I love that the view count is included in the minimalist UI. I came across one with zero views, and there's something so intimate and exciting about being the first person to watch an ancient home video (even if it's shaky handycam footage of a horse, narrated in Russian).
As an aside, hats off to Google to being able to serve an 11 year old video with no noticeable delay from what must be the coldest of caches.
I felt slightly uneasy myself - the first thing I saw was a mum laying on her bed doing a selfie-video with two small kids (probably between 2 and 4 years old) singing a song to daddy.
That felt like a total invasion of their private lives.
I've had the same videos from my own kids, and while there is nothing embarrassing or shameful about it, it's not something I'd want broadcasted. Maybe it hit a nerve for me as it is so very very similar to my own life right now. Sure yeah they uploaded it to YouTube and it's public but it still felt wrong to watch that.
Kinda ruined my day a bit - feel kinda bad for viewing it.
That slight unease used to permeate the entire internet (and made it exciting and genuinely thrilling!), and now that you've articulated it out loud it makes me think it's a critical missing part to all those "nostalgia for the old web" thinkpieces people love to write these days. Granted, I was a teenager in the 90's literally growing up into the world as the web grew up around me, so there was slight unease in all aspects of life, but that feeling of the unknown, of not totally being sure what you're going to discover (good or bad) when you surf from link to link, maybe that's really what's missing in the sanitized, commodified 2024 internet.
Nah, i agree. I'm a little younger but i distinctly remember adults around me heavily warning about using the internet and especially putting anything about yourself into it. There was a great distrust between people and the internet in the early 2000's, but then kids got ipods that could text and call, and network effects meant that you _had_ to be on Facebook, and slowly over time Facebook and MySpace started to not feel like the danger zone, like it was separate from all those warnings cause it was just you and your friends chatting at 2:00a.m., nobody was gonna bother to look at you. Then the social media empires grew and expanded and it kinda became the entire internet (that people use) started to feel like not the danger zone. You could do anything there, and huge company's would create walled gardens that would hide the worst aspects and let you pretend it was a safe and open place, to their benefit of course. Adults stopped warning, kids became adults, and now to hear a warning about the internet is incredibly rare. We also just think that there's so much shit there, nobody would take the time to notice us, and everyone else is posting their entire lives anyways so why not? Strange times
I wonder if the no warning part is a consequence of too much moderation, so people think everything or most thing is so moderated it no longer warrants a warning?
Ruined your day? Although it is undoubtedly tech voyeurism the fact that these observations occur in every day life and don’t violate people’s privacy I would just like to invite you to get out more.
==occur in every day life and don’t violate people’s privacy==
Plenty of things happen in every day life, but are private (sex, break-ups, proposals, Dr. visits, etc.). I also noticed lots of these videos have people in the background. I doubt they were they notified that a video was being taken and uploaded publicly.
==I would just like to invite you to get out more.==
Maybe an alternative is to invite yourself to ask questions about why there are multiple comments with the same sentiment rather than reflexively telling them how to feel/act?
I don't think it is invading their privacy-with-a-big-P (after all I have no idea who these people are or where the lived etc), it is more just socially it felt inappropriate.
I think if a young family was sat on a park bench doing this and you went and sat on the bench between the mother and the father it would be considered at the least incredibly rude and inappropriate. Even if they are in a public place and you are not technically violating any laws, you'd still be acting in a way that most people would disagree with.
If I can tweak the metaphor, it's more like sitting on a vantage point within the park and peering at them with binoculars, far enough away that they can't see. It's still ick but definitely intrudes on them far less.
No, it's more like someone took a photo of themselves to show to their family, and after they were done with it they left it on a bench in a park (perhaps not realizing that the photo wouldn't magically go away on its own), and a long long time afterwards someone happened to stumble upon it and look at it.
Thanks - that's exactly how I felt after watching a view videos - I came away feeling a bit disturbed - largely because the things I watched were very wholesome but also very private.
We don’t know that. As per the webpage, this could’ve been uploaded directly from the Photos app on an iPhone, by people who didn’t really understand the consequences. Maybe they uploaded it and thought they’d get a private link to share with one specific person. Most people are not tech savvy and don’t fully understand the possible ramifications of their sharing.
Yeah I just got a video of an infant taking a bath. I have small kids my self so nothing new, but not something I would want on the internet for everyone to see. And I doubt that the mom, and now the teenager who was the kid, would want broadcast everywhere.
The world was a lot different 15 years ago, both YouTube and iPhones were new and not full understood by the average person. Anyone who has designed a UI knows that not all actions are explicit.
More likely: uploaded with the intent that a very limited audience would see it, thinking it would drown in the pool of videos uploaded to YouTube or maybe not even aware that other people could stumble upon it.
I think, back then, many people didn’t realize their videos are going to be available to the whole world. They might have uploaded them just to send a link to relatives, and fumbled or missed the privacy toggle. Lots of very private videos on there.
I have seen recently uploaded videos (or reels, or "tiktoks") which were intentional... Shit's wild. People now know, yet... They sometimes do the most disgusting shit ever for the attention (likes, views).
At the time this was probably the one of the most convenient ways to share videos with loved ones. It wouldn't cross your mind that these videos were "public" because no one had the link but you.
I'm sure it never crossed their mind that 15 years later an aggregator would be resurfacing them.
I think it’s also a reminder that the internet felt so much safer in 2010.
My sister (who is apparently wiser than most of us) has always refused to sharing pictures and videos of her kids on the internet and in 2010 that felt very old-fashioned. Now, because the internet feels so much more dangerous, it’s become a completely normal take.
I know a video from roughly 11+ years ago where the audio got messed up, not sure how to even begin to report that. Was some niche "inside joke" type of meme. I have to wonder how many videos got re-encoded by YouTube that got screwed up inadvertently.
As soon as it gets split off from google and they no longer have the money machine to fund them and have to fight on a level regulatory-monitored ground for ad revenue you can bet your ass it will.
Can you post your source? Last time I checked (and quickly checking around now) I didn't see any announcement from Google about Youtube being profitable.
For every year that passes, storage becomes cheaper, but the total size of youtube's video repository grows. I wonder what the net effect of all that is in the end. Ever increasing costs? Or maybe it kinda evens out.
