Not recent (http only): <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;astronaut.io" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;astronaut.io</a>YouTube videos that have almost zero previous views- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20432772">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20432772</a> - Jul 2019 (239 comments)- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13413225">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13413225</a> - Jan 2017 (140 comments)

Recent and related:IMG_0416 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42102506">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42102506</a> - Nov 2024 (324 comments)

same here, id be more interested in the list gathering technique than the list itself..

I&#x27;d like to learn more about crawling YouTube, I don&#x27;t think they appreciate that.

Was a pump &amp; dump by Casey Neistat. Lacked true popularity and network effects as it turned out people don&#x27;t want to share unedited, raw footage. Social media is about looking good. So Casey just used his YouTube&#x2F;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.

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... ?

The keming got me, I totally read that as Berne and wondered what you were admining in Berne with video streams. Nvm.

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.

haha creepy. i was lucky and got a cute cat video =)

&quot;Between 2009 and 2012&quot; fits with the Kony 2012 documentary.

I got one that seemed to involve child soldiers in Africa, zero views. This is wild.

First pull was a surreptitiously recorded conversation that sounds like it was being held as blackmail.

Those people are probably elected officials now

The first video I got was from some KKK ritual.

A lot of babies, horses, dancing&#x2F;singing, and sports but also plenty of fascinating stuff.

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.

Love this :) How awesomeA 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.

I think it’s special that we’re collectively ensuring that all these videos are watched at least once :)

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 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

Far Side caption: Terry was never any good with idioms

I got a dude beating a horse with a stick!

Same reaction here, I just watched a bunch guys playing with crabs in the kitchen sink to the soundtrack of riotous laughter.10&#x2F;10 I saw something real online

Really triggers Sonder in a way curated content never can.The back to back viewing of things going on everywhere around the world, seeing what is important to people moment by moment really makes you appreciate how big the world really is, a reminder that my perspective is quite narrow.

It&#x27;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.

It&#x27;s from this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Design_rule_for_Camera_File_system" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Design_rule_for_Camera_File_sy...</a>

I think the issue is more that the battery runs out and now it&#x27;s 2007 again and you start overwriting img_20070101_01.jpg ; last-directory-entry++ is a bit more robust.

It&#x27;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...

Nice and all, but aside: just reminds of the ridiculous&#x2F;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&#x27;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.

First video felt like an awkward ad with two teachers. Second a high school party playing YMCA... I approve.

Check out <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;astronaut.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;astronaut.io&#x2F;</a> for a similar vibe but recent videos as opposed to old ones (also, it&#x27;s not limited to iPhones which translates to more variety in terms of geography)

Authentic and nostalgic, I am enjoying watching.

A bit more context:Show HN: If YouTube had actual channels - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41247023">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41247023</a> - Sep 2024 (532 comments)

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ytch.xyz&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ytch.xyz&#x2F;</a>

Automated filtering surely is not across the main competitive advantages of youtube.

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.

Doubtful, it&#x27;s likely just a game of numbers.There is endless amounts of coomer content on YouTube like<pre><code> * Nude yoga
 * Body painting
 * Nude massages 
 * Transparent x haul &#x2F; try on
</code></pre>
You&#x27;re just a million times more likely to get non-coomer content when it&#x27;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

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 it&#x27;s quite so clean. My first was a a girl in underwear standing in front of a wall and turning while introducing herself &quot;My name is __ and I am 19 years old...&quot;

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&#x27;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.

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.

Absolutely mesmerized by this, thank you.

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&#x27;ll take this as a benefit; an algorithm palate cleanser

I&#x27;m happy with videos that have few views. I&#x27;ll always be sure to leave a comment and a like. Sometimes there&#x27;s really good videos in there

I was wondering why YouTube suddenly thought I only wanted to watch sub 1000 view videos

Videos embedded in other pages don&#x27;t show up in my <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;feed&#x2F;history" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;feed&#x2F;history</a>

PSA: This will fubar your YouTube watch history &#x2F; recommendations, you might want to incognito.

Thanks for sharing that riveting performance. And, Borges is always intersting.

