly 3y 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.
    - rezonant 3y ago
      Agreed, but I imagine this might be a licensing restriction or something.
      - Suppafly 3y ago
        I think that's why the merged google music into youtube for youtube music, I imagine they had much better licensing terms on the youtube side.
troupo 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.
- dylan604 3y 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 3y ago
Let me recommend this song: https://www.youtube.com/wach https://www.youtube.com/wach
- user_7832 3y ago
  That's a weird thing... but a solid song, thanks!
- verticalscaler 3y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/wath https://www.youtube.com/wath ^ And that one pops a "confirm channel subscription" pop up - is this an inside joke or bug?
  - varun_ch 3y 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.
    - verticalscaler 3y ago
      I wish to subscribe to your newsletter. Very interesting.
PetitPrince 3y ago
> Roel Van de Paar, at this current time has 2,035,484 videos uploaded. > https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPF-oYb2-xN5FbCXy0167Gg https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPF-oYb2-xN5FbCXy0167Gg What the hell. It doesn't seems to be autogenerated video.
- rwmj 3y ago
  It looks like the kind of video spam that now shows up in searches for technical questions.
  - jsheard 3y 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 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.
    - imp0cat 3y ago
      These reviews where the whole video is a slideshow + robotic voiceover are so annoying. They contain 0% information, they're just a delivery vehicle for ads. And there is a ton of them!
      - rasz 3y ago
        Its ok, you can recognize them by looking at number of downvo... oh, right.
    - k12sosse 3y ago
      It pays to have an account if you don't - train that shit into oblivion!
no-dr-onboard 3y 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 3y 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 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!
- password4321 3y ago
  The ubiquity of YouTube is why if I'm going to "buy" (license) a movie I do so there whenever possible.
  - dingaling 3y 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 3y 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.
twisteriffic 3y 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 3y ago
  I've never seen one recommended, just a counter-point. I watch YouTube daily.
  - johnnymorgan 3y 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
    - mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
      I mostly see content that similar to the things I watch(lot of sci-com, some gaming stuff, some sports stuff, a fair share of chess content) The only offputting stuff I get recommended is these AI generated video essays with nonsense claims masquerading as scicom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJ-pztYXH8k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJ-pztYXH8k Depresses me that this channel has over 100k subscribers... But I've never been recommended gross-out stuff. I have history enabled because otherwise all I get recommended is videos I've already seen. One thing I would recommend is disabling autoplay. I found recommendations improved markedly when the only videos I even start watching are ones I decided to. And sometimes with autoplay on I'd pass out in front of the TV and wake up to some wild shit, and get stranger recommendations because of it. But still not getting a bunch of gore or gross stuff.
      - 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Whooping7116 3y ago
[dead]
gwern 3y ago
I wonder how many of these are https://www.hyrumslaw.com/ 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 3y 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 3y 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.
- Suppafly 3y 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.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
015a 3y 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrGrOK8oZG8)
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  That is fascinating. Wonder why that video in particular (or any single video that in theory) would need its text style changed.
  - chch 3y 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.
smashah 3y 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 https://youtu.be/z815XfakQCE?t=26
- albert_e 3y 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 3y ago
  Since October so relatively new, the like button also gets animations: https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-67137492.amp https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-67137492.amp
atesti 3y ago
Are there not more videos that got corrupted? With this amount of data, youtube must have lost several videos statistically.
INTPenis 3y 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 3y 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.
- pests 3y 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.
pests 3y 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.
- whitakerlol 3y 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 3y ago
LOL 3 month long videos ...
rasz 3y 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 3y 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.

318 points by xk3 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
  ...or use an up-to-date version with this recommended extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/video-background-play-fix/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/video-backgro... ...or use NewPipe instead: https://newpipe.net/ https://newpipe.net/ (also available with SponsorBlock integration)
- beeboobaa 3y ago
  Or install the latest Firefox with https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-background-play-fix/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-backgro... (also available on Android)
sosodev 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- rezonant 3y 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 3y 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.
rezonant 3y 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.
- Suppafly 3y 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.
  - rezonant 3y ago
    Agreed, but I imagine this might be a licensing restriction or something.
    - Suppafly 3y ago
      I think that's why the merged google music into youtube for youtube music, I imagine they had much better licensing terms on the youtube side.

troupo 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.
dylan604 3y 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 3y ago

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

user_7832 3y ago
That's a weird thing... but a solid song, thanks!
verticalscaler 3y ago
https://www.youtube.com/wath https://www.youtube.com/wath ^ And that one pops a "confirm channel subscription" pop up - is this an inside joke or bug?
- varun_ch 3y 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.
  - verticalscaler 3y ago
    I wish to subscribe to your newsletter. Very interesting.

PetitPrince 3y ago

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

rwmj 3y ago
It looks like the kind of video spam that now shows up in searches for technical questions.
- jsheard 3y 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 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.
  - imp0cat 3y ago
    These reviews where the whole video is a slideshow + robotic voiceover are so annoying. They contain 0% information, they're just a delivery vehicle for ads. And there is a ton of them!
    - rasz 3y ago
      Its ok, you can recognize them by looking at number of downvo... oh, right.
  - k12sosse 3y ago
    It pays to have an account if you don't - train that shit into oblivion!

no-dr-onboard 3y 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 3y 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 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!

password4321 3y ago
The ubiquity of YouTube is why if I'm going to "buy" (license) a movie I do so there whenever possible.
- dingaling 3y 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 3y 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.

twisteriffic 3y 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 3y ago
I've never seen one recommended, just a counter-point. I watch YouTube daily.
- johnnymorgan 3y 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
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
    I mostly see content that similar to the things I watch(lot of sci-com, some gaming stuff, some sports stuff, a fair share of chess content) The only offputting stuff I get recommended is these AI generated video essays with nonsense claims masquerading as scicom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJ-pztYXH8k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJ-pztYXH8k Depresses me that this channel has over 100k subscribers... But I've never been recommended gross-out stuff. I have history enabled because otherwise all I get recommended is videos I've already seen. One thing I would recommend is disabling autoplay. I found recommendations improved markedly when the only videos I even start watching are ones I decided to. And sometimes with autoplay on I'd pass out in front of the TV and wake up to some wild shit, and get stranger recommendations because of it. But still not getting a bunch of gore or gross stuff.
    - 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Whooping7116 3y ago

[dead]

gwern 3y ago

I wonder how many of these are https://www.hyrumslaw.com/ 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 3y 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 3y 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.

Suppafly 3y 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.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

015a 3y 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrGrOK8oZG8)

nonethewiser 3y ago
That is fascinating. Wonder why that video in particular (or any single video that in theory) would need its text style changed.
- chch 3y 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.

smashah 3y 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 https://youtu.be/z815XfakQCE?t=26

albert_e 3y 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 3y ago
Since October so relatively new, the like button also gets animations: https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-67137492.amp https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-67137492.amp

atesti 3y ago

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

INTPenis 3y 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 3y 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.
pests 3y 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.

pests 3y 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.

whitakerlol 3y 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 3y ago

LOL 3 month long videos ...

rasz 3y 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 3y 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.