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Strange YouTube watch-tracking behavior
Just looking for some indication that I'm not going a bit crazy here, but does anyone else get shown videos they've never seen before, indicating that the video has been partially watched?
It seems to be just on search results and recommendations and it picks random points in the video to be kick-off points for continuing.
If anyone has an explanation that'd be appreciated, as it almost feels like my watch history is getting mixed up with someone else's.
This happens to me, in two different scenarios
There's one that's somewhat infrequent, but sometimes YouTube seems to track how long a video plays when I hover over a thumbnail. And will bring me back to where I stopped if I ever click on that video in the future.
There's other times where, like you, I find a video through search and YouTube starts me somewhere in the middle of the video.
My assumption was that this was YouTube's attempt to guess the most relevant section of the video to my query, and jump me straight there. I know this was a thing on Google Search when you searched for a video, so I assumed that YouTube might've been extending that behavior more broadly.
I experience this a lot. It is tied to one of the many annoyances of YouTube: there are only little space in the interface where one can rest the mouse pointer without something starting to play/animate.
I turned that play feature off ages ago. I got tired of it thinking I was watching something I wasn't and giving me recommendations based on an errant mouse pointer
I turn it off too, but have to keep turning it off over and over. The setting is stored locally in cookies instead of on your account, so every time you clear your cookies, you need to turn the setting off again.
You can turn that off? Oh, thanks for that!
I am so used to not be able to influence anything on Youtube that I didn't even think about looking it up.
You may be delighted to hear that there are plenty of browser extensions to improve YouTube experience. The most well-known ones are uBlock Origin, SponsorBlock, and DeArrow. There's also YouTube Anti-Translate for those who sometimes get video recommendations where YouTube decides to translate the title into a different language. Those are the ones I know of; I'm sure there are more that cover smaller annoyances.
The most infuriating part of this is that the videos are not quite on a grid, so moving the pointer between videos and scrolling down is not enough, as it might start auto playing something on the next row.
If you keep your mouse cursor at the top in the blank space to the sides of the search bar you can still scroll without dealing with the mouse cursor hovering over videos
I have definitely experienced the second: I search for something fairly narrow and get a video result that's more broad, but fast forwarded to the relevant section. The times it's happened it has usually been helpful.
Watch history has been working pretty poorly since hovering over a YouTube thumbnail, or simply having it on screen (on mobile) starts playing the video. My best guess is that that's what you're seeing.
It also counts and keeps track of history if you click through the preview.
I'd agree with you, except I did disable those preview play functionalities when they first came out, unless they somehow still happen in the background and are just hidden...
...you know, I wouldn't put that past Google 🫤
It turns on for new devices sometimes.
Yep, this is what happens for me too. The desktop version with my mouse hovering over the thumbnail that is.
This happens to us, and we assumed it’s 100% because of our AppleTV not shutting off every time we turn off the TV. I’d be interested to see what others have to say.
Yes! This does happen to me and I've never been able to fully explain it! I never have autoplay enabled, so I never automatically get taken to other videos on any device, nor let videos play in such a way. I'm very picky and intentional about what I choose to play and how-so
I have thought, at one point, it was due to my mouse hovering over a video in a results list or sidebar, and it starting to play a video in the thumbnail- however this was quickly disproven by the fact that a number of videos that I've never played that showed as partially watched were significantly long and indicated that I had watched an hour or more of them. Unless hovering (even for a split second when scrolling a page) causes it to scrub to a particular place in the middle of the video, and even if that's done for a second, it considers said video 'watched up to that point', but that seems wild and implausible to me.
I do use a number of browser extensions, including some that help remember my place in videos without Youtube's help, or modify Youtube in certain ways, and I thought maybe some bug from them could be interfering, but it would not explain me seeing videos I've never even browsed to or searched for previously marked as partially-watched. There is also no common denominator between the various videos that have been "watched" that I've never watched, no common theme or content, or anything.
It's always a search result or recommendation, and it always seems rather random.
I have recently started using similar extensions, but disabled any independent tracking behavior. I also have my watch history only last 3 months, so it's possible to scroll back to that point and the video doesn't appear (that I can see anyway). Very odd.
I've also disabled the autoplay preview, since it bugs me, so that can account for some I imagine, but l like you said it can't explain them all.
*Oh should say, this behavior started before I used extensions/modified apps, from what I remember.
do you have a carbon monoxide detector?
No, but I just demonstrated the problem to my wife. Can you have a shared delusion with carbon monoxide poisoning? 😅
I mean, if you've got the poisoning thing going on, can you trust anything? :) If you don't have a detector, its a great time to get one. You should have one regardless.
if it isn't this, that's a very odd issue. Couldn't hurt to check which devices are logged in (guide)
If you can log every session out, that'd be ideal. Also check if you have any unexpected API keys at https://console.cloud.google.com/apis/credentials
I've been seeing videos I briefly clicked into and then saved to a playlist to watch later show up as partially or almost completely viewed when they shouldn't be. I mostly watch YouTube on my phone, followed by my tv, so I just assumed it was a bug in either/both of the apps. I've seen it in other streaming apps like HBO Max as well.