Here&#x27;s a video of him performing it live that I found with a YouTube search:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=2xmRWj7gJEU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=2xmRWj7gJEU</a>But it&#x27;s presumably not the same one that you saw, since it doesn&#x27;t show any signs of being an amateur or mobile device recording, and wouldn&#x27;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 &quot;The Secret Miracle&quot;!<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;secondarylaresources.weebly.com&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;1&#x2F;0&#x2F;4&#x2F;7&#x2F;10473434&#x2F;the_secret_miracle_by_jorge_luis_borges.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;secondarylaresources.weebly.com&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;1&#x2F;0&#x2F;4&#x2F;7&#x2F;10473...</a>

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.

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.

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.

Google: if you like it, it&#x27;s going away.

You should get YouTube Premium so they can pay for all those servers.

They&#x27;ve already announced deleting videos from unused channels. So it&#x27;s only a matter of time

It was already partially killed when in 2017 YouTube switched all unlisted videos to private.Which I now just realize why they did that : a lot of people didn&#x27;t understand the difference.Sadly, a lot of other people did understand the difference, and did not expect this kind of switcheroo, and now there&#x27;s a bunch of effectively dead links covering more than a decade of videos.

I&#x27;m really anxious Google will also kill this aspect of Youtube one day.

View count is nice but I&#x27;d like to be able to share a video that I got with someone else, I think that would be a great function.

Thanks - that&#x27;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.

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 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.

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.

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!

&gt; That felt like a total invasion of their private lives.Except they literally explicitly uploaded it to YT.

That slight unease used to permeate the entire internet (and made it exciting and genuinely thrilling!), and now that you&#x27;ve articulated it out loud it makes me think it&#x27;s a critical missing part to all those &quot;nostalgia for the old web&quot; thinkpieces people love to write these days. Granted, I was a teenager in the 90&#x27;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&#x27;re going to discover (good or bad) when you surf from link to link, maybe that&#x27;s really what&#x27;s missing in the sanitized, commodified 2024 internet.Or maybe I&#x27;m just overthinking it lol

Because the truth is it’s likely that most of these were never meant to be public. People will say that it’s the fault of the user and thus there is no guilt attributable to the viewer, but I sincerely doubt most of these users knew they were making it public and may not have if they knew.While I don’t think intentionally surfacing these videos is wrong in any legal sense of course, I think it’s wrong ethically.Exploiting someone’s mistake in this manner is not noble.It’s the same reason we (good folk) look away when someone’s clothing accidentally reveals more than they intended, though it would be within our right to look.I choose not to view these because I don’t believe it was intended that I should, and without the consent of the creator I chose to err on the side of decency.

Funny you say that because flipping through a few videos on the site just now, I came across one of a young child (say 2yo) playing nude in the pool. I reported it, of course.

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&#x27;ve had the same videos from my own kids, and while there is nothing embarrassing or shameful about it, it&#x27;s not something I&#x27;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&#x27;s public but it still felt wrong to watch that.Kinda ruined my day a bit - feel kinda bad for viewing it.

