YouTube the Snitch

December 18, 2011 7:52 AM

YouTube sleuthing question: When you're logged in, the home page shows a timeline of activity from all the accounts you've subscribed to. This is activity like uploading a new video, or liking/favoriting someone else's video. You can also click on a username to see that person's individual activity feed. What circumstances could cause an action to appear in the main feed, but not in the personal one for that user?

I "subscribed" to someone I know well in real life. Today as I was scrolling through my home page, I saw that he apparently "liked" a video that seemed highly out of character for him. But when I clicked over to his personal feed, that action didn't show up in the list. All the other actions of his I saw in the main feed did appear in the personal one, so this was the sole exception. I'm curious if he really did watch (and like) this video, but YouTube isn't providing a clear record... and if he didn't, telling him what I saw could be very awkward.

I want to tread lightly, as this could be detrimental to his career and relationships if it's true and made known. It appears that he simply didn't know how much information YouTube shares publicly, and viewed some embarrassing material in (what he thought was) private. I'd rather confront him directly than risk a scandal if someone else finds this. I shouldn't be too hasty though, if YouTube is itself in error. It's not clear to me if this is just a glitch or something else.

Non-technical advice is also welcome, if you can come up with anything helpful for such a vague conundrum.

posted by anonymous to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Data getting lost is (at a guess) three or four orders of magnitude more likely than data being created out of whole cloth.

But please, just leave it alone. You don't need to do anything about this.
posted by Leon at 9:43 AM on December 18, 2011

I accidentally clicked "like" on a video once (computer was acting up). I went to my liked videos and removed it from there. I don't know if it still showed in any feeds, but possibly something similar could've happened.
posted by revikim at 10:05 AM on December 18, 2011

Also note that it's quite common for people to upload stuff with misleading titles and other come-ons. (There's a whole genre of material centered around putting a shot of a sexy woman at the point in the video that becomes the thumbnail.) Unless you yourself watched this video and it was something that by its very nature implicated your friend, you may be making assumptions based on incomplete information.
posted by dhartung at 11:09 AM on December 18, 2011

I have liked many videos by accident. Unless the content is illegal I wouldn't do anything about it.
posted by alby at 1:38 PM on December 18, 2011