If I play a YouTube video for ~3 seconds and leave, it becomes marked as completely watched, with the red line extending all the way under the thumbnail.
-
If I play a YouTube video for ~3 seconds and leave, it becomes marked as completely watched, with the red line extending all the way under the thumbnail. It’s been like this forever.
Does anyone know if this is a bug, or intentional? It’s frustrating to me.
(Apple TV.)
Facebook has very strong algorithm bias towards reading someone switching to another app over page as ‘the thing drove you away! We will banish it forever!’
I see this happen with YouTube as well. I don’t always have time for a video of the length presented. I simply don’t have the time. Maybe later. Where did it go?
-
It’s been like this for years for me. It is not related to the recent view count change.
@mwichary Doesn’t happen to me on any platform using YouTube apps or the browser.
-
@mwichary Doesn’t happen to me on any platform using YouTube apps or the browser.
@glennf Thanks! It’s all so peculiar.
-
@glennf Thanks! It’s all so peculiar.
@glennf It’s really annoying, but mostly I would love to understand.
-
If I play a YouTube video for ~3 seconds and leave, it becomes marked as completely watched, with the red line extending all the way under the thumbnail. It’s been like this forever.
Does anyone know if this is a bug, or intentional? It’s frustrating to me.
(Apple TV.)
@mwichary Same here. It’s sometimes intermittent and happens the first time correctly but subsequent visits or pass-bys are fully to the right.
-
Not only Apple TV. I just reproduced it on iOS. I tapped on this unwatched video and closed it after a second or two. Now it’s marked as completely watched.
@mwichary it's a livestream, I don't know why youtube does that. even for vertical livestreams you scroll pasts in shorts they're marked as fully watched afterwards.
-
@mwichary it's a livestream, I don't know why youtube does that. even for vertical livestreams you scroll pasts in shorts they're marked as fully watched afterwards.
@6lr61 This isn’t specific to livestreams, and happens to normal videos as well.
-
If I play a YouTube video for ~3 seconds and leave, it becomes marked as completely watched, with the red line extending all the way under the thumbnail. It’s been like this forever.
Does anyone know if this is a bug, or intentional? It’s frustrating to me.
(Apple TV.)
@mwichary Happens to me all the time, usually when I open an interesting looking video just to put in on my Watch Later list. (There are a bunch of video grids in the YouTube TV app where context menus are not available.)
-
@mwichary Happens to me all the time, usually when I open an interesting looking video just to put in on my Watch Later list. (There are a bunch of video grids in the YouTube TV app where context menus are not available.)
@diondiondion Yeah! I recognize this too, completely.
-
It’s been like this for years for me. It is not related to the recent view count change.
My occam razor would be something like “two systems inside YT not talking to one another”: the page load saves the video as watched, and the playback progress sends the playhead position to server. If you nope out of the video quickly, the second one never fires, and the system interprets that as “completely watched.”
I don’t know if it’s just the UI layer (just shown this way), or system layer (actually recorded this way), and if there is a difference.
But why do some people not see it…
-
@mwichary …yep. And sometimes, if I stop watching at 90%, it resets the watch progress to 0%.
-
My occam razor would be something like “two systems inside YT not talking to one another”: the page load saves the video as watched, and the playback progress sends the playhead position to server. If you nope out of the video quickly, the second one never fires, and the system interprets that as “completely watched.”
I don’t know if it’s just the UI layer (just shown this way), or system layer (actually recorded this way), and if there is a difference.
But why do some people not see it…
@mwichary YT has been utterly broken for years... for me it also does basically the opposite, which is forget the playback position & go back to zero, if I tab out of a video while paused & the page times out & reloads.
BTW it's obvious why the 3-second-watched one always fires; that's the one they use to claim that viewing 3 seconds of a two-hour video counts as "video watched" in their stats. The error is that you see this, but then they really don't care at all about the user experience.
-
@Screwtapello Oh, that’s interesting.
-
@mwichary YT has been utterly broken for years... for me it also does basically the opposite, which is forget the playback position & go back to zero, if I tab out of a video while paused & the page times out & reloads.
BTW it's obvious why the 3-second-watched one always fires; that's the one they use to claim that viewing 3 seconds of a two-hour video counts as "video watched" in their stats. The error is that you see this, but then they really don't care at all about the user experience.
@jwcph …except some people say they never see this problem.
-
@jwcph …except some people say they never see this problem.
@jwcph Oh, and also it’s not over 3 seconds. It’s under. So it’s kind of the opposite of your theory?
-
@Screwtapello Oh, that’s interesting.
@Screwtapello I mean I hate it, but I can imagine a) a very old mvp idea like this from early days of YT, and b) a set of cirvumstances that makes this legacy thing still survive to this day under some circumstances.
-
My occam razor would be something like “two systems inside YT not talking to one another”: the page load saves the video as watched, and the playback progress sends the playhead position to server. If you nope out of the video quickly, the second one never fires, and the system interprets that as “completely watched.”
I don’t know if it’s just the UI layer (just shown this way), or system layer (actually recorded this way), and if there is a difference.
But why do some people not see it…
@mwichary I have seen this behavior. Other sins: It sometimes plays videos I didn't click on. It sometimes plays random shorts on startup. It will also randomly ignore clicks or taps to turn off or back out of a video during the first few seconds of playback. I have always assumed they are gaming the UX to goose their view stats to get more revenue.
-
@mwichary I have seen this behavior. Other sins: It sometimes plays videos I didn't click on. It sometimes plays random shorts on startup. It will also randomly ignore clicks or taps to turn off or back out of a video during the first few seconds of playback. I have always assumed they are gaming the UX to goose their view stats to get more revenue.
@brundaged Thanks – I have never seen any of this, if that matters.
-
@brundaged Thanks – I have never seen any of this, if that matters.
@mwichary I probably turned on "experimental features" or such years ago and forgot about it.
-
My occam razor would be something like “two systems inside YT not talking to one another”: the page load saves the video as watched, and the playback progress sends the playhead position to server. If you nope out of the video quickly, the second one never fires, and the system interprets that as “completely watched.”
I don’t know if it’s just the UI layer (just shown this way), or system layer (actually recorded this way), and if there is a difference.
But why do some people not see it…
@mwichary My guess was always (for the yeaaars this has been happening) that its a (bad) UI decision of "the playback progress for 1-3 seconds is too short, and we can't lie by saying it was 20% watched or something, so we'll just fill it up as a flag meaning 'somewhat watched' ".
I wanna say a good solution might be to make the progress always fill up with at least 20%, but a user might feel like an error happened if the indicator says they're 20% through an hour-long video, and it starts at 3s