Interestingly, if storage cost decreases geometrically over time, then the total storage cost of storing a video for all eternity is finite.
Though what I was commenting on here wasn't so much the cost of storing a video at all, but storing it in 'warm' enough storage that you can load it really quickly.
I got charged by Squarespace the other day, and it immediately raised red flags—I've never done business with them before.
Then it clicked: this was for an old domain I’d purchased through Google Domains. I knew Google had sold its domain business to Squarespace, but in the moment, I’d completely forgotten about it.
Anyone aware of public archives of videos like this? These are so cool and I imagine that in the future this would be an incredibly valuable peek into history given how raw it is.
It's like TikTok sans algorithm. I got a protest in Vietnam, a rally for French politician François Hollande, a dad making his daughter laugh, hockey practice, a farmer driving a truck, a guy impressing his girlfriend with his new subwoofer.
This is the web2 internet I remember and love. People sharing their lives.
I watched a blurry video of a family at the zoo, a father tickling his toddler (who is having an absolute blast), a middle school play rehearsal, some guy's high school class presentation in south africa (I think?), a random indie country band at a bar, lots of terrible dancing... all joyful, no agendas.
There was a thread yesterday about Facebook's little red book and a lot of nostalgia from folks who were there at the time about the optimism across builders then. This was the kind of content that drove that feeling.
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.
Lasagne on fire on the top of an oven.
I've watched a family BBQ from 2009.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Time to close the browser.
You know, whenever I see stuff like this or the Deep Into YouTube subreddits, it always makes me wonder what it must be like for the person that posted the original video. There they are with a video they randomly threw online without any intention of it becoming popular, only to see their mostly abandoned channel blow up overnight as their random clips get thousands of views.
Depending on the user, it must be either the coolest thing ever or the creepiest thing ever, with little in between. Kudos to anyone that takes the opportunity and uses it as a reason to kickstart a YouTube career or something.
Regardless, it's always interesting to see, since:
1. It shows you just how big YouTube is, and how few of the videos posted there get any attention at all. The fact there's a huge percentage of the platform viewed by no one is just mind boggling to me.
2. It illustrates how little marketing skill correlates to video editing skill, since there are interesting videos going ignored due to their creator's inability to add a good title or thumbnail or metadata, or which were uploaded on a whim without any of that stuff being taken into account.
I would imagine a sizable portion of these old (15+ years ago) accounts are abandoned. Forgotten password, email address tied to an ISP that only serves a region where the person no longer lives, that kind of thing.
YouTube wasn’t always tied so strongly to a Google account, and overall fewer people had Google accounts in the first place.
A substantial amount (20% already back in 2014, I would imagine more now) of songs available on streaming never get streamed either. Kind of why that market has steered towards flat-fee upload distributors. 29 bucks a year is better than 10% of 0 bucks.
This is a lazy take. The reason is that there is money involved in picking who is at the top of the playlists. It's no big secret the big record labels own large parts of the music streaming industry. They are simply getting their investment back. There is no incentive giving money to any small third parties in terms of promotion. Spotify doesn't even pay out for songs that get under 1000 streams per year anymore.
This is not even getting into the investment companies that buy artist catalogues wholesale, and therefore have a major interest in keeping old songs in constant rotation for the decades to come.
Saying any of it is a meritocracy is pure ignorance.
I don't think they're saying it's a meritocracy, I think they're uncontroversialy saying that a playlist of songs with up-till-now zero plays would be a huge amount of garbage, e.g. poorly made FL Studio/Garage Band experiments, not even interesting music just kinda bad music.
Yeah, it seems like it could be a great feature for helping level the playing field a bit and discover some hidden gems that no one would have ever heard. But I imagine that at some point 'no streams' would have to turn into 'low streams' but that's fine.
Noooo! I was working on the exact same web app inspired by the same article seen here, you just beat me to the punch (Issue: I ended up overengineering the UI, trying to make a css-only simpsons-style TV around the iframe, the rest is basically the same as this app). Good Job :)
In case you need inspiration, I've had this site bookmarked for many years. I don't know anything about the Web design, but it has the appearance you describe.
https://www.myretrotvs.com/
This is wonderful. The effect of switching between videos from all over the world of people doing all sorts of things sounds like it could be dehumanizing — I find it anything but. It reminds me a little of our admin view at Beme, where we had a live feed into videos people were sharing publicly all around the world in real time. Really cool to see the sunset and the sun rise at the same time.
These videos are wonderful, great execution on the project.
Was a pump & dump by Casey Neistat. Lacked true popularity and network effects as it turned out people don't want to share unedited, raw footage. Social media is about looking good. So Casey just used his YouTube/influencer popularity at the time to pump metrics and then managed to sell it to CNN. No idea what CNN did with the tech or people but not much later they shut it down entirely.
How many of these people didn't understand that anyone could see their videos?
It might be a bit difficult for the highly technical HN crowd to grasp how little many people understand technology. Not changing the title is already a big clue. Since it was a feature built-in to a native app, people might have thought their videos would not be public or only shared with friends, and lots of them might not even have understood what they were doing at all.
This is my take too. This is more like finding an unsecured s3 bucket and delving through it.
It might have been "published" to YouTube, but was it really done so with informed consent?
This is unlikely to be a popular opinion here, but mass downloading of IMG_0001 videos is essentially trawling for private data by looking for an identifier of accidentally unsecured private data, akin to searching for "{ apiKey: " in github.
especially given the low view counts. I've just watched two videos with 1 view. One would assume if they were being uploaded to be shared they'd have more views.
When the original post about this was on HN, I searched IMG_[XXXX] on YouTube and the videos I found... let's say most of them were really boring.
The ones I see here are the complete opposite, they are so interesting, this might be a total coincidence or maybe the simpler interface changes my perception. You didn't curate them?
After a few clicks I got a guy heating the tip of a screwdriver-like thing on a gas range and apparently attempting to de-solder some component off a PCB. Genius!
I hit the jackpot: someone recorded Ralph Stanley performing O Death in concert.
I caught him several years ago (on my second attempt: he was supposed to perform at the Grand Ol’ Opry, and I drove 5 hours to see him, but he canceled) but he was clearly running on fumes. Definitely something I wish I’d understood when I was younger: find musical giants and see them live before they’re gone.