yt-dlp <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;yt-dlp&#x2F;yt-dlp">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;yt-dlp&#x2F;yt-dlp</a> lets you list and download different formats offered by YoTube for videos.You could try downloading different audio formats and see if any of the available ones contain non-garbled audio.For example:<pre><code> yt-dlp -F &quot;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=a28_aXgrgXE&quot;
</code></pre>
Output:<pre><code> [youtube] Extracting URL: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=a28_aXgrgXE
 [youtube] a28_aXgrgXE: Downloading webpage
 [youtube] a28_aXgrgXE: Downloading ios player API JSON
 [youtube] a28_aXgrgXE: Downloading player 62ccfae7
 WARNING: [youtube] a28_aXgrgXE: nsig extraction failed: Some formats may be missing
 n = l9bNLKrDBBdCJtknGqU ; player = https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;player&#x2F;62ccfae7&#x2F;player_ias.vflset&#x2F;en_US&#x2F;base.js
 WARNING: [youtube] a28_aXgrgXE: nsig extraction failed: Some formats may be missing
 n = Z-MlQqu4ClRjI62sqw_ ; player = https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;player&#x2F;62ccfae7&#x2F;player_ias.vflset&#x2F;en_US&#x2F;base.js
 [youtube] a28_aXgrgXE: Downloading m3u8 information
 [youtube] a28_aXgrgXE: Downloading MPD manifest
 [info] Available formats for a28_aXgrgXE:
 ID EXT RESOLUTION FPS CH │ FILESIZE TBR PROTO │ VCODEC VBR ACODEC ABR ASR MORE INFO
 ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 sb2 mhtml 48x27 1 │ mhtml │ images storyboard
 sb1 mhtml 33x45 1 │ mhtml │ images storyboard
 sb0 mhtml 67x90 1 │ mhtml │ images storyboard
 233 mp4 audio only │ m3u8 │ audio only unknown Default
 234 mp4 audio only │ m3u8 │ audio only unknown Default
 139-dash m4a audio only │ 427.60KiB 48k dash │ audio only mp4a.40.5 48k 22k DASH audio, m4a_dash
 139 m4a audio only 1 │ 427.60KiB 48k https │ audio only mp4a.40.5 48k 22k low, m4a_dash
 140-dash m4a audio only │ 853.17KiB 96k dash │ audio only mp4a.40.2 96k 44k DASH audio, m4a_dash
 251 webm audio only │ 851.41KiB 99k dash │ audio only opus 99k 48k DASH audio, webm_dash
 140 m4a audio only 1 │ 853.17KiB 95k https │ audio only mp4a.40.2 95k 44k medium, m4a_dash
 160 mp4 108x144 30 │ ~962.40KiB 108k dash │ avc1.4d400b 108k video only DASH video, mp4_dash
 269 mp4 108x144 30 │ ~ 1.43MiB 164k m3u8 │ avc1.4D400B 164k video only
 278 webm 108x144 30 │ ~846.56KiB 95k dash │ vp9 95k video only DASH video, webm_dash
 133 mp4 180x240 30 │ ~ 2.11MiB 242k dash │ avc1.4d400c 242k video only DASH video, mp4_dash
 229 mp4 180x240 30 │ ~ 2.65MiB 305k m3u8 │ avc1.4D400C 305k video only
 242 webm 180x240 30 │ ~ 1.92MiB 220k dash │ vp9 220k video only DASH video, webm_dash
 134-dash mp4 270x360 30 │ 3.32MiB 459k dash │ avc1.4d4014 459k video only DASH video, mp4_dash
 230 mp4 270x360 30 │ ~ 5.07MiB 583k m3u8 │ avc1.4D4014 583k video only
 134 mp4 270x360 30 │ 3.32MiB 380k https │ avc1.4D4014 380k video only 240p, mp4_dash
 243 webm 270x360 30 │ ~ 3.53MiB 406k dash │ vp9 406k video only DASH video, webm_dash
 135 mp4 360x480 30 │ ~ 10.05MiB 1155k dash │ avc1.4d400b 1155k video only DASH video, mp4_dash
 231 mp4 360x480 30 │ ~ 11.43MiB 1313k m3u8 │ avc1.4D400B 1313k video only
 244 webm 360x480 30 │ ~ 6.55MiB 753k dash │ vp9 753k video only DASH video, webm_dash
</code></pre>
And then download each of the &quot;audio only&quot; entries from the table. In the case of the table for the video I chose:<pre><code> yt-dlp -f 233 -o &quot;%(id)s.%(format_id)s.%(ext)s&quot; &quot;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=a28_aXgrgXE&quot;
 yt-dlp -f 234 -o &quot;%(id)s.%(format_id)s.%(ext)s&quot; &quot;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=a28_aXgrgXE&quot;
 yt-dlp -f 139-dash -o &quot;%(id)s.%(format_id)s.%(ext)s&quot; &quot;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=a28_aXgrgXE&quot;
 yt-dlp -f 139 -o &quot;%(id)s.%(format_id)s.%(ext)s&quot; &quot;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=a28_aXgrgXE&quot;
 yt-dlp -f 140-dash -o &quot;%(id)s.%(format_id)s.%(ext)s&quot; &quot;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=a28_aXgrgXE&quot;
 yt-dlp -f 251 -o &quot;%(id)s.%(format_id)s.%(ext)s&quot; &quot;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=a28_aXgrgXE&quot;
 yt-dlp -f 140 -o &quot;%(id)s.%(format_id)s.%(ext)s&quot; &quot;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=a28_aXgrgXE&quot;
</code></pre>
Here I used the &#x27;-f&#x27; option to choose each of the &#x27;audio only&#x27; formats available for the example video, and then I used the &#x27;-o&#x27; flag to specify a custom format string for the output files so that the file names include the format id making them unique from each other and corresponding to the entries in the original table.This gives me files containing each of the audio formats that were available from YouTube.<pre><code> -rw-r--r-- 1 user user 437246 Oct 9 2013 a28_aXgrgXE.139-dash.m4a
 -rw-r--r-- 1 user user 437246 Oct 9 2013 a28_aXgrgXE.139.m4a
 -rw-r--r-- 1 user user 713133 Oct 9 2013 a28_aXgrgXE.140-dash.m4a
 -rw-r--r-- 1 user user 872935 Oct 9 2013 a28_aXgrgXE.140.m4a
 -rw-r--r-- 1 user user 441481 Oct 9 2013 a28_aXgrgXE.233.mp4
 -rw-r--r-- 1 user user 881428 Oct 9 2013 a28_aXgrgXE.234.mp4
 -rw-r--r-- 1 user user 711273 Jul 22 2019 a28_aXgrgXE.251.webm
</code></pre>
The timestamps of the files are set by yt-dlp to correspond to timestamps it got from YouTube.It might be worth to be careful about downloading alternate format versions of too many videos. I could imagine that downloading alternate formats of too many videos from YouTube could trigger something on their side to make them think you are a bot or something. Of course that&#x27;s just speculation and I don&#x27;t know if YouTube actually does that. Hopefully doing it for a single video won&#x27;t get your IP banned by YouTube.

