YouTube had a bug – I used ChatGPT to investigate

YouTube had a bug – I used ChatGPT to investigate(blog.thezilber.com)

10 points by theZilber 23 hours ago | 9 comments

starcast2026 12 hours ago |

I too noticed -20s, but I always felt it is a feature. I close browser and after a couple of days I continue watching same video. This -20s shift gives me a good context on what was the last sentence/frame, so I can comfortably continue watching. So this is a feature as far as I am concerned & felt Youtube has thought about people like me.

Barbing 12 hours ago | |

Bet you’re right. I just said 20sec is too long but maybe they do this for me and it feels just right so my perception and reality and opinion are a little out of sync.

cush 12 hours ago |

This sounds like an intentional feature. Like how when your audio book gets interrupted by a notification it replays an extra second of audio. Personally I really like it.

dmix 12 hours ago |

> In the past few days, I noticed a bug I could not keep ignoring. Sometimes YouTube would randomly skip back in time during soft reloads

FWIW I noticed this bug as well, I often listen to longform videos on youtube and it was very obvious something changed when you pull up half-finished videos it suddenly started skipping back when it didn't previously.

I view Google as too big of a faceless machine to bother investigating myself, but I'm happy someone did.

IronWolve 17 hours ago |

I noticed some websites dont have proper refer and embedded youtube videos give a 153 errors. Had chatgpt debug the error, told me to install a header plugin and how to configure it. Fixed the problem.

weird-eye-issue 12 hours ago | |

How does that happen, I thought the referer header was set by the browser how do websites impact what is sent in the context of an embedded YouTube video? If a website could fake their referer header that could be a security risk

I think you probably have another plug-in that was blocking the headers from being sent in the first place... Or maybe some sort of browser setting

Barbing 12 hours ago |

>In the bug report I opened to YouTube, I used a nicer set of words.

Didn’t use “retarded” four times then? Not sure if that or using Chrome was worse, but now onto the cool stuff:

Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP): neat!

20 seconds: that’s a while. Prefer it reduced to 0sec or instead maybe 1-3 seconds? Have noticed YouTube might replay a few seconds when switching from app to browser. Sometimes it’s too long and seems like a bug, other times it seems like they might’ve been accounting for the moment of distraction while opening the browser and closing the app. (I know this seems unlikely. Perhaps it felt inspired by iOS which now seemingly intelligently replays a second of a podcast that was interrupted by a call or something.)

PS: does the Android app make you tap like four times to switch to max quality even when you’re on WiFi and told the app years ago to use high quality? (Jerks!) …and yeah Google is doing (actually more than) a reasonably good job with many aspects of YouTube (zero downtime, instant loads).

weird-eye-issue 9 hours ago | |

> PS: does the Android app make you tap like four times to switch to max quality even when you’re on WiFi and told the app years ago to use high quality?

Never had this problem. I'm in Thailand and whether I'm on mobile or Wi-Fi it's always at high quality

LoganDark 11 hours ago |

This isn't a bug, it's intentional. YouTube will skip back some amount of time on purpose if it thinks you haven't been to the video in a while. Even if all you did was click away from the tab for some hours.