Show HN: Reversing YouTube‘s “Most Replayed” Graph(priyavr.at)
priyavr.at
Show HN: Reversing YouTube‘s “Most Replayed” Graph
https://priyavr.at/blog/reversing-most-replayed/
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Link?
You can visit it by clicking the title. Eitherway, here you go: https://priyavr.at/blog/reversing-most-replayed/
I recently noticed a recurring visual artifact in the "Most Replayed" heatmap on the YouTube player. The highest peaks were always surrounded by two dips. I got curious about why they were there, so I decided to reverse engineer the feature to find out.
This post documents the deep dive. It starts with a system design recreation, reverse engineering the rendering code, and ends with the mathematics.
This is also my first attempt at writing an interactive article. I would love to hear your thoughts on the investigation and the format.