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. It is probably suggesting it again because it thinks it has been enough time you’d want to watch it again.
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.
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.
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.