YouTube Autoplay and Hidden Settings Took Over the App
Users are frustrated with YouTube's increasingly intrusive and unpredictable behavior. They report issues with recommendations, watch history limitations, app interface changes, and auto-playing videos, leading to a feeling of lost control and a degraded viewing experience. These changes negatively impact their ability to manage and enjoy content.
SOURCES (60)
“I've searched for this, but all I've seen are posts describing errors where youtube isn't saving their progress on videos they watch. However, I'd like to replicate that, but intentionally. Is there something in the code that prevents the website from saving my progress, or…”
“So I noticed that now days, after the latest update, everytime I open the app, a random youtube shorts clip starts playing! I have to cancel it to to my home page/feed Is there a way to stop this from happening? submitted by /u/mystiqophi [link] [comments]”
“Found a workaround. In the settings of the YouTube app, you can find the Watch on TV button. You can cast directly to the TV from there (bypasses the TV's YouTube app) or link it with the TV code. The casting function is not the same as it used to be, but it's a lot more responsive than linking them together. Only downside is I lose any functionality with my TV remote.”
“It's my first day of using this new youtube update and it's so stupid. I can't find any songs from my favorite artist. Just a bunch of random videos i already seen. This makes me not even wana use it but wtf else am I gona do? Lol do yall think they will change it back? cause this is pointless. submitted by /u/Boring_Ad26 [link] [comments]”
“What is going on here? I can't even use the app anymore its like its deliberately trying to make me upset! I have all these things that I watch and engage with and I'm only recommended stuff that is on theme but the complete opposite opinion about it. Making fun of the kind of person I am, what i enjoy. And now theres so much AI generated, hateful and just plain lazy content now that I've never seen anything of the sort before. And without dislikes I cant influence it at all. Is ther”
“I thought it was something I did, but I am glad that others are having that issue. I also do not care for the new embed player..”
“Everytime I click something to ads to watch later, it will save to my watch later but the bookmark won't become solid. I can't remove from the Playlist by clicking it anymore, it just keeps saying save. I can only remove them on my phone by finding where they are in the Playlist and swiping, which is bloody annoying. The bookmark is working for other Playlist I have, it only seems to be broken for Watch Later. Anyone else have this issue or know why? I checked for updates, it isnt workin”
“What it says on the tin here. I use the tv app to sleep—on a 5th gen firestick, iirc. This has been a problem on my old smart tv too though when it had YouTube directly built in. Is there any way to disable this? I would like to hesr the music I made for my playlist without it jumping to some sort of automatically made playlist that I didn't choose. Even if it's just me wanting to listen to a single song while brushing my teeth since my bedroom is right next to the bathroom, it'll ma”
“Sometimes I can leave the app on iPhone and come back to the queue and resume the feed of selected videos…but often, it just disappears. Seemingly no rhyme or reason to it, except maybe every 12 or so hours? submitted by /u/Former-Wish-8228 [link] [comments]”
“If you've been seeing this message, this is why. Apparently, YouTube has new rules requiring users to sign in before watching certain videos. submitted by /u/Retrogamer5421 [link] [comments]”
“I've noticed ever since the dislike got removed that it was assumed you say you're "not interested" in the video. Now strangely, when I open up shorts on my phone, Ipad, or PC, I can't find the "Not interested" button. Has anyone else experienced this? submitted by /u/Living_Dig7512 [link] [comments]”
“I have PiP turned off for the youtube app and in special access settings on my phone. Still, everytime I go back from a video the PiP still plays. submitted by /u/ImonZurr [link] [comments]”
“Opened the new Ask Hank Anything and it opened a short I was watching a few minutes prior's title in vertical mode on my TV. Weird. submitted by /u/EntertainerOk9179 [link] [comments]”
“launching the app, sometimes, launches the Shorts tab and it starts playing immediately. I always make sure hit my phone's back button a few times when I go to close the app, because that's supposed to "reset" the app's home screen back from the Shorts tab. but today, and I swear this has happened before but I ignored it last time and just thought it weird, it opens each time to the Shorts tab automatically. I believe this may be a purposeful "feature"/"bug&q”
“Can't find an answer for this anywhere. Googling it just gives me stuff about iphone. submitted by /u/Kingofshovits [link] [comments]”
“Liking a short makes the heart disappear. The circle pn the like button stays even after i let go. submitted by /u/DivyangshaMazumdar25 [link] [comments]”
“Every time i try to play the audio on the preview of a video on the website, for some reason, it seems to be saving to my watch later even though i am not pressing to do so. Is this just a me issue or is this happening to others? (ignore what im using as an example 😭) submitted by /u/dumbfartwithabarrel [link] [comments]”
“I’m a petsitter so I naturally stay in a lot of different houses. I also frequently watch stuff on YouTube, and will often link my app to TVs in petsitting houses when I’m there, and then I delete my account from that TV when it’s time to leave- I ALWAYS make sure to sign out. I am however continually signed into my TVs at home, as well as the TV at my boyfriend’s place. There have been multiple occasions when I go to link my app to a TV in a petsitting house and I have no idea what their device”
“Updated to open as a normal video without any playlist attachment, can disable in cfg line 27. Best products are the one being used by developers themselves, so I will keep updating it from time to time.”
“Since the new update, I only have “Recent” and “History” sections. My downloaded videos are not listed even though they have been downloaded onto my phone. submitted by /u/10-Thirteen [link] [comments]”
“I click the channel icon in the bottom right and it directs me to my channel and that’s it. I could click it a bunch of times, refresh the page, switch accounts and nothing changes. Only way I can get to watch history is the gear icon - settings - watch history (but that involves a loading screen and extra steps) rather inconvenient compared to what it was last time I used the mobile app. When I’m watching a video and click another one I used to enjoy being able to go back and forth or look at m”
“idk they gave it back on my account submitted by /u/Familiar_Scholar_156 [link] [comments]”
“On my case though, when I use the filter “Videos” instead of “all” it resets the other filters I selected (i.e. “uploaded last year”). And as I write this I’m struggling with my keyboard on iOS.. it’s like enshittification has reached a peak. This is insanity..”
“Recently when watching shorts I randomly started getting videos of like 16-17 y/o girls dancing with text like "Your 3rd @ wants to go to the beach with you" or something like that. I immediately clicked not interested with the reason boring. Don't forget: I swiped onto the video and didn't even watch it for 2 seconds before immediately going to the next after hitting the button. Before that most of my shorts were political/military stuff and now I basically only get these girl”
“In their constant quest to drive users off the app, YT now has their notifications blockout almost the entire video you're currently watching. And I don't always want to dismiss it because sometimes I would like the notification to go to the video later... so you just have to sit there and wait for this giant annoying notification to go away so you can see the actual video you're watching. Notifications used to be a small bar like *every other notification on my phone*. So now I have”
“So YouTube rolled out a new update to their navigation layout and its absolutely atrocious. My New To You feed is gone and now I can no longer browse my explore page. It's just a black screen. Is this issue happening to anyone else? I've uninstalled, cleared cache, and the update still comes back. It's made the app basically un-usable. submitted by /u/agarcia_136heat [link] [comments]”
“When searching for a video it seems that youtube search knows what you are looking for and intentionally hides it. I can look the same thing up on google and pull up exactly what im looking for within the first page. Youtube will fill the first page with shorts, then have some vaguely related content for half a page, then show videos ive watched the last few days. Its horrible. Its gone from a tool to frustration machine. It seems like its being done on purpose because it happens on all my searc”
“You also can't use your headphones to switch songs This has never happened before. submitted by /u/Forsaken_Site_2268 [link] [comments]”
“My auto play is typically fine, I mostly rewatch the same series or stick to the same few creators so it's always played that. 2 days ago for what ever reason it's decided to start auto playing free movies, random videos with like eight views and lives with no one watching. I've never watched a live or a free movie on YouTube and it does it EVERY TIME. watching a series? It's not playing part two it's staring a live stream, it's driving me mad submitted by /u/”
“You're the survivorship bias joke. But if you're genuinely getting recommendations for the channels you love then you're actually the exception because I have to manually go and find my favorite channels. The type of video I constantly get is those videos from new channels that are history or some random popular topic that seem real with real scripts and voices then you realize they say the same obnoxious writing tropes in every video that mark AI.”
“I’m on iPhone. But. What happened this morning?? It’s now three full lengths then shorts. Over and over. Every video is spaced out a ton. And they all have ai overviews. I wish I could go back somehow submitted by /u/Frequent-Noise-711 [link] [comments]”
“https://preview.redd.it/q7toim1t66ch1.png?width=975&format=png&auto=webp&s=d6f4af4622de0717e2a735bca90e4980cb99d977 Hello! I have several playlists I like to rewatch. However, these playlists have over 20 videos in them, and sometimes I forget which part I stopped watching because I usually rewatch these playlists in the background while I'm working, so I do not really pay attention. Once I rewatch an entire playlist, YouTube adds a red bar under each video thumbnail, signaling t”
“So my brother had purchased some movies on YouTube and when you go to movie purchases and rentals. It shows the list but when you click on it it doesn't show all of them. You have to go to the search bar to look for the movie you want to watch submitted by /u/Comfysweatpants69 [link] [comments]”
“I use youtube on my TV for the most part, and I've noticed that when I look up certain things, they just don't pop up. For example, I wanted to continue my watch of Hell's Kitchen since they have it on there for free, and literally every episode is gone. It works fine on my ipad though? I'm confused submitted by /u/Responsible_Soil7091 [link] [comments]”
“doesn't work anymore! all videos are random years from a few days ago, to a few months ago, to a few years ago... to nearly before 2006! IT DOESNT WORK!”
“So, the friend whose couch I've been crashing on for the past year or 2 has one of those Samsung smart TVs and I was given the go-ahead to connect my account to it. For some reason, every time I use the search function for anything, the app will treat whichever video I select as the first one in a playlist, as if I had selected one of their automatically-generated 'mix' playlists instead of a standalone video. It doesn't even play other search results, it just throws random semi-”
“Hey everyone, I watch a lot of movies and shows, and kept running into the same problem: I’d pause something, come back later, and have no idea where I actually was. Not just which episode, but where in the episode or movie. I tried apps like Trakt and IMDb, but none of them let me log a specific minute. So I built Queued: you search for a title, add it, and log the exact minute you stopped watching. The details page then shows your progress and history for that title. Built with Next.js, Supaba”
“I've been saving videos I like, music and various other topics, probably over 100 clips, for the past 20 years. Even when watching YouTube on TV, if I see something I like, I simply Save. The other option is Watch Later. I noticed last week I only had the Watch later option. Today, tried it again, Watch Later option only. So I fired up the laptop and was shocked to see zero content on my playlist. All gone, erased, deleted. They were there a few weeks ago when I last accessed them. No was 10”
“When you click “not interested” on the tv app, it shows this. How am I supposed to know whether I dislike a video or not if I haven’t seen it yet? Why isn’t “not interested” enough of a justification? submitted by /u/Dooodleboom [link] [comments]”
“Yeah that's annoying. My biggest annoyance with them is them not indexing their videos with chapters.”
“I was looking for a video I watched on Saturday and all of a sudden I see a bunch of hours long videos one after the other that I don't recognize that but been watched in full. They're live videos and videos I would never watch (live fish cutting???) Also in foreign languages. It's only Saturday for like 10 1-4 hour long videos for a total of almost 24 hours in a row, in which I definetly watched other stuff. The shorts also don't look like anything I recognize/seen/interested in”
“In the past, to skip a video I'm watching from my Watch Later playlist full screen, I could either use skip on my media keys on my keyboard, or click next in the player controls. Now, I have to come out of full screen, scroll down, expand the collapsed playlist, click on the next video, wait for it to load, then finally put it back into full screen. Are they not even using the platform after making these changes? submitted by /u/linkheroz [link] [comments]”
“I removed youtube playables with the top sellers, because no one wants to play mobile games in their browser on a PC. Library brings you to your watch history, while profile brings you to your account. Community brings you to your community posts, and home is at home. Don't know if shorts work though. https://preview.redd.it/j2z88sk7vkbh1.png?width=317&format=png&auto=webp&s=8ac005ca9f8f9f31d24119790adbac83e965b7fd Added some settings too. And improved search by a little bit http”
“https://preview.redd.it/o94vwl8brkbh1.png?width=664&format=png&auto=webp&s=83d557d922c38135253ad288f0bf91fc9efcc15a I remember the time before AI, where you clicked on this 'YouTube' button and the embedded player stopped, so the video in the new tab that opened took over. Now both the embedded video and the video in the tab continue to play with sounds. submitted by /u/Realistic_Arm_ [link] [comments]”
“For me my in Germany it's called a TV box it turns off after 3 hours and when i turn it on I'm on the profile choosing menu but this happened to me too when the thing I said didn't happen”
“Just as the title asks. I can scroll through my recently watched and find a video with a specific word in the title (i.e. purple) and when I use the search function, it is nowhere to be found. Like I watched this video yesterday and it only pulls up like 1 or 2 videos per day, and sometimes they have nothing to do with the word I searched. And yes, I am using the search bar on the right, not the top of the screen. Am I using it wrong or something? submitted by /u/Vegetable-Bid7180 [l”
“I noticed in my history that I apparently watched a video I had no interest in watching. It was a video from my subscriptions. I do have thumbnail animations on so I can have a sneak peek at the video to see if it is worth watching but what annoys me is that when I move off the window to a folder or something, the last location the cursor was on in the browser stays that way until I go back to the window. Sometimes the cursor is stuck at the bottom of a page on a thumbnail and as how YouTube wor”
“I can no longer filter my favorites by “on sale” and etc like I used to. I don’t know how to fix this and if I’m just missing something but it definitely doesn’t work how it used to submitted by /u/Euryd1ces [link] [comments]”
“There’s a setting where your history deletes every few months/years. Go to history>manage all history and you can change it”
“loved this, but could there be an option to go to previous anime, as new recommendations kept popping as i clicked on my anime button. uk there is always a bug in you who wants to explore more. And if there was an option to go to previous recommendations or see a list of recommendations, i am sorry i was unable to find it, please make it more visible.”
“Auto categorizing watch later is something I’ve been wanting for agesssss. Does it do a good job?!”
“I don't find a video. I choose for a channel I like to watch while eating and then pick a interesting video”
“So I made a playlist dedicated to RvB from Season 1 to 17 and including the mini-series and other shorts in between, just cause I’m driving around for 12.5 hours for work and like listening to it in the background. Recently noticed my playlist was shorter than usual and found out Season 15 Episodes 6-21 have been removed from my downloads and won’t download no matter what I try. Anyone else had this issue? submitted by /u/ODST-Capwnd [link] [comments]”
“Hi everyone, I’ve noticed recently that the "Most Replayed" heatwave graph on the video progress bar is either missing on many videos where it used to be, or it has become so faint and flat that it's barely visible. I know that new videos need time to accumulate data for the graph to appear, but I’m seeing this happen on older, highly-viewed videos where the graph was definitely there before. This feels incredibly intentional. My theory is that YouTube wants to force users to w”
“I shouldn't have to wipe my watch history from my account. I've had to do that two times now, in all I saw was that it helped for a few days and then it just went back to the same old but now without my history of what I've watched so my recommendations are even more different.”