HACKER Q&A
📣 teapot01

Is YouTube using a dark pattern to prevent background playlist play?


I listen to youtube playlists in the background fairly regularly and I've noticed some interesting changes in the last couple of weeks. Initially it began with an auto pause, and a popup saying video paused, click to continue.

More recently playlists have been looping the same song at seemingly random, looking to support forumss gives hundreds of comments reporting similar behaviour. (https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/16267152?hl=en)

Is youtube trying to drive adoption of youtube red by intentionally reducing the user experience for non premium users?

  👤 smittywerben Accepted Answer ✓
I haven't experienced this specifically on YouTube, but you may be talking about the Page Visibility API [0]. I've tried to disable it natively in Firefox and Chrome (without extensions) but with no avail. It can even tell if I switch desktops in i3wm. Here's two demos [1][2]. I'm guessing it's saving $$$ on bandwidth. I just want the option to turn it off.

[0] https://www.w3.org/TR/page-visibility-2/

[1] http://daniemon.com/tech/webapps/page-visibility/

[2] https://testdrive-archive.azurewebsites.net/Performance/Page...

👤 mrsalt
It would not surprise me if that was the case.

I do get that "video paused" popup every once in a while, but I have never seen the looping behavior.

If this is happening to you a lot, a cool way to get around it can be using mpv/youtube-dl, they both support YouTube playlists:

mpv --no-video https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLThlnilAqSEtI9HNfZEEy...

or

mpv https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLThlnilAqSEtI9HNfZEEy...

The --no-video flag hides the mpv OSC (a simple GUI, which is not necessary if you're playing songs). To navigate the playlist you'll need to learn a few keyboard shortcuts (<, >, ENTER, p), and more:

https://mpv.io/manual/stable/#keyboard-control

This works very well and is multi-platform.

Unless YouTube puts DRM on the whole site, this should continue working as long as you keep mpv or youtube-dl updated. Sadly I don't think we can know for sure if they're doing this on purpose.