The fact that a client-side change can impact reported views is wild. Its so wildly the wrong place to track views that it forces me to wonder if its an intentional & malicious decision by Google to mobilize YouTube creators against the idea of viewer privacy.

This is how it has worked for ages. If you think about it for a bit, I think you'd come up with all kinds of reasons for why this can't be done with just server-side signals.

For example, how do you account for skipping over already fetched parts of the video or rewatching the same section multiple times?

Or for the entire video being cached and researched? For bots downloading the video?

The idea that this is some malicious anti-adblocker time bomb implanted a decade ago is preposterous.

Yeah. How does the client get trusted and could someone write a view amplifier that reports extra views to YouTube? I would assume it’s already being abused if they trust the client side to report views. If they’re not trusting the client, the ad blocker explanation doesn’t work.

It makes no sense.

Did we hear anything about people using ad blockers and still having YouTube's watch history enabled reporting that a watched video didn't pop up in the history?