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 &quot;inside joke&quot; type of meme. I have to wonder how many videos got re-encoded by YouTube that got screwed up inadvertently.

There&#x27;s an iframe with a link to the youtube api. When I watched a video, it was being streamed from a server named rr4---sn-p5qlsny6.googlevideo.com

I don&#x27;t think they are being served from Youtube (?)

The first video I got was of a really cute baby making baby noises. Made me very happy. It had 0 views.

It really amazes me that they don&#x27;t simply say that any video that doesn&#x27;t get at least 1000 views will count towards your google drive storage quota.Keeping all that private and never watched video ready-to-serve must cost so much, with zero revenue.

&gt; 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.And remember that depending if you visited with an iphone, or an android, or a smart TV, or a Chromecast, they&#x27;d be needing to serve the video with different encoding settings&#x2F;codecs&#x2F;MPEG profiles. So for the hardly ever watched videos, they either need to keep transcoded copies in 10+ formats, all ready to serve with no latency for years, or be ready to live transcode.

I love that the view count is included in the minimalist UI. I came across one with zero views, and there&#x27;s something so intimate and exciting about being the first person to watch an ancient home video (even if it&#x27;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.

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&#x27;t exist yet, pretty sure Facebook could share videos but the quality wasn&#x27;t as good, etc).

Lots of baby videos. Wonder if that&#x27;s because 15 years ago phone storage was at a premium so only relatively important stuff got videoed. I&#x27;d image baby videos would be diluted amongst less important stuff in a 2024 sample.

Warning - some of these can be reasonably graphic. I came across this which is live footage of a hammerhead shark being caught and killed: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=isHEsOPIr28" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=isHEsOPIr28</a>Also got some cute things like a dad giving a piggyback ride, some weightlifting, an amazing dance rehearsal - so very human.

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.

I got tons of babies&#x2F;kids, and pets.

This is cool as hell. I spent 30 minutes browsing random videos I will likely never watch again.

How? Which ever button I press, I only get static. Am I region blocked? I have tried all the keys on my keyboard as wellEdit: It works on Firefox for some reason. Maybe extensions? I am not sure

I get only static, even if I refreshdid it break?

The hell, the first one I got was two people dissecting a cat.I guess it did say random

Here&#x27;s my favorite one so far:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=jggYnez6gQ0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=jggYnez6gQ0</a>

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&#x27;s privacy of their own home

The first vide I see is two neo-nazi guys naked in the shower and singing a punk song..I can&#x27;t help but feel like watching these videos is some kind of breach of privacy, I don&#x27;t think all these videos were supposed to go to youtube. But then again, someone did press &quot;upload to youtube&quot; on these videos, so I&#x27;m torn.

I hope this gets archived in case YT decides to purge videos like these in the future.

Note to the author: the website is broken and seems to rely on some &quot;works best on chrome&quot; shenanigans to work. On my phone, youtube thumbnail gets pressed but nothing happens (duckduckgo browser).

Theres nothing wrong with more choice. Please post a link!

Here&#x27;s to hoping we get the Premier album for Christmas!

Ecclesiastes 1:9<pre><code> What has been will be again,
 what has been done will be done again;
 there is nothing new under the sun.</code></pre>

As the great Nas has rapped:<pre><code> No idea&#x27;s original, there&#x27;s nothing new under the sun
 It&#x27;s never what you do, but how it&#x27;s done</code></pre>

there&#x27;s room on the internet for multiple sites, finishing it is nice

Finish and post it please, I still want the Simpsons style TV!!

