Noisy YouTube titles are cleaned for display + storage, raw kept in videos.original_title:
- app/titles.normalize_title: strip emoji/symbols (keep accents), remove trailing SEO hashtag
clusters (keep numeric #3 episode markers), context-aware de-shout (mostly-ALL-CAPS titles ->
Title Case with an acronym whitelist + function-word lowercasing; otherwise only long all-caps
words), collapse repeated punctuation
- applied at enrichment (sync/videos.py) and in the download worker (ad-hoc yt-dlp titles);
catalog downloads inherit the normalized title automatically
- migration 0039: add original_title, preserve raw, rewrite title (generated search_vector
regenerates); reversible via original_title
Backfill on localdev: 122115/273417 titles normalized in ~2 min. Verified in the feed + on
real messy samples (emoji/de-shout/hashtags), accents + acronyms (PS5/AI/USA/PC) preserved.