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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • TootSweet@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldClassic 🌱
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    27 days ago

    That IQ testing site has us sharing free publicity for them. And there are folks in this very thread admitting to have gone to the site and started taking the test. Probably none of that free PR would have happened had the site reported in a way that made the tweeter think twice about whether that result was brag-worthy or not.

    Seems to me the way it reports its results is in fact working very well. (For Truetest .)












  • Oh Jesus. Really?

    Holy crap. That explains nearly everything. The only things that still seem weird are:

    • I’m 99% certain 273s is exactly where I left off watching yesterday, which seems like a weird coincidence.
    • I don’t remember it starting anywhere but the beginning when I first started it yesterday, but it’s possible I just immediately scrolled it back to the beginning without thinking about.
    • It doesn’t start there by default on my phone. Maybe YouTube doesn’t do that for mobile devices for some reason?
    • It doesn’t start at 273s if you use (at least certain) other search terms. Maybe YouTube decided that the bit that was relevant to my search term was at the 273s mark.
    • Someone else in this thread said they couldn’t reproduce the behavior I’m seeing by performing the same steps. It’s possible YouTube is A/B testing, though… though you’d think I wouldn’t consistently fall into the same “testing out the automatically starting you in the middle of the video feature” group and sometimes I’d get the control group where it didn’t give me that feature. Maybe they decide which group your in on the basis of “are you on mobile or not-mobile.” And maybe bamboo is on mobile or otherwise is on a machine that will consistently be picked for control group.

    Still, though, the idea that it’s not “remembering me” and probably is just giving people that timestamp when they search that term by default even if they’ve never run across that video before seems like the most likely explanation.

    Oh, and I did take a minute to go try this on (a fairly outdated version of) Firefox on another Arch Linux laptop on which I wasn’t logged in and all my cookies/history/form data/etc had all been deleted immediately before. I did get the indicator on that video when searching “gnu taler”. Which definitely seems like more validation of this theory.

    Thank you for your input!