Declaring “watch-later” bankruptcy

I’m sure a lot of people get to this point … it’s a form of procrastination, clicking on the tempting little Watch Later mini-clock-face.

“Of course I’ll watch you”, I say to the little thumbnail.

Fast-forward a few years later, and there are now about five hundred of these. Surprise.

Given that the average length is about half an hour (if it’s five minutes, I either watch now or watch never), this is several months of dedicated watching time. Not going to happen.

I could painfully prioritize these, figure out what I really meant to watch, and what I was just lying to myself about.

I don’t need to do that. I know I was lying to myself most of the time I clicked that little button.

So the next best option: start over.

Unfortunately, Youtube hasn’t allowed for this possibility.

I found a hack on StackExchange¹. It involved moving some playlists around. Painful, but doable.

Doubly unfortunately, this doesn’t work anymore. The Watch Later playlist is an append-log now. Your pile of misery cannot be allowed to shrink².

There seemed to be light at the end of the tunnel: by suitably obscure Javascript, you too can wipe your slate of false optimism clean. It was an innocuous looking short one-liner³.

I tried it, didn’t work for me.

I tried reverse-engineering it, but couldn’t hack and cut my way through the mass of divs that characterize modern web pages. Javascript is the new assembly language of the web, deal with it.

I got more desperate, tried out other, more unwieldy snippets⁴.

I did find some kindred souls⁵.

Anyway I’ve been on-and-off this quest, with no success. Still looking for that “magical snippet” that will work for me.

(@Youtube, Y U No Let Me Delete My Watch History ?!)