I haven't viewed this video, but I like it!



  • [IMG]http://i47.tinypic.com/amzhwo.png[/IMG]



  • YouTube "freezes" the play count at (about) 300 so they can switch the video from their "loose play count" to their "correct play count". If that makes sense.

    They have a quick-and-dirty play counter they use for videos with under 300 views, and works in real-time. They also have a second play counter system that does things like removes fradulent views, removes repeat views from the same user, etc, but runs every few hours in a batch process. What you're seeing is the first system has switched off, but the second hasn't completed its first batch yet.

    Edit: now that I've explained what's going on, yes it is indeed a WTF. But it's already established that YouTube can't do math.



  •  Yeah there's mostly likely just a discrepancy in the different counting systems for views and likes. It has to be said that this video was just uploaded a few minutes before, and it was (is) immensely popular. So some strange systems related to view counting have probably kicked in.



  • I make it a hard and fast rule to never look at anything on YouTube apart from the video itself, and sometimes (only sometimes) the Related Videos list. If you're looking at anything else, you deserve everything you get. Especially if you're reading the comments.



  • I found the comments often provide much more entertainment than the video itself.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

     @Vanders said:

    I make it a hard and fast rule to never look at anything on YouTube apart from the video itself, and sometimes (only sometimes) the Related Videos list. If you're looking at anything else, you deserve everything you get. Especially if you're reading the comments.

     QFT, but the best comment about the herp derp plugin I have seen was on another site, where someone said "look, it turns out you CAN programmatically add semantic content."



  •  Numberphile made a great video explaining how this works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIkhgagvrjI



  • Yeah I was looking for that video but I couldn't find it because he put "301" specifically in the title. When it's more like "somewhere greater than 300 but less than 315ish".



  • That's a bit like another forum I read, which runs IP.Board: occasionally you'll see new threads that have apparently been replied to more often than they have been read (usually no views but one or two replies), and if you look at the thread it's not like the same person replied multiple times without reloading the page.

    Edit: Oh, and I just spotted an even better example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvYXoyxLv64 (yeah, I play WoW :) supposedly has 307 views* as I type this, but 16396 likes and 1679 dislikes …

    * Suspicious number, given the OP.



  • @hunter9000 said:

     Numberphile made a great video explaining how this works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIkhgagvrjI

     

    Ah a friend told me he saw a video about it, and explained it. He couldn't find the video either. Thanks for posting! Although I'm wondering why they didn't fix the code to be < rather than <=...  did they just like this little bug enough to keep it around? Also the explanation about having multiple views added at the same time does not seem that satisfying to me. There is no such thing as "at the same time".

     

    @Gurth said:

    Edit: Oh, and I just spotted an even better example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvYXoyxLv64 (yeah, I play WoW :) supposedly has 307 views* as I type this, but 16396 likes and 1679 dislikes …

    * Suspicious number, given the OP.

     

    That was the video I was referring to, and of which I created a screen capture. :)

     



  • @pbean said:

    That was the video I was referring to, and of which I created a screen capture. :)

    In that case, the WTF is probably that it doesn't update in 3.5 hours :) But checking now, it has 990448 views.



  • @pbean said:

    There is no such thing as "at the same time".

    Please tell me you don't write multithreaded programs...





  • @Hmmmm said:

    @pbean said:

    There is no such thing as "at the same time".

    Please tell me you don't write multithreaded programs...

     

    "Nearly at the same time" != "at the same time".  Especially when data is coming in from different sources, it's particularly difficult to get these kind of requests at exactly the same time so that a simple <= 300 check will satisfy multiple requests in a row.

     



  • @Ben L. said:

    lookie what I found...
     

    Nothing on the web is unique. Everything that exists in some place, exists in another place as well.



  • @Ben L. said:

    lookie what I found...

    Nothing on the web is unique. Everything that exists in some place, exists in another place as well.


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