Comment by swozey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by swozey | Hacker News Reader

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Dude youtube drives me absolutely crazy. I fall asleep to it almost every night watching some documentary or something on say the medieval times or whatever. Specifically a channel I want to keep watching videos from.

Then when I pop up awake at 3am cause of noises youtube's sent me to WW2/Hitler/Nazi videos. It never, ever fails. Sometimes I get sent to this one physics teachers video who I've never once clicked on, watched, or selected myself, but he has an INSANE amount of views like tens of millions. Like, youtube purposely sends videos to him. I forget who it is but it's a dude with long grey/white hair and a beard talking about physics I think from MIT but I dont remember it's been awhile.

Why can't you keep me watching stuff related to what I'm watching?? How do I get from the Teutonic Knights to Hitler?? It's ALWAYS Hitler.

Now i have to make sure I watch a channels playlists because I wind up in Hitler territory every other video if I don't.

> Now i have to make sure I watch a channels playlists because I wind up in Hitler territory every other video if I don't.

Godwin's law

I mean, we are talking about the same genre: history documentaries. And there are plenty of WW2 documentaries on YouTube… so it’s not quite Godwin proper (no one is getting called a Nazi who wasn’t an actual 1930s-1940s Nazi). This is more Godwin adjacent… if you watch enough videos on a loop, you’ll eventually see a documentary about Nazis. To be fair, this is true of traditional cable TV too. There are a LOT of WW2 documentaries, so I don’t completely fault the algorithm here.

turn off autoplay

??? Then I don't get a loop of videos to fall asleep to. Thats the entire point.

If you want a loop why don't you actually set it to loop some rather long video?

I fall asleep to documentaries. I don't want to loop one video. I want to play videos that relate to one another and not go from one topic to one completely unrelated. The only way to reliably do this is to use a playlist, which sucks, because not every channel makes playlists and I'm sometimes fine with the channel changing, as long as it doesn't go from #SpaceScience to #WW2againagaingain.

And then I'd say about 30% of the time it'll grab some documentary/video I've already watched, which is also annoying.

make your own! have you heard of watch later?

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