But it's presumably not the same one that you saw, since it doesn't show any signs of being an amateur or mobile device recording, and wouldn't have been crawled for the IMG_0001 site.
Speaking of the theme of that song, and since we were just talking about Borges here in in another thread, compare his story "The Secret Miracle"!
The craziest thing to me is how...clean these results are. No nudity. No porn. No gore. Nothing overly sensitive. There is no doubt that so much of that stuff would have been initially uploaded but blocked by YouTube's filters. There are a million hours of video uploaded to the service every day, and they have built the infrastructure to analyze every single frame. When people ask why there are no viable competitors to YouTube – this is your answer.
I just got what looked like an accident scene from a South East Asian country. A body with a head injury lying on a road with police standing around and a crowd of onlookers behind tape.
Not sure where you're getting that alt-right circle from, it's just regular Internet lingo.
Unless you consider people like Hasan alt-right too? Would be mind-blowing for sure, but hey, to reach their own.
Got popular during the pandemic, though it predates it
Check out http://astronaut.io/ for a similar vibe but recent videos as opposed to old ones (also, it's not limited to iPhones which translates to more variety in terms of geography)
Many moons ago an acquaintance did a somewhat similar project finding default title "mic in track.mp3" files on music sharing services that were created using MusicMatch Jukebox.
I completely agree. There's something really jarring about watching videos from this time, where things were just more candid in a way that's hard to describe. I only clicked through a few videos and I was smiling from ear to ear. People dancing in a club, a guy riding a homemade little dirtbike in the countryside, babies playing and kids riding bikes. They feel like home videos. It's beautiful.
Yea, the Internet has slowly lost something as every online video has slowly evolved to start with the same obnoxious "WHATS UP GUYS! Check out my sponsors who have some great stuff to show you. I've got some great content for you so watch it to the end and remember to hit like and subscribe with the bell!" in that fake "90s Radio DJ" voice.
What I find weird is searching IMG_XXXX directly on youtube returns you a number of videos with such title and half of the results are 10+ year old youtube SHORTS. There was no such thing back then. Just bloody videos! Does Youtube auto-convert short old videos to vertical shorts on users’ behalf?
The very first video was of a toddler doing their first steps. I don't know any of them and had no clue where they are from. Someone just wanted to share their magic moment and after 15 years, I was involved.
If you turn off watch history YouTube refuses to show you anything at all on its landing page. Not even the stuff it would show to someone not logged in.
I think they consider it punishment for not letting them hold your data, but I find it nice to have to search to get anything.
The first vide I see is two neo-nazi guys naked in the shower and singing a punk song..
I can't help but feel like watching these videos is some kind of breach of privacy, I don't think all these videos were supposed to go to youtube. But then again, someone did press "upload to youtube" on these videos, so I'm torn.
Yes same, my first video was a dad recording his two young sons on sofa just playing around. Very up-close to their faces, I felt very uneasy having a feeling of breaching someone's privacy of their own home
Gives you similarly obscure videos, but without any context or links which makes it feel more ephemeral and random in my view. Have spent many hours down that rabbit hole, makes me feel like I'm watching the interdimensional cable from Rick and Morty
Note to the author: the website is broken and seems to rely on some "works best on chrome" shenanigans to work. On my phone, youtube thumbnail gets pressed but nothing happens (duckduckgo browser).
A little off topic.. As I watch these, I have a overwhelming nostalgic feeling for those times. I almost never feel nostalgic for the past, but these videos evoke many personal memories from that time period.
THANK YOU! Random snapshots of life from a completely different internet era—no filters, no algorithms, just raw, unedited moments. This feels like opening a digital time capsule.
One suggestion, add controls for rotating the video. Cameras in this era didn't always have the ability to rotate a video after it was shot, so some of these are in the wrong orientation.
I enjoyed the views counter with the low numbers. It made me feel like me and four other people have shared this moment. When the view counter was zero, that felt very special.
Warning - some of these can be reasonably graphic. I came across this which is live footage of a hammerhead shark being caught and killed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isHEsOPIr28
Also got some cute things like a dad giving a piggyback ride, some weightlifting, an amazing dance rehearsal - so very human.
One of the vids I looked at was some guys warming up for a league basketball game, pretty cool. Another was of a small child riding a scooter, I can think of a lot of ways that might be uncool.
My take away is this: I took a video of my grandson's birthday party recently using my cellphone. I haven't uploaded or sent it to anyone yet. Has my cell carrier already captured the video without my knowing it? In the corporate world the only privacy that matters to them is their own, not ours.
I've read that digi-cams were making somewhat of a comeback, maybe that's good.
Well I clicked one too many times. Came across a funeral procession with 0 views. Couldn't see any faces or identifying information, thankfully. But sad nonetheless.
I was thinking there will probably be nothing from my home country (HU) since it's a small country, and iPhones aren't as popular anyway. People are comparatively price sensitive.
And then in the 5th video that got recommended to me, the language seemed familiar, and sure enough, it's hungarian. IMG 0397, with 18 views.
While watching, I started playing a fun game where I try to guess the location of the video, GeoGuessr style. Very interesting when it comes to the odd handheld angles and low quality of some of the video clips. Would recommend.
The video player on the site adds a vignetting effect (darkening the edges of the screen) to make the videos feel older, I think. If you click the date on a video you see the original on YouTube, without this effect.
Lots of baby videos. Wonder if that's because 15 years ago phone storage was at a premium so only relatively important stuff got videoed. I'd image baby videos would be diluted amongst less important stuff in a 2024 sample.
YouTube was also one of the easiest ways to share family videos back then (the files were too large to be emailed, Google Photos didn't exist yet, pretty sure Facebook could share videos but the quality wasn't as good, etc).
Nice and all, but aside: just reminds of the ridiculous/lame design choice from the great Apple to use that filename. How many shared photos sent in emails to me from iPhones with subject IMG_0001. Classic Apple removing any kind of useful functionality because the users wouldn't need to interact with files or know more about the system. A date in the filename would have killed them? IMG_20070629 or whatever..sigh.