In case you need inspiration, I&#x27;ve had this site bookmarked for many years. I don&#x27;t know anything about the Web design, but it has the appearance you describe. 
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.myretrotvs.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.myretrotvs.com&#x2F;</a>

To be fair it&#x27;s all just astronaut.io with a different scope

We should be collaborating, open sourcing the scraping code, and sharing the scraped datasets IMO.I was working on a similar idea a couple of years ago but got hung up on the scraping step after realising google api restrictions were too onerous.I was trying to come up with a way that would have the videos scraped by the user and then randomised, entirely client side.

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 :)

I liked the one with the toddler trying to convince a cat to come down the stairs :-)But honestly - another contender for the &quot;Least informative title on HN&quot; :-\

Simple but crazy good idea. There is something in those simple non pretencious videos that makes it better than TikTok thought XD.

Mine was a horse f*cking another horse. Reminder to not browse HN while at work. Closed the site pretty fast after that.

The very first video was of a toddler doing their first steps. I don&#x27;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.

It feels too intimate, I had to close it. Cool concept though

Seems to bizarre to me that the &quot;zero streams&quot; playlist isn&#x27;t a feature actually.

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.

I wonder if that is actually tru. Because interestingly enough my youtube account is the only remaining link I have to the internet of the past. Created in 2006 and I&#x27;m still using it.I&#x27;m not aware of anything else that has persisted since then. Old email accounts, forums, games - everything is gone now and inaccessible for me.

&gt; YouTube wasn’t always tied so strongly to a Google accountThey still have a page to recover a pre-Google account. It used to be a clearly outdated page with old graphics, now they made it a bit &quot;better&quot;.It&#x27;s here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;gaia_link" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;gaia_link</a>

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.

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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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.

It&#x27;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!

especially given the low view counts. I&#x27;ve just watched two videos with 1 view. One would assume if they were being uploaded to be shared they&#x27;d have more views.

The apiKey thing is actually scary though, so many firebase keys...With that said, I don&#x27;t really find this metaphor to be applicable though. If these videos don&#x27;t have sensitive content — and some may of course do — this is something deeply human, the ability to share experiences with others, which has been lacking in the last years with attention-grabbing social media.

&quot;Share to Youtube&quot; should at least make the video Unlisted by default which is probably what most people expect: They get to share the url with their friends&#x2F;family, but you can&#x27;t find their videos in search. And the security model makes sense: anyone with the url can view it.Public by default is just so bad.Youtube playlists used to default to public and it&#x27;s ridiculous to realize some personal playlist you&#x27;ve been accumulating is right there on your profile. I think they finally fixed it.Facebook also bungled massively in this space where just commenting on some embarrassing Facebook group ended up broadcasting it to all of your friends&#x27; walls. And you had no way of knowing that until one of your friends told you that your question on &quot;Foreskin restoration support group&quot; showed up on their wall.You&#x27;re probably in the top 1% of product&#x2F;UX designers if you spend just 10 seconds pondering the level of privacy the average user expects as they do things in an app.

This is my take too. This is more like finding an unsecured s3 bucket and delving through it.It might have been &quot;published&quot; 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 &quot;{ apiKey: &quot; in github.

How many of these people didn&#x27;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.

CSS over the player boxboxshadow: 0 0 200px rgba(0,0,0,0.9) inset

Why is there vignetting at the edges of the videos?Is that a known iPhone defect?

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.

Many of these videos aren&#x27;t even 10 years old (was just watching a clip from 2015), but they look like they were shot in the 80s. What&#x27;s up with that?

I was thinking there will probably be nothing from my home country (HU) since it&#x27;s a small country, and iPhones aren&#x27;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&#x27;s hungarian. IMG 0397, with 18 views.

Please beware, some very strange films can be encountered there... Including naked

TIL: Americans really like firing guns, and videoing their friends firing guns.

This reminded me of the scene in Amelie where she makes a video montage for the glass man. Really interesting and random topics.

It’s beautiful. Reminds me of a post Armageddon montage.

Got to give a shout out to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youhole.tv" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youhole.tv</a> 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&#x27;m watching the interdimensional cable from Rick and Morty

YouTube view counts are known to be tricky. There are in depth videos on that topic.

