I was thinking it would be a video counting from 0 to 1 million or whatever. Combined with a service to redirect you to the video at the correct timestamp using YouTube's "t=1m23s" parameter.

But 10 hours of video with 1s timestamp parameter resolution would only get you up to 36000

Similar things were done by generating a live video. Heck, you could just show the page for the video in the live video.

The problem would be in keeping the transmission live for a long time.

It would start out working fine at zero.

I agree, but when someone does something we consider to be impossible, that's interesting and noteworthy. This, not so much.

Yeah unfortunately Youtube doesn't let you edit videos, which sucks for creators who want to fix minor mistakes after a video has gone viral.

You can, however, add and edit "cards" on top of the video.

On another note, it would be noteworthy if the title on Hacker News also included the counter.

It’s sucks for them (and their viewers). It doesn’t suck for viewers who want to see the thing that went viral - not some new video with product placement etc.

Like Reddit comments with a thousand edits after they become popular.

If such a feature existed, it would be used for abuse 99% of the time

Vimeo does have such a feature. The ability to do such could be based on karma on YouTube.

Maybe they aren't downvoting for the fact, but they disagree with you that tying to karma solves the problem.

Yup. A lot of Youtube abuse starts with hijacking.

Lots of popular Youtube channels are by people who aren't very technically savvy. You can easily have 10 000 subscribers while only barely following how to make a video and upload it if there are 10 000 people out there who want that particular niche content. 100 000 is less common but not rare.

That's a juicy target for a hijacker. The hijacker tricks the channel owner into giving them control. "Hi, YouTube Services here, great to see you're so successful. Can you go fill out this form and we'll upgrade you to Elite status". A day later, locked out of their account and unsure what's happening, the channel owner is frantic. If they're lucky they know other Youtubers and can get control back. Otherwise... they may just walk away.

Meanwhile their subscribers are surprised to find that they're now subscribed to "Crypto investor update" or "Apple Genuis Bar" or whatever and it's bombarding them with videos they don't want.

Every feature you give the channel is a feature hijackers will try to use to maximise their profitability. If they can replace old videos, they will, if they can edit them, they will. They can change titles and hide stuff so they do that immediately.

If you're a channel owner: Buy two FIDO Security Keys. Use them to secure any accounts related to the channel then put one somewhere safe (maybe literally a safe if you have one) and keep the other like your house keys. Unlike other 2FA technologies, FIDO keys can't be phished. So short of you being dumb enough to literally Fedex your key to a bad guy (Do I need to say not to do that? Do not do that) there's no way to get tricked into letting them control your channel.

But until we get to a world where this sort of defence is ubiquitous, every Youtube API feature has to be considered as to how you'll unwind it if the channel was hijacked.

Uh, why the downvote? Can HN institute a policy that a reply is required if you downvote?

You're just farming more downvotes by clearly being affected by them and then complaining about them.

If this is how you respond to pointless vote counts, I would avoid revisiting comments after you leave them for the sake of your mental health.

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

> Please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I didn't leave a downvote, but that sounds like a horrible policy. You'd get a ton of short comments on the least-valuable (as judged by voters) comments, bloating the comment tree and making it way less readable.

It is fortunate, not unfortunate, that YouTube prevents editing of the video itself after a video has been uploaded, viewed, interacted with, shared, commented on, and started to accumulate karma of various sorts.