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Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

What really bugs me is when a video literally has "Episode 18" in the name, but somehow the recommendation list on the right side fails to find the one with "Episode 19".

But if I want to go watch Episode 5 again or jump ahead to Episode 26, it's happy to help. Awesome.

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As I remember at least some series videos used to be recommended in order, but I haven't seen that in a while.

The behavior that really gets me now is having the top recommended videos on my YT homepage ones I've watched... Recently. I can watch a video from my notifications, and then have it stay at the top of my homepage until I hide it manually. Refreshing the page changes some videos, but rarely the top few.

Of course, hiding the video helps but I get tired of having to do it constantly. I think I'm resigned to my YT homepage being useless at this point.

I wondered how many others experienced this. It really makes it demotivating to use YT

It's possible your adblocker is preventing YouTube from tracking your watched video history. I know pi-hole does this by default unless you whitelist certain domains.

Happens to me on non-adblocked mobile all the time, it is infuriatingly dumb. Google seems to not be able to do user friendly UI's.

Don't get a started on discovery!

user agent hits Google random-string.googlevideo.com/videoplayback with referrer, ip, signature and several other parameters coding your individual user id, Google knows every single time who, why and when requested particular resource.

Just because they have the data doesn't necessarily mean that they use it. They might rely on some javascript XHR to tell them when a video is really watched. Just guessing here.

I think this behavior is probably driven by people like me, who use youtube mostly for music. I repeatedly listen to/watch performances on youtube because to me it's the only streaming service I have. I frequently come to youtube just to watch stuff I've already seen. I find the recommendation in that context to be uncannily good and they keep me coming back to find new music and to see the cool performances I've already seen. Maybe youtube has trouble differentiating these use cases?

When I'm programming, gaming I mostly listen to retrosynth and outrun.

For that youtube is great because it's autoplay just seamlessly plays one after another.

For everything else it's recommendations are hilariously bad.

I think when you turn off tracking what you watch it warns you this will happen. it does this for me i think and didnt before i turned off watch history.. but maybe i am just imagining that. And maybe you havent turned off watch history.

What drives me insane is there's no way to mark videos as watched. You can hide them only with "not interested" even though you totally are.

When I mark a video as "Not interested" I get a link to "tell us why", where "I've already watched the video" is an option.

I wrote my own tempermonkey userscript just for that occasion to hide already watched recommendations :/

And there is no way to find Episode 19.

You know the exact date of Episode 18 so you assume Episode 19 was published soon afterwards. So you go into the profile and click videos.

You realize that the date is not even listed, it just says "x months ago", or "x years ago". And since this video was from two years ago you have to sift through all videos of the last two years. And you can't just ctr+f. You have to go to the bottom to load the next 30 or so videos.

The user interface for these kinds of sites are just incomprehensible poor.

I wish they would fix their iPad app. I'm learning to play guitar with the JustingGuitar channel. Justin has created playlists that match his book that I bought. But as soon as I play a video from that list, it seems to lose that context.

Plus, on the iOS app there's no way to search within a channel or playlist. If I want to find Justin's lessons on a Nirvana song I have to search "justin guitar nirvana" rather than just "nirvana" when I'm on that channel.

Have you tried deleting the iPad app and using the website?

The app is better than the website in other ways so I'm reluctant to do that. I actually called YouTube and talked to somebody about this. Whether or not that makes a difference, who knows?

I strongly recommend downloading educational and otherwise valuable content. It solves so many problems, present an possible.

That's even worse when you make videos, especially when they search for something that is episodic like a let's play.

I'd much rather have youtube recommend episode 1 or the first video of the playlist to people but instead it gives them a random one in the middle. This causes the viewer to get mad and press thumbs down. This also makes the "average viewed minutes" go drastically down.

That's probably the source of most of my thumbs downs.. It also causes ridiculous stats like episode 27 of 50 has 100 times the number of views as the first episode but not more view time.

That recommendation issue you point out is extremely annoying since YouTube has no way to reverse the order of videos in a playlist. More often than not for some reason Let's Play and other chronological video authors create their playlists in a reverse chronological order, latest first so it's basically impossible to binge them unless you manually click on the next episode yourself.

I make mine in chronological order!

It's actually just a playlist setting for the creator but the default is reverse and that makes the whole list useless. You even have chrome and firefox plugins to fix it.

I also link the playlist in each youtube description but unfortunately they are not so easy to spot on app/tv/game consoles.

Also, in this case I think it's OK to youtube-dl the list and play them in order locally.

It's eternally appreciated when creators consider doing that!

Unfortunately I use Safari so it's not an option for me, sadly one of the very few downsides to using Safari is relatively weak extension support.

You've summed up my frustrations, well.

What would be even better is if they had somewhere that you could just specify what episode it is in a series rather than it try to guess based on titles

Youtube creators already have the ability to create series inside playlists.

Example: The Slow Mo Guys channel has a "Planet Slow Mo" series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbIZ6k-SE9Shmj0Uvxtrv...

This is not available to... well, almost anyone. Seriously try searching for it. Every permutation of your search terms will bring you back to one of three results that all heavily imply or say that it's available to a select handful of channels

It's not even subscriber gated or verified channel gated, it's someone at youtube for some reason flicked the switch on for this channel gated

The problem is when you first find a video that's interesting you don't necessarily find the playlist that it belongs to. (or worse, you find it in someone else's playlist which includes the video along with other seemingly random videos that the playlist creator was interested in)

Sometimes they're in a playlist, but sometimes I'm not watching via the playlist. Like if I know that episode 19 is the next one I need to watch, I go in search and find "Super cool series episode 19", and then I watch it.

I don't search for the playlist, then go to the playlist and scroll through to the episode I want, then pick it.

But then since I didn't go to the playlist, now YouTube can't recommend the incredibly obvious next video in the series.

there are times that "Episode 19" does in fact exist but even when I search for it, it finds NOTHING

I wouldn't surprised if it had been A/B tested and rejected because it decreased engagement. I'd love to know if and why.

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