Obscure Youtube Features and Behavior

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I thought I’d start a general thread about these things, since I’ve occasionally noticed various weird things here and there that other people might want to talk about.

A long time ago I started building music playlists on youtube, and I frequently wanted to snarf the contents of somebody else’s playlist into my own. I googled for how to do that, and got very confusing and contradictory answers on whether it was possible and how to go about it, Then I finally figured out the issue that hardly any of the “how to” guides mention: This is a feature the Youtube Music site supports, but not the main www video site. I’d assumed if I was looking at a playlist with the same exact ID on the music side it would be the same as the one on the www side, right? It is most of the time… I think. Now I’m going to have to check more deeply and I’m annoyed because I thought I was saving time by using the music side’s “add to playlist” function.

I just found a case where it isn’t true:

So here it is on the youtube side. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kgqI3U6KlD43sonyPiIMRniCrW9pYhOHg I switched over to the music version of that list by changing the www in the url to music like this: YouTube Music And I assumed it would point to the same exact list of files, but no. Check out the two different versions of “Guilty” they’re different lengths. One side has opening chatter from Elwood introducing Jake, the other doesn’t.

ETA dammit discourse, I did NOT want you to hide the URLs, the point was to show the exact coding, why did you do that?

2

This has little to do with the OP, but I was gratified years ago to find J/K/L works with YouTube. J/K/L is a pro video editing (Avid) feature for shuttling through video. J would shuttle backward slowly then faster as you hit J, L similarly forward, K was always Stop. YouTube does the same thing, but always at shuttle speed 1.0. Still pretty cool.

3

Put a space in front of the pasted link:
www.see.com?

4

I did open this thread to general talk about youtube functions, features, and bugs.

Both of my links in the OP have spaces in front of them. But Discourse decided to replace the second URL with the site title instead as if I had linked it to text in my post. Bizarre and unwanted behavior.

The very next list I tried to snarf into my own playlist by first replacing the www with music in the url, I found another different list. This one appears to only differ for the second playlist item, “Locked Within the Crystal Ball” The Youtube side: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kWvjA3QEvygxz8-d_rmeZbz1mZKqfrsws has the official video version, and the music side has the audio-only version: YouTube Music

5

Yes, sorry, I didn’t read carefully enough. I see what you mean.
YouTube Music

Pasting to both title and url.
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_lhIaUDKtK1bB5wv4ypeknB0YIH_wreZjI

[https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_lhIaUDKtK1bB5wv4ypeknB0YIH_wreZjI](https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_lhIaUDKtK1bB5wv4ypeknB0YIH_wreZjI)
6

So YouTube pushed another update to the android version of the app that once again has removed functionality for managing my playlists.

I’ve created a large number of playlists in youtube, and I add the same video to multiple playlists, sometimes a lot of different playlists. When I go to add or remove a video from playlists, up until yesterday, it gave me a list of my playlists with checkboxes next to them, I could go through the list, checking or unchecking as needed for that video.
(it won’t show me ALL my playlists, but that’s a different complaint)

This morning, I was downright pissed off that they did two things at once to that function.
The first is just plain bad. They added the thumbnail of whatever video is at the top of the playlist, taking up valuable screen real estate and reducing the number of playlists that show on the screen at the same time to just 3 or so at once. That change is merely terrible. I was fine seeing only the names. Seeing the thumbnails just wastes screen real estate and bandwidth and slows down the app.

The second is even stupider. They removed the simple checkboxes. Now there are flag buttons that show if a video is on that list or not, but they don’t work like checkboxes. Clicking one toggles that video on or off the list and closes the list so I have to re-open it again and scroll down it looking for the next one I want to add or remove the video from. [CENSORED] Wow. That’s just shitty.

I sent feedback, of course. Which they’ll probably ignore. They’ve only ever fixed obvious bugs I’ve complained about (usually taking months to do it). They’ve never reverted things that were clearly deliberate changes.

This one made me want to revert to the previous version if at all possible, and this is where things got strange. According to my version info, the last update got pushed October 7th. This new behavior didn’t start happening until today. I don’t know what’s going on there, but I suspect now even if I were go jump through all the steps of sideloading an old version, I might not get my checkboxes back.

I use the playlist functions on my phone all the time. I frequently go through the latest videos in my subscription feed and decide which playlists each one should go on, then hide item from my subscription feed. I curate my watching experience as best I can using the playlists rather than YouTube’s own stupid algorithms for what they think I want to watch next. This change severely impacts my ability to do so, by making the choice process take up a LOT of extra time. THANKS effin youtube.

I’m probably shouting into the wind here.