Weirdly I’m seeing it both ways now. In the latest covers thread, everything below my Aurora post and above and including your Whitney post is just a poster and a link. The first ~200 posts and the most recent 3 are proper YouTube embeds.
I can’t with any certainty say whether these posts were always this way, and some hiccup in YouTube embedding occurred between the morning of April 9th and 12 hours ago, or if these used to be embeds and got “flipped” to links somehow.
Every YouTube embed that I am seeing is still an embed.
Perhaps Elon has taken over YouTube, so things are just randomly changing minute to minute?
A few times recently, YouTube videos embedded here have started playing when I didn’t tell them to and I wasn’t even at that post in the thread.
Just now-ish, I was slowly making my way through the Lichtenstein plagiarism thread, over a couple of hours, and twice this video started playing all on its own when I was well past it. “Well past it” as in, the video is in post #12, and it started up when I was reading near the middle of the thread, and then again when I was reading near the end of the thread, which at this point has 52 posts.
I did play/watch the entire video earlier, when I was at that point in the thread. At some point further on, I went and spent time on another site, then went back to that thread to keep reading. I kept the tab open while I was on the other site. Why would the video have started playing again on its own much later, when I was well past it in the thread?
I posted that one, afaik, nothing atypical in how I did so. If there’s a way to stop that issue from happening, happy to do so in the future.
I’d guess it’s probably not anything you did, and I don’t know of anything that I did 
I wish I could remember what thread or video it happened with the other day, but alas, all I can remember is that it happened.
Something that happens to me alll the time which might be relevant here: I’m a big keyboard navigator; I tend to scroll with the spacebar a lot. But I also mix it up with two-finger scrolling on my touchpad.
I’ve noticed that if I watch a YouTube embed, it often retains the browser focus. Sometimes after I watch the video, if I don’t consciously click somewhere that is not the YouTube embed, the next time I hit spacebar, YouTube will start playing the embedded video again instead of Discourse triggering a pagedown – even if the video is way off the screen.
This often happens because I had done some scrolling using two-finger scroll, but then absentmindedly switch back to scrolling with the spacebar, not realizing I’d never clicked off of the YouTube to give focus back to Discourse.
Could something like that be happening to you?
Oh, that’s interesting! Thank you for replying and describing your experience.
Hmm…I don’t use much keyboard navigation myself, and I don’t think that describes my situation, but I certainly could be doing something like that somehow without being aware, and I’ll try to notice what I’ve done if it happens again.
(I was going to reply that I use a mouse or touchpad to scroll, but may have left the focus on the video and then hit the spacebar while composing a reply…but I would have had to click on the “Reply” button to get the Composing window, so it doesn’t seem like that would be it… )
Yeah, has happened a fair amount to me, might be a firefox thing?
I use a Chromium-flavored browser myself. I think it’s just a fact of how embed focus works and that the functionality of the spacebar is quite overloaded in the modern web browser.
I use a mouse to navigate and it happens to me too on Firefox.
When it happens I refresh the page and it goes away.
I understand your post as “I can’t set spoiler tags on my phone”. Am I correct?
I have trouble doing that sometimes as well, and usually it is a matter of spaces and carriage returns.
[spoiler]
Spoilertags not correctly set,[/spoiler]
Spoilertags correctly set.
HTH?
Happens to me all the time, and has for years. As @byronba says, I just hit the Reload button (left of the address bar in Firefox) or Ctrl+R and YouTube shuts up.
@IronEdithKidd, this may be too simple-minded an answer, but if I understand your question this is how it works on my tablet.
If you highlight the text you want to blur, you should see the row of commands at the top of the text window—Bold, Italic, etc. Tap the gear symbol on the right and then tap “Blur Spoiler”. Sometimes the gear seems to hide itself behind a hamburger menu.
Please tell me I’m not mansplaining.
I’m mansplaining, aren’t I? 
If a woman ASKS for help on a specific issue, answering her (as long as you don’t make jokes about how dumb ‘ladies’ are) is exactly the right thing to do.
I was being facetious, of course. It’s just that I’m sure @IronEdithKidd knows much more about posting from a phone than I do, since I usually post from a desktop.
I am known for taking things too literally, sorry!
This is so annoying, and it happens if you watch a YouTube video then scroll away (whether or not you finished it or paused it). It’s so annoying that I only watch YouTube videos in new tabs as a result.
I don’t know what changed but embeds seem to be okay now.
Compare what it was:
To what it is now:
Maybe someone can look through the scripting and see what the difference is?
As I mentioned upthread, Ctrl+R is your friend, resetting the video without seeming to affect anything else on the page.
An almost-opposite problem that sometimes happens is when I want a video to continue playing as I scroll down, but after scrolling past 20 or so posts the video cuts out. I’m sure this has happened to me, but now I can’t reproduce it.
Thanks for the tips, @byronba , @teknocholer, and @orenwolf , about refreshing the page or simply watching in a new tab 
What seems weird to me is that you say it happens a lot, while I don’t recall it happening for me before now. Maybe just by chance I had never happened to do the exact sequence of actions that causes it
Anyway, thank you! I appreciate that people pitch in to answer questions here. Also, I never feel dumb here, even though I may ask some pretty ignorant questions sometimes. People are kind here 