It's pretty standard practice for all cameras manufacturers to use a basic incremental filename. Many more useful data are embedded in jpeg exif metadata.
On the contrary including a date in the filename could be perceived as user hostile because none of the multiple iso representations (or non iso) is universally used and understood by the general public.
Eg : 20241112, 1112024, 1211024, 131208, 081213 and so on...
I think the issue is more that the battery runs out and now it's 2007 again and you start overwriting img_20070101_01.jpg ; last-directory-entry++ is a bit more robust.
One upside is that it hopefully prevented developer to ship half-baked software that rely on filename and can't handle duplicate name gracefully.
You can't prevent collisions (multiples sources/counter reset/date reset, etc). So it's actually nice to have an unforgiving standard that will bite you if you make unfounded assumptions.
if you let users watch two videos and pick which one is more interesting, this will go very bad in no time as it did with early Zuckerberg site Hot-or-Not
I love that the view count is included in the minimalist UI. I came across one with zero views, and there's something so intimate and exciting about being the first person to watch an ancient home video (even if it's shaky handycam footage of a horse, narrated in Russian).
As an aside, hats off to Google to being able to serve an 11 year old video with no noticeable delay from what must be the coldest of caches.
I felt slightly uneasy myself - the first thing I saw was a mum laying on her bed doing a selfie-video with two small kids (probably between 2 and 4 years old) singing a song to daddy.
That felt like a total invasion of their private lives.
I've had the same videos from my own kids, and while there is nothing embarrassing or shameful about it, it's not something I'd want broadcasted. Maybe it hit a nerve for me as it is so very very similar to my own life right now. Sure yeah they uploaded it to YouTube and it's public but it still felt wrong to watch that.
Kinda ruined my day a bit - feel kinda bad for viewing it.
That slight unease used to permeate the entire internet (and made it exciting and genuinely thrilling!), and now that you've articulated it out loud it makes me think it's a critical missing part to all those "nostalgia for the old web" thinkpieces people love to write these days. Granted, I was a teenager in the 90's literally growing up into the world as the web grew up around me, so there was slight unease in all aspects of life, but that feeling of the unknown, of not totally being sure what you're going to discover (good or bad) when you surf from link to link, maybe that's really what's missing in the sanitized, commodified 2024 internet.
Or maybe I'm just overthinking it lol
Nah, i agree. I'm a little younger but i distinctly remember adults around me heavily warning about using the internet and especially putting anything about yourself into it. There was a great distrust between people and the internet in the early 2000's, but then kids got ipods that could text and call, and network effects meant that you _had_ to be on Facebook, and slowly over time Facebook and MySpace started to not feel like the danger zone, like it was separate from all those warnings cause it was just you and your friends chatting at 2:00a.m., nobody was gonna bother to look at you. Then the social media empires grew and expanded and it kinda became the entire internet (that people use) started to feel like not the danger zone. You could do anything there, and huge company's would create walled gardens that would hide the worst aspects and let you pretend it was a safe and open place, to their benefit of course. Adults stopped warning, kids became adults, and now to hear a warning about the internet is incredibly rare. We also just think that there's so much shit there, nobody would take the time to notice us, and everyone else is posting their entire lives anyways so why not? Strange times
I wonder if the no warning part is a consequence of too much moderation, so people think everything or most thing is so moderated it no longer warrants a warning?
Ruined your day? Although it is undoubtedly tech voyeurism the fact that these observations occur in every day life and don’t violate people’s privacy I would just like to invite you to get out more.
==occur in every day life and don’t violate people’s privacy==
Plenty of things happen in every day life, but are private (sex, break-ups, proposals, Dr. visits, etc.). I also noticed lots of these videos have people in the background. I doubt they were they notified that a video was being taken and uploaded publicly.
==I would just like to invite you to get out more.==
Maybe an alternative is to invite yourself to ask questions about why there are multiple comments with the same sentiment rather than reflexively telling them how to feel/act?
> multiple comments with the same sentiment
Multiple comments saying it felt creepy or multiple comments saying it ruined their day to any extent? Those aren't the same thing.
There is literally a comment thanking the person who made the original comment because they felt the exact same way.
==Thanks - that's exactly how I felt after watching a view videos==
The original comment was a long explanation that ended with: ==Kinda ruined my day a bit==
Seems like pretty tame language to get worked up about, I see two qualifiers in merely 6 words.
Without more clarification, I am unsure about whether feeling the same applies to the day ruining or just the direct reaction.
> Seems like pretty tame language to get worked up about, I see two qualifiers in merely 6 words.
I don't think anyone here is worked up.
I don't think it is invading their privacy-with-a-big-P (after all I have no idea who these people are or where the lived etc), it is more just socially it felt inappropriate.
I think if a young family was sat on a park bench doing this and you went and sat on the bench between the mother and the father it would be considered at the least incredibly rude and inappropriate. Even if they are in a public place and you are not technically violating any laws, you'd still be acting in a way that most people would disagree with.
This is what it felt like to me.
If I can tweak the metaphor, it's more like sitting on a vantage point within the park and peering at them with binoculars, far enough away that they can't see. It's still ick but definitely intrudes on them far less.
No, it's more like someone took a photo of themselves to show to their family, and after they were done with it they left it on a bench in a park (perhaps not realizing that the photo wouldn't magically go away on its own), and a long long time afterwards someone happened to stumble upon it and look at it.
"don’t violate people’s privacy"
Did you asked the kids in the videos (who are grownups or teenagers now) if they are ok with random strangers watching their kids life?
Also I would doubt, that most people were aware, that they were uploading the video to the general public.
So there are surely worse things going on, but I also felt uneasy after watching such private videos.
Thanks - that's exactly how I felt after watching a view videos - I came away feeling a bit disturbed - largely because the things I watched were very wholesome but also very private.
> very private
very explicitly uploaded with the intent that others would see it
We don’t know that. As per the webpage, this could’ve been uploaded directly from the Photos app on an iPhone, by people who didn’t really understand the consequences. Maybe they uploaded it and thought they’d get a private link to share with one specific person. Most people are not tech savvy and don’t fully understand the possible ramifications of their sharing.
The fact that many of these have exactly 0 views makes it totally plausible that the uploaders had no idea that this video existed.
