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Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

Same experience here. I have to actively curate them by removing some one-off dumb videos from my watch history, but my YouTube recommendations are by far extremely high quality. Youtube is the only service I know of that has actually achieved working content recommendations for me.

My Watch Later has hundreds of hours of content from things that I definitely want to watch but I'm either not yet in the mood for or too long to get to now.

Seriously, youtube for all its flaws is an incredible human achievement on par with wikipedia.

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I don't use the "watch later" feature anymore. It's always a bit irritating when you want to catch up on the list only to find that a video has been removed in the mean time. So I switched to archiving using youtube-dl. Also nice to have a few backup videos in case of an internet outage.

I rarely have that problem with watch later, but it does happen. When I want to ensure a video is available down the line, i send the url to the web archive; they have a special archiver for youtube videos.

What's the link?

Just prefix any URL with this exactly: https://web.archive.org/save/

Example: https://web.archive.org/save/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

If it's already saved, it'll do a new snapshot, but I believe the archive is smart enough not to duplicate saved youtube videos.

I tried this and it keeps saying job failed.

Looks like the Archive is having some trouble today, but it's also getting throttled because the link is getting clicked a lot. the /save/ link will redirect you to a saved snapshot of the page; it basically tells the archive "capture this page right now".

Same issue. Love the concept of saving through a GET link.

Just curious, do you download them one at a time or do you have a "system" for handling them?

I ask because this seems like a great idea. I've already written a script to read from a list and download and now I'm wondering if I don't just use use that instead of "watch later" going forward. Curious if you do anything beyond adding them one at a time I should consider before changing my approach.

FYI youtube-dl can download playlists. I heavily suspect you can even use --continue to download missing updated bits in a playlist you previously downloaded

Good point on the playlists, it hadn't dawned on me that 'watch later' is a playlist. Haven't tried continue, in the past I've created a 'downloaded.txt' file which gets updated as files download and then checked before it runs again so it doesn't try to re-download them.

Yeah you don't need that downloaded.txt, youtube-dl can do that all on its own with the right flags :)

This is conceivable to me, bit I've never had this happen. What sort of videos would be removed that you actually wanted to watch?

Apart from what has already been mentioned, stuff also gets copyright-struck. Sometimes for ridiculously minor infractions. Sometimes for no real infraction at all.

Additionally, there are the vague and ever-changing terms of service.

Also, people sometimes take stuff down themselves. Take the JRE, for a recent and rather prominent example.

Happens to me often. I don't think it even tells you what videos are gone. I know I've seen channels say they removed a video themselves because it didn't do well with views so they wanted to re-tweak it in the hope it lands better.

Cody's Lab had a video about refining metal ores removed, as one example.

People remove and re-upload (or not) their videos sometimes, so if you could even find it that'd be an annoying extra step.

+1 for cleaning up the watch history. It's pretty nice that youtube let's you edit that and doesn't use a "full history" to train the recommendation algorithm.

I try to be careful and always use private browsing when opening "suspicious" videos, but every now and then, one slips and taints my recommendation.

OTOH, with a clean history, I barely subscribe to channels, since new videos usually end up in the recommendations, anyway.

"OTOH" = On the other hand.

For those that, like me, hadn't seen this one before ^_^

How do you clean up your watch history?

Go to "History" in your sidebar: https://www.youtube.com/feed/history

You can individually remove videos by clicking on Delete (at least on desktop).

You can also pause your watch history (eg. for some guest browsing) or clear it entirely (if you want to start from scratch).

My big curation-related grief has to do with YouTube playlists (the ones you can create with the +Save button on YouTube.) The list of playlists can't be sorted in alphabetical order by playlist name. It seems to be ordered either by playlist creation date and/or by when I last added a video to the list (with most recent playlists first.) I'd say the playlist feature is next to useless to me, except that I keep using it, ever so masochistically.

This is a recurring grief I have with Google products: poor UI and a seeming inability to receive and/or act upon feedback from power users.

This is intentional. They want you to just follow their AI more than curate your own world. You live in their world.

Thing is YouTube has hardly any features to manage a playlist that big. I think it does not even allow to search within the playlist.

YouTube provides high quality for everyone, because it knows what your preference is. For poor dumbs the suggestion feed full of conspiracy videos is very extremely quality in their eyes too. The other thing is that we consider their videos - crap

but many years later,some videos in watch later list have gone,it seems that no way to find them back.

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