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Comment by quaunaut | Hacker News Reader

Taking a look at it now, and how it interacts with Enhancer for Youtube.

The one thing I'm absolutely desperate for, is a fix to Youtube's Watch Later playlist issues.

If you ever hit maximum on it, it seems permanently broken afterward to not delete watched videos- which means the only way to delete videos is manually, behind a 3-dot menu per video. Since the playlist max size is 5000, that'd be a minimum 10,000 clicks, and since the 3 dot menu only shows up once you're over a video, a certain level of hunting too.

I tried to make an extension for this once, but bungled it pretty bad so it'll take another effort sometime. Youtube's my primary content source outside of games, so for me it hurts pretty bad.

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My pet peeve is that if you start playing a video by clicking on it in the watch later playlist it will start wherever you left off, but then if you let it proceed to the next video it will start at the beginning of that one, forever erasing your watch position for that video.

In general the saving of watch position is very frustrating on YouTube. There are a lot of bugs. They need an explicit way to see exactly which parts you've watched.

Has anyone made a "watch later" queue that is site-agnostic? I'd love to be able to add Twitter videos, Spotify podcasts, YouTube clips, etc to a single "watch later" queue.

Honest question: Do you ever actually watch them later? I've been bookmarking things on the internet to Read Later (TM) for 26 years. I might bookmark multiple things in a day. The Later never comes - and often the link rots in just a decade or two.

I've recently begun using Ctrl-W to mark items to Read Later. It saves some disk space at the very least, and frustration years down the line at the very most.

Yes, I watch about half of them. Usually while doing the dishes or working out. Mostly listening, as I usually save interviews or lectures or podcasts. I never read the things I bookmark for later reading, but I have extra time to listen to things.

might just consider caching them to a thrash-drive with yt-dlp and one of those browser-exntensions that caches a webpage for offline use; then watch later without linkrot, ect can even throw that behing something as simple as darkhttp and serve it to your tablets easier too

but of course the downside is the required regular spring cleaning

having an AIO system for that would be pretty nice though

Linkrot isn't that big of an issue for the stuff I save. I'm fine watching/listening on the web, I just wish there was a way to make a playlist that works over multiple sites. Really it should be a browser feature, part of the bookmarks manager, if browsers were still innovating.

My primary YouTube experience is:

a) Browse when I have a few minutes, and add interesting videos to Watch Later

b) Watch them in the evening when my family has gone to bed.

I don't watch everything the same day, so over time it builds up. Sometimes I have more time, so I catch up then. I try to keep it less than 50 items, and if it ever goes over I'll prune it.

I rarely watch movies or TV shows - I watch YouTube.

> I rarely watch movies or TV shows - I watch YouTube.

Same here. For all its faults—the search function is my personal peeve—it has really turned into a fantastic platform. By allowing anyone to upload videos of any length, giving those videos permanent URLs, and enabling people to make money from their videos, they have encouraged a wealth of content creation on every topic under the sun.

I wish YouTube had a dozen strong competitors, though. Too many valuable eggs are being entrusted to that one basket.

I would love better playlist controls for Youtube. I do a lot of playlist shaping and even their web interface is broken -- for instance, if you have a playlist with 100 items on it and you drag-n-drop to re-order, the visual order doesn't match the saved playlist order. I then re-load the playlist and have to scroll back down.

I'd also like to shuffle certain playlists, not in playback, but the way it's stored.

I cant fathom why you'd let that list get so long... I tend to max it out at about a dozen.

but

also any video that you mark as watch later, but then gets pulled... its hidden and messes with the play list order. you have to go find the menu option that shows hidden videos so you can remove them from the list manually before the list will start to behave

There is a "Removed watched videos" option in the three-dot-menu for the playlist itself on desktop at least. I have to do this every so often, and this is a very welcome feature as I used to do it as you describe.

Yeah, that's literally what I'm talking about being broken. It hasn't worked for me for over 2 years.

My solution is to clean things up on mobile. Swipe and click delete is a lot easier than that 3-dot menu, but still no bulk options.

Run this on your Watch Later page in your console:

let x = $x;

let buttons = $$('div#contents div#contents div#menu button');

let delay = 1000;

for (let i = 0; i < buttons.length; i++) {

  setTimeout(() => buttons[i].click(), 100+(i*delay));

  setTimeout(() => x("//span[contains(text(), 'Remove')]")[0].click(), 800+(i*delay));

};

...increase delay if needed.

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