I can imagine people thinking "YouTube" was a video service for You, indicating that you'd be uploading something private for You to share as desired.
It sounds crazy now, but having worked with people a lot to make software that makes sense to them, this... Is not far fetched in the slightest.
Yeah I just got a video of an infant taking a bath. I have small kids my self so nothing new, but not something I would want on the internet for everyone to see. And I doubt that the mom, and now the teenager who was the kid, would want broadcast everywhere.
The world was a lot different 15 years ago, both YouTube and iPhones were new and not full understood by the average person. Anyone who has designed a UI knows that not all actions are explicit.
More likely: uploaded with the intent that a very limited audience would see it, thinking it would drown in the pool of videos uploaded to YouTube or maybe not even aware that other people could stumble upon it.
I think, back then, many people didn’t realize their videos are going to be available to the whole world. They might have uploaded them just to send a link to relatives, and fumbled or missed the privacy toggle. Lots of very private videos on there.
I have seen recently uploaded videos (or reels, or "tiktoks") which were intentional... Shit's wild. People now know, yet... They sometimes do the most disgusting shit ever for the attention (likes, views).
> That felt like a total invasion of their private lives.
Except they literally explicitly uploaded it to YT.
At the time this was probably the one of the most convenient ways to share videos with loved ones. It wouldn't cross your mind that these videos were "public" because no one had the link but you.
I'm sure it never crossed their mind that 15 years later an aggregator would be resurfacing them.
Is there a more convenient way now? Not being sarcastic, but it's still pretty damn convenient.
I use Google Photos. Apple Photos would work too. Or any of the messaging apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, etc.
These days you can unlist the video.
That was possible then too, but took an extra step. Defaults are important.
YOu think people know how to do that? Or even remember their content is there for all to see?
I think it’s also a reminder that the internet felt so much safer in 2010.
My sister (who is apparently wiser than most of us) has always refused to sharing pictures and videos of her kids on the internet and in 2010 that felt very old-fashioned. Now, because the internet feels so much more dangerous, it’s become a completely normal take.
Link? :P
First video I got was some happy people (families, by the sound of it) popping off a few rounds at the range with AR-15s. My day has been improved!
I know a video from roughly 11+ years ago where the audio got messed up, not sure how to even begin to report that. Was some niche "inside joke" type of meme. I have to wonder how many videos got re-encoded by YouTube that got screwed up inadvertently.
I don't think they are being served from Youtube (?)
View count is nice but I'd like to be able to share a video that I got with someone else, I think that would be a great function.
Clicking the date opens it in YouTube.
That's a shame, I like the ephemeral nature of these.
I'm really anxious Google will also kill this aspect of Youtube one day.
As soon as it gets split off from google and they no longer have the money machine to fund them and have to fight on a level regulatory-monitored ground for ad revenue you can bet your ass it will.
AFAIK youtube is profitable now. It was not for years, but is now.
Can you post your source? Last time I checked (and quickly checking around now) I didn't see any announcement from Google about Youtube being profitable.
Yes, but it could perhaps be more profitable, if they cut spending on this aspect?
For every year that passes, storage becomes cheaper, but the total size of youtube's video repository grows. I wonder what the net effect of all that is in the end. Ever increasing costs? Or maybe it kinda evens out.
Interestingly, if storage cost decreases geometrically over time, then the total storage cost of storing a video for all eternity is finite.
Though what I was commenting on here wasn't so much the cost of storing a video at all, but storing it in 'warm' enough storage that you can load it really quickly.
What could be cost of total storage of YouTube ? Edit : About billion USD per year.
Since when did that stop shareholders to make even more money?
Google: if you like it, it's going away.
Once you live to a certain age, you realize this is true about everything in your life.
I'm increasingly thinking of customer product relations in terms of giving treats to your users.
The moat and stickiness concepts are ok, but "candy store" is more fruitful.
Of course what constitutes candy is different for every product and you need to understand your customers to know what "flavors" they want
I got charged by Squarespace the other day, and it immediately raised red flags—I've never done business with them before.
Then it clicked: this was for an old domain I’d purchased through Google Domains. I knew Google had sold its domain business to Squarespace, but in the moment, I’d completely forgotten about it.
Oh well.
They've already announced deleting videos from unused channels. So it's only a matter of time
https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/18/youtube-will-no-longer-be-...
> Google updated the post to read, “We do not have plans to delete accounts with YouTube videos at this time.”
Anyone aware of public archives of videos like this? These are so cool and I imagine that in the future this would be an incredibly valuable peek into history given how raw it is.
https://archive.org/details/movies?tab=collection
You should get YouTube Premium so they can pay for all those servers.
It's like TikTok sans algorithm. I got a protest in Vietnam, a rally for French politician François Hollande, a dad making his daughter laugh, hockey practice, a farmer driving a truck, a guy impressing his girlfriend with his new subwoofer.
This is so raw and human, I love it.
Same reaction here, I just watched a bunch guys playing with crabs in the kitchen sink to the soundtrack of riotous laughter.
10/10 I saw something real online
I got a dude cutting a higher branch off a tree and it kinda bouncing off, some family stuff and some things that could have been on AFHV
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I got a dude beating a horse with a stick!
Far Side caption: Terry was never any good with idioms
Recent and related:
IMG_0416 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42102506 - Nov 2024 (324 comments)
Not recent (http only): http://astronaut.io
YouTube videos that have almost zero previous views
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20432772 - Jul 2019 (239 comments)
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13413225 - Jan 2017 (140 comments)
This is the web2 internet I remember and love. People sharing their lives.
I watched a blurry video of a family at the zoo, a father tickling his toddler (who is having an absolute blast), a middle school play rehearsal, some guy's high school class presentation in south africa (I think?), a random indie country band at a bar, lots of terrible dancing... all joyful, no agendas.
There was a thread yesterday about Facebook's little red book and a lot of nostalgia from folks who were there at the time about the optimism across builders then. This was the kind of content that drove that feeling.
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Lasagne on fire on the top of an oven. I've watched a family BBQ from 2009. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to close the browser.
