Reversing YouTube's "Most Replayed" Graph (opens in new tab)

(priyavr.at)

1 pointsprvt2mo ago1 comments

1 comments

prvtOP2mo ago

Hi HN, 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.

https://priyavr.at/blog/reversing-most-replayed/

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1 comments

prvtOP2mo ago

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.

https://priyavr.at/blog/reversing-most-replayed/

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse