Um, I have a YouTube hoarding problem. I have 2,335 videos in my Watch Later list.
I'm never going to watch them all. On the web and official iOS client it seems I can only remove videos one at a time. I can't do that for all 2,335!
I was wondering if there were any tools or apps out there I could use that would allow me to just wipe the list clean?
Navigate to the Watch Later playlist page
Disclaimer: You really shouldn't run random code provided by randoms on the internet. You should probably never open your browser's console unless you know why you're doing it. I take no responsibility if this doesn't work, etc, etc.
If you understand that and also understand that I might be a lying loser on the internet trolling you (I'm not, but could easily be), open up your browser's console (ctrl+shif+j in chrome, ctrl+shift+k in firefox) and paste the following into said console. Again I can't stress enough how silly it is to run random bits of code if you don't know what it's doing
var el = document.getElementsByClassName('pl-video-edit-remove');
for (var i=0;i<el.length; i++) {
el[i].click();
}To sum up what it does, it finds every button with the HTML class "pl-video-edit-remove" - the button to remove the video from the playlist. It loops through all of them, "clicking" on each. This nukes playlists for sure. I have no idea what effect it'll have on other pages. Be careful where you run it.
If you get what it's doing and can see how it's doing it, hit enter
Wait while it loops through clicking on the "Remove from playlist" button for each vid. I dunno if that many videos causes YouTube to paginate or anything so you may have to do it a few times to finish him off.
Wait a few seconds before navigating away when it's done too, it takes a moment or two to submit all of the requests :)
I know I'm repeating myself but please, please, please - don't run random bits of code in your console. Lets just say this is here for theory's sake (although I tested it a few times myself and it worked perfectly)
If you're still unsure as to what to do or what this is doing I would highly recommend just sucking it up and clicking remove on each video manually
I just found out a method that is much easier and works 100% of the time! In your browser go to your Watch Later playlist and click the menu (the three dots in the right top corner) and add to playlist. Create a new playlist and name it someting easy(I named it WL for example). Now go to that playlist and go to the same menu and instead of adding it to a playlist uncheck Watch Later. Now your Watch Later playlist is cleared and you can delete the temorary playlist you just created. Hope this helps some people!
Videos
How do I remove all watch later videos from YouTube?
How do you remove a video from watch later on YouTube?
How do I remove recommended videos from the YouTube app?
I had the problem where my Watch Later playlist was full and I couldn't add any more videos to it.
There is to this day still no way to mass remove videos from the Watch Later playlist.
They only way to remove videos from it is to tap every video on the playlist, one by one, press remove and go to the next one.
Mind you I had 5000 videos in my Watch Later playlist, meaning that I had to press 10k times on youtube to remove every video from the playlist.
The Remove All Watched Videos option did nothing. didn't even remove the watched videos and even if it did I had maybe around 3000 videos that hadn't been marked Watched.
Solution:
So since YouTube doesn't want to provide with a solution to this we have to use a script that does it for us.
The script does the same as you would to remove videos, the difference is it does not mind clicking the same buttons over and over again until every video is removed.
The script is this.
setInterval(function() {
document.querySelector('#contents button#button').click();
var things = document.evaluate('//span[contains(text(),"Watch later")]',document,null,XPathResult.ORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE,null);
for (var i = 0; i < things.snapshotLength; i++) {
things.snapshotItem(i).click();
}
}, 1000);
Step 1: Copy the script.
Step 2: Go to your Watch Later playlist or click this link: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=WL
Step 3: Press F12 to the open developer’s console.
Step 4: Paste the script into the console and press Enter.
If you have an Adblocker you need to disable it first for this script to work.
After hitting enter the script should begin to remove the videos one by one.
It takes some time, but it is automatic.
Hope it helps.
Edit: Typos