You know, whenever I see stuff like this or the Deep Into YouTube subreddits, it always makes me wonder what it must be like for the person that posted the original video. There they are with a video they randomly threw online without any intention of it becoming popular, only to see their mostly abandoned channel blow up overnight as their random clips get thousands of views.
Depending on the user, it must be either the coolest thing ever or the creepiest thing ever, with little in between. Kudos to anyone that takes the opportunity and uses it as a reason to kickstart a YouTube career or something.
Regardless, it's always interesting to see, since:
1. It shows you just how big YouTube is, and how few of the videos posted there get any attention at all. The fact there's a huge percentage of the platform viewed by no one is just mind boggling to me.
2. It illustrates how little marketing skill correlates to video editing skill, since there are interesting videos going ignored due to their creator's inability to add a good title or thumbnail or metadata, or which were uploaded on a whim without any of that stuff being taken into account.
I would imagine a sizable portion of these old (15+ years ago) accounts are abandoned. Forgotten password, email address tied to an ISP that only serves a region where the person no longer lives, that kind of thing.
YouTube wasn’t always tied so strongly to a Google account, and overall fewer people had Google accounts in the first place.
A substantial amount (20% already back in 2014, I would imagine more now) of songs available on streaming never get streamed either. Kind of why that market has steered towards flat-fee upload distributors. 29 bucks a year is better than 10% of 0 bucks.
Seems to bizarre to me that the "zero streams" playlist isn't a feature actually.
Most things with low popularity are rated appropriately. There are definitely some hidden gems, but most media that is created is simply bad.
This is a lazy take. The reason is that there is money involved in picking who is at the top of the playlists. It's no big secret the big record labels own large parts of the music streaming industry. They are simply getting their investment back. There is no incentive giving money to any small third parties in terms of promotion. Spotify doesn't even pay out for songs that get under 1000 streams per year anymore.
This is not even getting into the investment companies that buy artist catalogues wholesale, and therefore have a major interest in keeping old songs in constant rotation for the decades to come.
Saying any of it is a meritocracy is pure ignorance.
I don't think they're saying it's a meritocracy, I think they're uncontroversialy saying that a playlist of songs with up-till-now zero plays would be a huge amount of garbage, e.g. poorly made FL Studio/Garage Band experiments, not even interesting music just kinda bad music.
Yeah, it seems like it could be a great feature for helping level the playing field a bit and discover some hidden gems that no one would have ever heard. But I imagine that at some point 'no streams' would have to turn into 'low streams' but that's fine.
It feels too intimate, I had to close it. Cool concept though
Noooo! I was working on the exact same web app inspired by the same article seen here, you just beat me to the punch (Issue: I ended up overengineering the UI, trying to make a css-only simpsons-style TV around the iframe, the rest is basically the same as this app). Good Job :)
As the great Nas has rapped:
Ecclesiastes 1:9
Pretty sure Nas was first though. I can't even find Ecclesiastes on Tidal.
Whoever said it first was lying.
the joke lands a lot better in the original Cylon.
Score:5, Funny
Here's to hoping we get the Premier album for Christmas!
In case you need inspiration, I've had this site bookmarked for many years. I don't know anything about the Web design, but it has the appearance you describe. https://www.myretrotvs.com/
Finish and post it please, I still want the Simpsons style TV!!
there's room on the internet for multiple sites, finishing it is nice
Theres nothing wrong with more choice. Please post a link!
To be fair it's all just astronaut.io with a different scope
This is wonderful. The effect of switching between videos from all over the world of people doing all sorts of things sounds like it could be dehumanizing — I find it anything but. It reminds me a little of our admin view at Beme, where we had a live feed into videos people were sharing publicly all around the world in real time. Really cool to see the sunset and the sun rise at the same time.
These videos are wonderful, great execution on the project.
I never heard of Beme before now, interesting concept, but it looks like it had a fiery beginning (a million uploads in the first week) and then... ?
Sold to CNN in 2016 for $US25M
Was a pump & dump by Casey Neistat. Lacked true popularity and network effects as it turned out people don't want to share unedited, raw footage. Social media is about looking good. So Casey just used his YouTube/influencer popularity at the time to pump metrics and then managed to sell it to CNN. No idea what CNN did with the tech or people but not much later they shut it down entirely.
That’s an extremely unfair characterization. It was an honest attempt to make a product; the product didn’t catch on; CNN acquihired the team.
You are just describing a regular startup, that’s not a pump & dump which makes it sound like a scam.
The keming got me, I totally read that as Berne and wondered what you were admining in Berne with video streams. Nvm.
How many of these people didn't understand that anyone could see their videos?
It might be a bit difficult for the highly technical HN crowd to grasp how little many people understand technology. Not changing the title is already a big clue. Since it was a feature built-in to a native app, people might have thought their videos would not be public or only shared with friends, and lots of them might not even have understood what they were doing at all.
This is my take too. This is more like finding an unsecured s3 bucket and delving through it.
It might have been "published" to YouTube, but was it really done so with informed consent?
This is unlikely to be a popular opinion here, but mass downloading of IMG_0001 videos is essentially trawling for private data by looking for an identifier of accidentally unsecured private data, akin to searching for "{ apiKey: " in github.
especially given the low view counts. I've just watched two videos with 1 view. One would assume if they were being uploaded to be shared they'd have more views.
When the original post about this was on HN, I searched IMG_[XXXX] on YouTube and the videos I found... let's say most of them were really boring.
The ones I see here are the complete opposite, they are so interesting, this might be a total coincidence or maybe the simpler interface changes my perception. You didn't curate them?
After a few clicks I got a guy heating the tip of a screwdriver-like thing on a gas range and apparently attempting to de-solder some component off a PCB. Genius!
I hit the jackpot: someone recorded Ralph Stanley performing O Death in concert.
I caught him several years ago (on my second attempt: he was supposed to perform at the Grand Ol’ Opry, and I drove 5 hours to see him, but he canceled) but he was clearly running on fumes. Definitely something I wish I’d understood when I was younger: find musical giants and see them live before they’re gone.
Here's a video of him performing it live that I found with a YouTube search:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xmRWj7gJEU
But it's presumably not the same one that you saw, since it doesn't show any signs of being an amateur or mobile device recording, and wouldn't have been crawled for the IMG_0001 site.
