As someone who does put Youtube videos on repeat and does follow up on old videos that I still enjoy as "comfort" entertainment, I have two points to amend to the above:

1. I still don't want them showing up in recommendations. Recommendations are not a history view, if I'm listening to a song on repeat for 5 hours I don't need Youtube to recommend it to me. It has been recommended once very successfully, and if I need to find it again it should show up in my history[0], or at least it should be quarantined to its own recommendation section that I can toggle off. Even among people who obsessively revisit old videos, revisiting old videos and looking for new content are two separate categories of searches that should usually be handled differently imo.

2. The fact that I revisit certain series or listen to music on repeat for 5 hours does not mean that I want every video recommended to me that way -- ideally it should just be the variety clips and music videos. Youtube's algorithms are theoretically advanced enough to tell the difference between music and a programming tutorial or product review. So there shouldn't be repeat recommendations for me showing up for stuff like... one video in isolation out of an entire Lets Play playlist.

I feel like, Youtube knows that's not a music video: I know they know because they already put the video in the gaming section. They're just being obstinate and refusing to use that information in their recommendation engine, and refusing to ask the obvious question of "is a music video consumed differently than one video out of context from a Lets Play."

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I don't think you're wrong, I think you're probably 100% correct, I think that Youtube kind of just optimizes to get people to click on things and repeat videos are a way of doing that, and the algorithm just does what it does. But I'm not sure I know anyone who likes that, I should be the target audience for that behavior, I obsessively rewatch stuff all the time, and I don't like that behavior, the algorithm doesn't feel like it's tuned to my preferences. It feels like just kind of mish-mash.

In theory, if it was optimized for me, then I shouldn't be losing track of music. But it's not like its reliable enough to use as a bookmarking system, if I have a favorite song on Youtube I like to listen to, then I can't trust recommendations to have it in front of me, I have to actually bookmark it or (nowadays) download it and save it to an offline playlist.

So if they're trying to please people like me, then... it's not working.

<ranton>Personally, I feel like every time I interact with Google products or try to dig into how they work or recommend things, I always feel like the designers/programmers are almost deliberately trying to make their own jobs harder. Like they think it's cheating or something to have a toggle that could let people turn off this behavior. They have to organically have an AI come to every decision or else it's not 'real' programming; it's very weird.

I don't understand the reasoning why this wouldn't be user-configurable behavior at the very least, why it wouldn't be something where we can apply human reasoning on top of the AI algorithm. If you work at Google, I promise that no customer is going to be mad at you or shame you or say that you're bad at programming if you give us really clear controls that let us just tell you what we want in a predictable way. No one is going to be offended if you just ask us if we want to see repeat videos, you don't have to intuit that, we can all tell you ourselves and we won't be mad that you asked.

I hate feeling like I have to do reinforcement training on a cat to get good Youtube recommendations just because some product designer is scared that I'll think less of them if they ever admit that they don't magically know my preferences without asking. Some people might want repeat videos, and some people might not want them, and this shouldn't be an existential problem for Youtube, I thought the whole point of this algorithm stuff was that I could have an individual experience that was customized to me. Instead we've got the worst of all worlds because Youtube thinks its a personal failure if they don't come up with one single, universal strategy for serving videos that makes everyone happy across the entire world.

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[0]: Shoutout to NewPipe that allows sorting history by the number of views. History in general could be way better on pretty much platform, but even just that sort option is useful on its own.