Show HN: Reversing YouTube’s “Most Replayed” Graph https://bit.ly/3NLBu7c

Show HN: Reversing YouTube’s “Most Replayed” Graph Hi HN, I recently noticed a recurring visual artifact in the "Most Replayed" heatmap on the YouTube player. The highest peaks were always surrounded by two dips. I got curious about why they were there, so I decided to reverse engineer the feature to find out. This post documents the deep dive. It starts with a system design recreation, reverse engineering the rendering code, and ends with the mathematics. This is also my first attempt at writing an interactive article. I would love to hear your thoughts on the investigation and the format. https://bit.ly/4qlpNm9 January 16, 2026 at 03:06AM