Speaking of the theme of that song, and since we were just talking about Borges here in in another thread, compare his story "The Secret Miracle"!
http://secondarylaresources.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/4/7/10473...
Thanks for sharing that riveting performance. And, Borges is always intersting.
The craziest thing to me is how...clean these results are. No nudity. No porn. No gore. Nothing overly sensitive. There is no doubt that so much of that stuff would have been initially uploaded but blocked by YouTube's filters. There are a million hours of video uploaded to the service every day, and they have built the infrastructure to analyze every single frame. When people ask why there are no viable competitors to YouTube – this is your answer.
I just got what looked like an accident scene from a South East Asian country. A body with a head injury lying on a road with police standing around and a crowd of onlookers behind tape.
My second video was from a strip club
Doubtful, it's likely just a game of numbers.
There is endless amounts of coomer content on YouTube like
You're just a million times more likely to get non-coomer content when it's been uploaded via iPhones upload to YouTube button during 2009-2014.Heck, that was a time before onlyfans etc, so the primary coomer stuff on Reddit etc was produced by exhibitionists vs people just milking simps
For those like me who had no idea what coomer means, it’s a weird meme about men that failed no nut November. It seems popular in alt-right circles.
Not sure where you're getting that alt-right circle from, it's just regular Internet lingo. Unless you consider people like Hasan alt-right too? Would be mind-blowing for sure, but hey, to reach their own.
Got popular during the pandemic, though it predates it
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Coomer
Many people still believe that 4chan et al are Alt Right.
They’re just what 14-28 year old boys are up to, sans filter algorithms. It’s the whole spectrum.
The idea itself is so regressive and shaming, I don't find it surprising at all that the political right is drawn to it.
Automated filtering surely is not across the main competitive advantages of youtube.
Check out http://astronaut.io/ for a similar vibe but recent videos as opposed to old ones (also, it's not limited to iPhones which translates to more variety in terms of geography)
Many moons ago an acquaintance did a somewhat similar project finding default title "mic in track.mp3" files on music sharing services that were created using MusicMatch Jukebox.
> https://www.stark-effect.com/mit.html
Watching this only a few videos and it made me profoundly sad. It is a loss of authenticity, everything online now feels fake compared to this.
I completely agree. There's something really jarring about watching videos from this time, where things were just more candid in a way that's hard to describe. I only clicked through a few videos and I was smiling from ear to ear. People dancing in a club, a guy riding a homemade little dirtbike in the countryside, babies playing and kids riding bikes. They feel like home videos. It's beautiful.
Yea, the Internet has slowly lost something as every online video has slowly evolved to start with the same obnoxious "WHATS UP GUYS! Check out my sponsors who have some great stuff to show you. I've got some great content for you so watch it to the end and remember to hit like and subscribe with the bell!" in that fake "90s Radio DJ" voice.
What I find weird is searching IMG_XXXX directly on youtube returns you a number of videos with such title and half of the results are 10+ year old youtube SHORTS. There was no such thing back then. Just bloody videos! Does Youtube auto-convert short old videos to vertical shorts on users’ behalf?
I believe Youtube just serves the video with a Shorts UI, nothing special besides the formatting of the page.
The very first video was of a toddler doing their first steps. I don't know any of them and had no clue where they are from. Someone just wanted to share their magic moment and after 15 years, I was involved.
The internet truly can be a marvelous place.
Mine was a horse f*cking another horse. Reminder to not browse HN while at work. Closed the site pretty fast after that.
Nature channel stuff is sfw
> another horse
Thank goodness
Every video says “sign in to make sure you’re not a bot” but there’s no sign in button. Amazing product design from YouTube.
PSA: This will fubar your YouTube watch history / recommendations, you might want to incognito.
I'll take this as a benefit; an algorithm palate cleanser
If you turn off watch history YouTube refuses to show you anything at all on its landing page. Not even the stuff it would show to someone not logged in.
I think they consider it punishment for not letting them hold your data, but I find it nice to have to search to get anything.
I was wondering why YouTube suddenly thought I only wanted to watch sub 1000 view videos
First pull was a surreptitiously recorded conversation that sounds like it was being held as blackmail.
I got one that seemed to involve child soldiers in Africa, zero views. This is wild.
"Between 2009 and 2012" fits with the Kony 2012 documentary.
haha creepy. i was lucky and got a cute cat video =)
The first vide I see is two neo-nazi guys naked in the shower and singing a punk song..
I can't help but feel like watching these videos is some kind of breach of privacy, I don't think all these videos were supposed to go to youtube. But then again, someone did press "upload to youtube" on these videos, so I'm torn.
Yes same, my first video was a dad recording his two young sons on sofa just playing around. Very up-close to their faces, I felt very uneasy having a feeling of breaching someone's privacy of their own home
This reminded me of the scene in Amelie where she makes a video montage for the glass man. Really interesting and random topics.
Damn, I got Gangnam styled on video #3.
Got to give a shout out to https://youhole.tv on a similar note.
Gives you similarly obscure videos, but without any context or links which makes it feel more ephemeral and random in my view. Have spent many hours down that rabbit hole, makes me feel like I'm watching the interdimensional cable from Rick and Morty
Note to the author: the website is broken and seems to rely on some "works best on chrome" shenanigans to work. On my phone, youtube thumbnail gets pressed but nothing happens (duckduckgo browser).
It works fine in Firefox on a desktop
Firefox on mobile works too.
Edge on desktop works too
Doesn't work in waterfox either.
Broken on Vivaldi as well.
Nice project.
Would be cool if there was an easy way to obtain the link to the actual video and maybe show the original title, description and username.
Click on one of the green numbers to get the link.
I'd like to learn more about crawling YouTube, I don't think they appreciate that.
same here, id be more interested in the list gathering technique than the list itself..
Love this :) How awesome
A little off topic.. As I watch these, I have a overwhelming nostalgic feeling for those times. I almost never feel nostalgic for the past, but these videos evoke many personal memories from that time period.
This hits nostalgia for me too but really I just miss the period 5-10 years before YT too... the 90s computing world was special.
THANK YOU! Random snapshots of life from a completely different internet era—no filters, no algorithms, just raw, unedited moments. This feels like opening a digital time capsule.
