Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

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My favorite "dark pattern" plausibly disguised as a simple bug is that the countdown timer, across multiple platforms I've used YouTube on, doesn't work correctly and very easily will let the ad play for a second or two longer than you intend. It behaves as if it's supposed to count down to 0 one second at a time, but there's a recurring event that is run every second to see if the countdown timer needs to be lowered. However, it's very easy for that event to be ever so slightly delayed or advanced relative to when the timer counts down, and as a result the timer doesn't get decremented correctly. It's very easy to see if you watch the timer carefully; it almost never counts evenly like it should, and it very often skips a beat entirely. (Compare with a simple timer app, which is correctly updating every frame the display renders. This isn't that hard.)

It's very plausibly a bug that a novice dealing with time in a UI would make, and in many other circumstances I'd accept that explanation. But, a bug in such a critical piece of YouTube's functionality, with a root cause I'm pretty sure I've diagnosed just by glancing at it, surviving for years and years across multiple platforms? This isn't a bug. It's policy. At scale, those seconds add up.

Sound like they implemented Vetinari’s clock from Discworld. That’s a waiting room clock that would slow down and speed up the seconds hand (and also the ticks and tocks) but the minute and hour hands would run on time. This was to make the waiting person extra nervous before their meeting with the patrician. He is by far my most favorite characters in the books.

There's also this physical clock mod that runs the mechanism a bit faster before lunchtime, then slows it down again so displayed time eventually lines up with real time: https://hackaday.com/2011/01/18/the-lunchtime-clock-gives-yo...

Yes, on my smart TV app it's so slow and glitchy that the 5-second ad preview often plays for 10+ seconds before the "Skip Ad" button finally appears. Add to that the 5-7 seconds of black screen before the ad starts playing and the 2-3 seconds to resume my video, and it's a major annoyance during workouts and such.

On an old TV I have it can take at least 5 seconds before it starts counting down. I've just assumed it was a badly maintained app. Have 3 smart Tvs and YouTube seems to behave different on all of them. May have to look into it.

A suspicious person would think they're billing by the actual seconds and dividing the total amount of actual seconds by the budgeted seconds in the ad to bump up the ad impressions.

But I'm not that guy.

> But I'm not that guy.

Yep, that was jerf :-P

I've seen it skip a second (e.g. go straight from 3 to 1) roughly as much as I've seen it do the opposite. I don't suspect foul play but I understand why someone would.

I've seen that too. Mostly I suspect foul play just because it's so damned obvious what the problem is, and there's a hack fix that's pretty easy (run the thing that updates the number every .1 seconds instead of every second). Not that the correct fixes are that hard, or that likely to have interactions with other things... on a technical level, anyhow.

If it is incompetence, it's a rather shocking amount of it in a very important part of the app that has a bajillion metrics tied to it. I can't say this is impossible. But I can't call it the most likely outcome.

Note that this particular behavior will never let you stop the ad early. It can only extend the amount of time it will play, by scheduling the thing that finally lets you in only when the current time is greater than or equal to the 5 seconds it is supposed to play. Jumping from 3 to 1 doesn't mean you skipped a second, it means the 3 wasn't moved to 2 at the correct time.

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