Seems that views through this site don&#x27;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.

Yea, the Internet has slowly lost something as every online video has slowly evolved to start with the same obnoxious &quot;WHATS UP GUYS! Check out my sponsors who have some great stuff to show you. I&#x27;ve got some great content for you so watch it to the end and remember to hit like and subscribe with the bell!&quot; in that fake &quot;90s Radio DJ&quot; voice.

I completely agree. There&#x27;s something really jarring about watching videos from this time, where things were just more candid in a way that&#x27;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&#x27;s beautiful.

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.

One suggestion, add controls for rotating the video. Cameras in this era didn&#x27;t always have the ability to rotate a video after it was shot, so some of these are in the wrong orientation.Now, it&#x27;s just a simple CSS transform:document.querySelector(&quot;#player&quot;).style.webkitTransform = &quot;rotate(90deg)&quot;

If only the arrow keys allowed you to skip a video....

Well I clicked one too many times. Came across a funeral procession with 0 views. Couldn&#x27;t see any faces or identifying information, thankfully. But sad nonetheless.

&gt; Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot

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&#x27;s birthday party recently using my cellphone. I haven&#x27;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&#x27;ve read that digi-cams were making somewhat of a comeback, maybe that&#x27;s good.

Weirdly poignant and beautiful, but also feels a bit wrong to watch.

Content world before ai , pure and organic !

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&#x27;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&#x27;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.

Simple, effective and enjoyable UX. Nicely done.

Watching a cat failing to open a jar, I noticed that my brain expects cats to succeed at all they do.

Same! I watched a few on youtube and got bored quickly, but I find a bunch of these a least somewhat interesting. Though having it just automatically go to the next one, and a skip button, are a big help. Maybe youtube search is just bad.

When the original post about this was on HN, I searched IMG_[XXXX] on YouTube and the videos I found... let&#x27;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&#x27;t curate them?

The lasagna that burns twice as bright, burns half as long.  And that lasagna has burned so very, very brightly.

I&#x27;ve seen things you people wouldn&#x27;t believe.
Lasagne on fire on the top of an oven.
I&#x27;ve watched a family BBQ from 2009.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Time to close the browser.

Click on one of the green numbers to get the link.

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.

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 believe Youtube just serves the video with a Shorts UI, nothing special besides the formatting of the page.

Unfortunately the answer is yes. If a video has a vertical resolution and is under 3 minutes (previously 1 minute), YouTube will automatically treat it as a short now. This basically means every video related to a DS or 3DS game, or recorded on a phone in general, is now treated like a short by their system.This has likely screwed up all manner of videos, since a vertical resolution doesn&#x27;t equate to it being designed for a TikTok or Instagram style feed...

Early YouTube limited videos to a few minutes. Also early phones didn&#x27;t have a lot of memory to make long videos.

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?

Many moons ago an acquaintance did a somewhat similar project finding default title &quot;mic in track.mp3&quot; files on music sharing services that were created using MusicMatch Jukebox.&gt; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.stark-effect.com&#x2F;mit.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.stark-effect.com&#x2F;mit.html</a>

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.

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

How did you crawl so many videos on YouTube?

I&#x27;m not really sure what the worry is here.Legally compromising material? From watching a YouTube video? Also wouldn&#x27;t you have this site in your browser history to prove it came from there? And the video has the same title which matches the format of all the videos on this site?Hard to think of a scenario where this site can get you in trouble tbh

I watched a few, but if the wrong video pops up and hasn&#x27;t been filtered &#x2F; redacted by YouTube then I might accidentally have legally compromising material on my phone through no fault of my own, other than curiosity. At least with the YouTube UI I can go to my &quot;History&quot; tab and see&#x2F;prove the video came through YouTube UI action. But random videos from unknown sites are too risky.

I love stories like this where no one is really aware of what is happening at the time and only later you can see that many puzzle pieces came together to create some funny effect

It is amazing what you have created; and the fact that you can not share the video, and you are the only one who can see it it is even more valuable; such a simple and smart idea; bravo

Baader-Meinhof strikes again - checked this out in the morning and just caught your Citibike tweet. You&#x27;re on a roll today!

I love archaeology, digital or otherwise.  Great project!

I wonder, could this be a time-shifted TikTok?

Meh. It tells me to sign in. I&#x27;m not doing that.

This reminds me of that Webcam video controversy a few years back