One suggestion, add controls for rotating the video. Cameras in this era didn't always have the ability to rotate a video after it was shot, so some of these are in the wrong orientation.
Now, it's just a simple CSS transform:
document.querySelector("#player").style.webkitTransform = "rotate(90deg)"
IMG_5049 is a monster truck.
I enjoyed the views counter with the low numbers. It made me feel like me and four other people have shared this moment. When the view counter was zero, that felt very special.
I think it’s special that we’re collectively ensuring that all these videos are watched at least once :)
https://ytch.xyz/
A bit more context:
Show HN: If YouTube had actual channels - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41247023 - Sep 2024 (532 comments)
Warning - some of these can be reasonably graphic. I came across this which is live footage of a hammerhead shark being caught and killed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isHEsOPIr28
Also got some cute things like a dad giving a piggyback ride, some weightlifting, an amazing dance rehearsal - so very human.
Damn, it was brutal.
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One of the vids I looked at was some guys warming up for a league basketball game, pretty cool. Another was of a small child riding a scooter, I can think of a lot of ways that might be uncool.
My take away is this: I took a video of my grandson's birthday party recently using my cellphone. I haven't uploaded or sent it to anyone yet. Has my cell carrier already captured the video without my knowing it? In the corporate world the only privacy that matters to them is their own, not ours.
I've read that digi-cams were making somewhat of a comeback, maybe that's good.
Well I clicked one too many times. Came across a funeral procession with 0 views. Couldn't see any faces or identifying information, thankfully. But sad nonetheless.
I was thinking there will probably be nothing from my home country (HU) since it's a small country, and iPhones aren't as popular anyway. People are comparatively price sensitive.
And then in the 5th video that got recommended to me, the language seemed familiar, and sure enough, it's hungarian. IMG 0397, with 18 views.
Seems that views through this site don't seem to reflect?
Found a video that had zero views, watched to completion, then hit back on next video to return to it. Video still had 0 views.
YouTube view counts are known to be tricky. There are in depth videos on that topic.
Watching a cat failing to open a jar, I noticed that my brain expects cats to succeed at all they do.
While watching, I started playing a fun game where I try to guess the location of the video, GeoGuessr style. Very interesting when it comes to the odd handheld angles and low quality of some of the video clips. Would recommend.
I did the same thing! Haha
Weirdly poignant and beautiful, but also feels a bit wrong to watch.
Many of these videos aren't even 10 years old (was just watching a clip from 2015), but they look like they were shot in the 80s. What's up with that?
The video player on the site adds a vignetting effect (darkening the edges of the screen) to make the videos feel older, I think. If you click the date on a video you see the original on YouTube, without this effect.
Simple, effective and enjoyable UX. Nicely done.
Content world before ai , pure and organic !
If only the arrow keys allowed you to skip a video....
Lots of baby videos. Wonder if that's because 15 years ago phone storage was at a premium so only relatively important stuff got videoed. I'd image baby videos would be diluted amongst less important stuff in a 2024 sample.
YouTube was also one of the easiest ways to share family videos back then (the files were too large to be emailed, Google Photos didn't exist yet, pretty sure Facebook could share videos but the quality wasn't as good, etc).
> Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot
TIL: Americans really like firing guns, and videoing their friends firing guns.
Please beware, some very strange films can be encountered there... Including naked
Simple but crazy good idea. There is something in those simple non pretencious videos that makes it better than TikTok thought XD.
Here's my favorite one so far:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jggYnez6gQ0
It’s beautiful. Reminds me of a post Armageddon montage.
Why is there vignetting at the edges of the videos?
Is that a known iPhone defect?
CSS over the player box
boxshadow: 0 0 200px rgba(0,0,0,0.9) inset
I hope this gets archived in case YT decides to purge videos like these in the future.
First video felt like an awkward ad with two teachers. Second a high school party playing YMCA... I approve.
The hell, the first one I got was two people dissecting a cat.
I guess it did say random
reposts. every day a new one.
It's like a time capsule of ordinary life. All the little moments when not many are watching and ironically now people are watching. Very fascinating!
Authentic and nostalgic, I am enjoying watching.
I got tons of babies/kids, and pets.
I get only static, even if I refresh
did it break?
Use the remote.
How? Which ever button I press, I only get static. Am I region blocked? I have tried all the keys on my keyboard as well
Edit: It works on Firefox for some reason. Maybe extensions? I am not sure
This is cool as hell. I spent 30 minutes browsing random videos I will likely never watch again.
Absolutely mesmerized by this, thank you.
Nice and all, but aside: just reminds of the ridiculous/lame design choice from the great Apple to use that filename. How many shared photos sent in emails to me from iPhones with subject IMG_0001. Classic Apple removing any kind of useful functionality because the users wouldn't need to interact with files or know more about the system. A date in the filename would have killed them? IMG_20070629 or whatever..sigh.
It's from this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_rule_for_Camera_File_sy...
It's pretty standard practice for all cameras manufacturers to use a basic incremental filename. Many more useful data are embedded in jpeg exif metadata.
On the contrary including a date in the filename could be perceived as user hostile because none of the multiple iso representations (or non iso) is universally used and understood by the general public.
Eg : 20241112, 1112024, 1211024, 131208, 081213 and so on...
I think the issue is more that the battery runs out and now it's 2007 again and you start overwriting img_20070101_01.jpg ; last-directory-entry++ is a bit more robust.
One upside is that it hopefully prevented developer to ship half-baked software that rely on filename and can't handle duplicate name gracefully.
You can't prevent collisions (multiples sources/counter reset/date reset, etc). So it's actually nice to have an unforgiving standard that will bite you if you make unfounded assumptions.
A lot of babies, horses, dancing/singing, and sports but also plenty of fascinating stuff.
The first video I got was from some KKK ritual.
Those people are probably elected officials now
I laughed. Thank you.
Very cool
IMG_0163 - Gold
I liked the one with the toddler trying to convince a cat to come down the stairs :-)
But honestly - another contender for the "Least informative title on HN" :-\
if you let users watch two videos and pick which one is more interesting, this will go very bad in no time as it did with early Zuckerberg site Hot-or-Not
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