I wouldn't mind this as much if YouTube were better about indicating which ones you've watched. In theory you can just look for the little red bar under the thumbnail but they seem to "forget" after a while.

This makes it tricky to go through the backlog of a channel's content without watching it all in order. Sure, at first any random video will be new to you, but eventually you will start seeing more and more repeats, forcing you to start choosing videos more methodically from the videos page. Even then, it's tricky when the ones you've seen are not always marked consistently.

It doesn't seem like too much data to story for a company that offers gigs of free email.

(And no, I don't have a auto-deletion policy set up, I just double-checked)

I have this problem too. It's stuff I've watched or it's stuff I've scrolled past uninterested in a dozen times. Basically the only time I casually find something I want to watch is when a subscription uploads new content

It could really benefit from a simple "suggest things I've already seen y/n" UI toggle. Sometimes you do want it to do that, such as for music, but most of the time you don't.

This just changed about two weeks ago, right? The rate of suggested rewatches went up from like 5% to 20% for me. And surprisingly, it seems not to have tracked or not be displaying that I've seen it before (with the red progress bar on the thumbnail). I agree this is a bad change, especially deceiving me about my watch history.

This was around the time they changed the mobile progress bar behavior to require dragging to advance, rather than allowing you to jump to the point you select (i.e. away from the model used by the android brightness slider).

That's because there's not really that much great content on YouTube.