Show HN: YouTube Decade – The most-viewed videos posted 10 years ago

This is neat, I tried to make a video series a while ago where I compared and contrasted what was in the front page of YouTube 10 years ago. This would have been super helpful for that. But I was shocked with how much of the stuff from back then on that site is just gone.

voltagex_• 7 years ago

Me and a mate have a playlist of stuff to watch when we get together and drink beers. I keep meaning to track/archive it because give it a month and there'll be 2 or 3 out of ~20 videos deleted. The decay is immense.

crtasm• 7 years ago

Are you familiar with youtube-dl? It can download an entire public playlist - ignoring videos previously downloaded - and easy to run it on a schedule.

tpetry• 7 years ago

What is happening at youtube? Do they delete old content? Only storing a single copy for old content and the disks are dying?

pjc502• 7 years ago

PBnFlash2• 7 years ago

Sometimes, sometimes the accounts get deleted for one reason or another. Lot of the old channels seem to be taken over by boots too. One of my very old videos seemed to have gotten corrupted even.

earthscienceman• 7 years ago

Woah. Great idea, so many interesting things to explore. I'm surprised there's no comment yet about the video titled "The most dangerous Barack Obama video ever!!!". It's such an obvious precursor for what the internet would be come. I was genuinely shocked that it had 10,000,000+ views.

Preserved in a screenshot:

https://i.imgur.com/mnerRgk.jpg

codetrotter• 7 years ago

Also in that screenshot is a video from the UKF Dubstep channel.

23.4M views. Is that the number of views now or the number of views ten years ago?

jonny_eh• 7 years ago

Probably now, I doubt they could get that kind of historical data.

disillusioned• 7 years ago

This just makes me deeply miss YouTube Time Machine.

MattConfluence• 7 years ago

There was a fun similar thing for Reddit on https://www.reddit.com/r/TenYearsAgoOnReddit/ (and https://www.reddit.com/r/FiveYearsAgoOnReddit/), sadly it stopped posting ~9 months ago.

Is it possible to use the search API to create something like this for HN?

insin• 7 years ago

Create a bookmarklet of this:

    let d = new Date()
    d.setFullYear(d.getFullYear() - 10)
    location.href = `https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=${d.getFullYear()}-${d.getMonth() + 1}-${d.getDate()}`

systemtest• 7 years ago

This will break on February 29 :)

ilikehurdles• 7 years ago

There's another one called /r/vintageviral. It's not as strict but tracks well-known 9+ year old videos.

bartread• 7 years ago

Unreal. Front page: 6.9M people[1] watched a video of a small dog trying to mate with a cat. The cat wasn't interested but showed surprising forbearance.

[1] OK, yes, I know, it's 6.9M views, and probably some people watched it multiple, so it's probably 2 - 3M people, but that's still a lot of people watching a dog mating with a cat.

have_faith• 7 years ago

I thought YT counted multiple viewings from the same person as a single view. Or it would be too easy to game. I at least imagine there would be a time cutoff before it considered counting a new view from the same person.

szatkus• 7 years ago

There are videos with billions of views, I doubt that much fraction of the planet saw them.

I imagine it would horrible performance-wise. You would need to store list of browser fingerprints and check it on every view.

doctoboggan• 7 years ago

No, if a single person watches more than once it is counted as multiple views. For the video creator, you can see a metric called "Unique Viewers" and see your "Average Views per Viewer" number which helps you see if people are watching multiple times.

All that being said, I do think there is some detention of fake views, especially if they come from the uploader themselves.

flamtap• 7 years ago

The old-school YouTube iOS icon for the favicon is a great touch!

robotmlg• 7 years ago

Similarly, https://favrd.it has been posting the top tweets of 2009 (as compiled by Favrd, RIP)

mgalgs• 7 years ago

Kudos to the creator for the responsible advertising strategy. The "hey -- you're using an ad blocker" message was thoughtful and non-guilt-tripping. Ads are clearly delineated as such, and the actual ads aren't spammy (carbon). Online advertising needs an overhaul and this is a step in the right direction.

Show HN: YouTube Decade – The most-viewed videos posted 10 years ago

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