I was going to say this too. I click on a random video just to be able to get to its channel faster (usually the Youtube Movies & TV channel) and then immediately close the video once the channel page opens. Later, it tells me I watched that whole video/movie, which I most certainly didn't.
If the other responses haven't convinced you yet, you're not crazy.
The same has happened to me off and on for maybe more than a year now, in videos that show up in my search results for queries that I know I haven't looked up before and for videos that I have no interest in and thus wouldn't ever be in my results. I don't use YouTube signed in, I don't have browser cookies, I have various anonymizer features enabled, and I use VPNs, so I figured my activity was occasionally getting lumped in with someone else's somehow, but I guess it's more likely to be a bug or some half-implemented feature behind the scenes.
The fact it shows up without being signed in catches my attention. Do videos usually show as being watched or not logged out?
If you're asking if I have a regular "watched video" mark while logged out, i.e. for the vids I actually do watch, yes.
For me YT will only track videos as watched during the same browser session. I do use a dedicated browser container for Youtube though, and if I close that all of container's tabs and go back to YT, there's no history.
Yeah, glad it's not just me. By the sounds of it YouTube is quietly pushing search results that start at a 'highlight' or relevant section of a video.
I have completely disabled watch history for a long time now and YouTube has become way, way, way less painful to use as a result. I highly recommend giving it a try. The main annoyance (for me) was having to remember where I left off in longer videos if I wanted to resume later, but if that feature is as broken as this thread makes it sound then maybe that's for the better anyway.
YouTube search has been busted at this point for a long while and I can't tell if it's because Googles search is so debased to sell ads that it's hitting their other internal services. Or because YouTube scale has hit a critical mass of poorly sorted content over time that conventional search systems are ineffective. But they would rather die maintain the broken system than give users better search controls and finding what they need. Same thing happened with Drive: they need to maximize the users time on the tool to justify existing so sorting and content controls seem maliciously bad.
I don't really mind it in Recommended and I think it's true to the function of that feed. Recommended is videos you would most likely watch. Subscriptions are for the channels you want to be informed had published something.
My guess with Recommend is that youtube has some segment of the algorithm in place to promote content from new/small creators and another that will just roll a stack of dice and point you to vids gaining traction with demographic groups you marginally apply to. I don't really mind and I've recently gone down and Advertising/Marketing rabbit hole. Last one was essays on weird video game obsessions. Any Austin following infrastructure in open world games and Internet Pitstop gushing about Vibes for hours makes for fun background listening.
Can't speak to the random start time. I know mine does that because my kid is only allows to watch YT on my profile. I think the app has device profiles because I get different recommendations on TV and my phone.
I don't get this, but what I do get is watching videos in a playlist and it marking several of them as not being fully watched despite the fact that I left them on auto play. The other thing it does to me on desktop is constantly recommend the same few YouTube shorts I've already watched over and over while serving me nothing new from those creators.
I've noticed this as well, and part of me is thinking the people on those channels have been editing the thumbnails and putting the progress bar at the bottom to make you think you have watched some of it.
That was my first impression too, I only questioned it once the video also started playing at the marked point, obviously not something a thumbnail can do.
Note: all of this is with watch history disabled, and has been for months
So to add another point of data here, I just did a search today, and a result of a video only posted 9 hours ago came up and showed as if I had watched almost 6 minutes in of a 16 minute video. This is not a search topic I've searched in weeks/months, and certainly not in the last 9 hours.
I notice in the thumbnail of the result, there are almost "two progress bars", one is the one that shows my supposed progress, and the other is a white bar that almost seems like it's highlighting an "important" or "highly-viewed" part of the video, and the progress starts at the beginning of that section.
Ultimately, I'm led to believe that Google is doing this on purpose, and maybe not particularly intending to say you've watched it already- but instead thinking you'll want to start watching at a particular timestamp and forcing the search result to start at that time. If I hover over the result itself, it even has t=355 in the URL, indicating the exact time it wants to start the video at.
I disabled my "video resume" extension, and reloaded the page, and it does not appear that my extension thought I had watched this video already- even without the extension YouTube still has that result marked with the partial progress bar and timestamped URL, despite me never hovering or seeing this video until today, at all.
So, this is not a fake progress bar or anything- Youtube is specifically altering a result to make it start at a particular timestamp. Unless this is something creators can do themselves, but it seems odd a creator would want you to skip parts of their video intentionally.
screenshot of the bottom of the thumbnail and how the progress bars appear
That's pretty notable, I had seen "skip to highlight" as an option recently, perhaps you're right and they're deciding to start you there in search results.
I wonder how that messes with the metrics of the creators, I imagine they'd not be happy with the loss of watch time.