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Comment by fpgaminer | Hacker News Reader

> For some reason, it insists on constantly recommending videos i have watched before, which is annoying.

The insanity is deeper than that:

1) YouTube recommends videos they _know_ you watched before (they're marked as watched).

2) YouTube forgets which videos you've watched after a few months. Google, of all companies, forgets what I've watched. WTF?

3) So even if YouTube didn't recommend videos you've watched before, they'll forget in a few months anyway and recommend it again.

4) And you can't mark videos as watched. Say you watched a video elsewhere. YouTube recommends it to you. But you've already seen it. Can't mark it as watched. Can't make Google not recommend it. Even if you could, they'll just forget in a few months.

5) Watched a video, but skipped the last 5 minutes because it's sponsorship content? YouTube: Better not mark that as watched and instead recommend that you finish it for the next few months.

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Some people, like me, will watch the same video multiple times, if not dozens.

YouTube likely isn’t forgetting that you’ve watched it. It is probably suggesting it again because it thinks it has been enough time you’d want to watch it again.

> YouTube likely isn’t forgetting that you’ve watched it.

No, they do. Videos that you've watched are marked as such. They have a red bar at the bottom of the video thumbnail that shows how much of the video you've watched. For ones you've watched all the way through, it's just a solid red bar.

After a few months, YouTube just forgets. I can go to, say, Chubbyemu's channel (https://www.youtube.com/c/ChubbyemuGames/videos), which I've watched most videos on, and it only shows that I've watched videos 6 months or newer. YouTube forgets everything past that.

The point of my post was multi-fold. YouTube will recommend a video they _know_ you've watched; it's got the red bar at the bottom. But even if they didn't do that, they'll forget in six months anyway and recommend it anyway.

> Some people, like me, will watch the same video multiple times, if not dozens.

Hmmm, yeah, you're right. I do the same. Must be that their AI has learned that behavior, but hasn't quite figured out what makes a video "rewatchable" yet.

I think I was just being needlessly pedantic.

For whatever reason I was fixated on the word 'forgetting' meaning that /all/ records where lost or deleted and that it couldn't mean they just get rid of the visual indicator after some time in order to trick you.

Upon reflection, that's a bit silly of me. Sorry.

No worries. I didn't think you were being pedantic; I figured my comment wasn't worded clearly. Hope my reply didn't seem defensive? I was just trying to clarify.

But yeah, it's possible that Google does keep the records around, but don't surface it in the UI after six months for some reason. Could be an optimization, to keep the edge databases lean. Or it could be a weird dark pattern.

Probably their bloom filter implementation?

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