IMG_0001

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.

pmarreck• 2 years ago

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... ?

itsjustjordan• 2 years ago

Sold to CNN in 2016 for $US25M

pearjuice• 2 years ago

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.

pbhjpbhj• 2 years ago

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

xxr• 2 years ago

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

sim7c00• 2 years ago

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

__turbobrew__• 2 years ago

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

topherclay• 2 years ago

"Between 2009 and 2012" fits with the Kony 2012 documentary.

superkuh• 2 years ago

A lot of babies, horses, dancing/singing, and sports but also plenty of fascinating stuff.

dybber• 2 years ago

The first video I got was from some KKK ritual.

dyauspitr• 2 years ago

Those people are probably elected officials now

babyent• 2 years ago

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.

voidfunc• 2 years ago

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.

tigerlily• 2 years ago

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.

Aeolun• 2 years ago

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

lelandfe3• 2 years ago

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.

raverbashing• 2 years ago

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

richardlblair• 2 years ago

I got a dude beating a horse with a stick!

lelandfe3• 2 years ago

Far Side caption: Terry was never any good with idioms

someone7x• 2 years ago

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

fellowniusmonk• 2 years ago

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.

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

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.

jannyfer• 2 years ago

It's from this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_rule_for_Camera_File_sy...

Twisell2• 2 years ago

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...

bux93• 2 years ago

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.

ivolimmen• 2 years ago

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

mastazi• 2 years ago

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)

sarpdag• 2 years ago

Authentic and nostalgic, I am enjoying watching.

shenbomo• 2 years ago

https://ytch.xyz/

password43214• 2 years ago

A bit more context:

Show HN: If YouTube had actual channels - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41247023 - Sep 2024 (532 comments)

paxys• 2 years ago

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.

beernet• 2 years ago

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

ffsm82• 2 years ago

Doubtful, it's likely just a game of numbers.

There is endless amounts of coomer content on YouTube like

  * Nude yoga
  * Body painting
  * Nude massages 
  * Transparent x haul / try on

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

rblatz• 2 years ago

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.

femto• 2 years ago

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.

pelorat• 2 years ago

My second video was from a strip club

semperdark• 2 years ago

Not sure it's quite so clean. My first was a a girl in underwear standing in front of a wall and turning while introducing herself "My name is __ and I am 19 years old..."

stefanpie• 2 years ago

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.

mparnisari2• 2 years ago

I did the same thing! Haha

boredtofears• 2 years ago

Absolutely mesmerized by this, thank you.

password43214• 2 years ago

PSA: This will fubar your YouTube watch history / recommendations, you might want to incognito.

debo_• 2 years ago

I'll take this as a benefit; an algorithm palate cleanser

0_____0• 2 years ago

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.

rajamaka• 2 years ago

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

tobyhinloopen• 2 years ago

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

rockbruno• 2 years ago

The same happened to me. Now I get it...

masto• 2 years ago

Videos embedded in other pages don't show up in my https://www.youtube.com/feed/history

macintux• 2 years ago

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.

schoen• 2 years ago

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...

MrMcCall• 2 years ago

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

kannonboy• 2 years ago

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.

hoseja• 2 years ago

I'm really anxious Google will also kill this aspect of Youtube one day.

supermatt2• 2 years ago

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.

joelkoen• 2 years ago

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.

kristopolous2• 2 years ago

Google: if you like it, it's going away.

ThrowawayTestr• 2 years ago

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

pohuing2• 2 years ago

They've already announced deleting videos from unused channels. So it's only a matter of time

BlueTemplar2• 2 years ago

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'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's a bunch of effectively dead links covering more than a decade of videos.

gear54rus• 2 years ago

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.

rkagerer2• 2 years ago

Clicking the date opens it in YouTube.

mattlondon2• 2 years ago

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.

arethuza• 2 years ago

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.

jnovek• 2 years ago

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.

manmal• 2 years ago

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.

mdanger0075• 2 years ago

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.

theodric• 2 years ago

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!

stronglikedan2• 2 years ago

That felt like a total invasion of their private lives.

Except they literally explicitly uploaded it to YT.

kevinsync• 2 years ago

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

jonny_eh4• 2 years ago

Link? :P

nkrisc2• 2 years ago

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.

itisit• 2 years ago

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.

giancarlostoro• 2 years ago

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.

codetrotter• 2 years ago

yt-dlp https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp 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:

  yt-dlp -F "https://youtube.com/watch?v=a28_aXgrgXE"

Output:

  [youtube] Extracting URL: https://youtube.com/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://www.youtube.com/s/player/62ccfae7/player_ias.vflset/en_US/base.js
  WARNING: [youtube] a28_aXgrgXE: nsig extraction failed: Some formats may be missing
           n = Z-MlQqu4ClRjI62sqw_ ; player = https://www.youtube.com/s/player/62ccfae7/player_ias.vflset/en_US/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

And then download each of the "audio only" entries from the table. In the case of the table for the video I chose:

  yt-dlp -f 233      -o "%(id)s.%(format_id)s.%(ext)s" "https://youtube.com/watch?v=a28_aXgrgXE"
  yt-dlp -f 234      -o "%(id)s.%(format_id)s.%(ext)s" "https://youtube.com/watch?v=a28_aXgrgXE"
  yt-dlp -f 139-dash -o "%(id)s.%(format_id)s.%(ext)s" "https://youtube.com/watch?v=a28_aXgrgXE"
  yt-dlp -f 139      -o "%(id)s.%(format_id)s.%(ext)s" "https://youtube.com/watch?v=a28_aXgrgXE"
  yt-dlp -f 140-dash -o "%(id)s.%(format_id)s.%(ext)s" "https://youtube.com/watch?v=a28_aXgrgXE"
  yt-dlp -f 251      -o "%(id)s.%(format_id)s.%(ext)s" "https://youtube.com/watch?v=a28_aXgrgXE"
  yt-dlp -f 140      -o "%(id)s.%(format_id)s.%(ext)s" "https://youtube.com/watch?v=a28_aXgrgXE"

Here I used the '-f' option to choose each of the 'audio only' formats available for the example video, and then I used the '-o' 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.

  -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

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's just speculation and I don't know if YouTube actually does that. Hopefully doing it for a single video won't get your IP banned by YouTube.

dheera• 2 years ago

I don't think they are being served from Youtube (?)

kahirsch• 2 years ago

There'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

Sateeshm• 2 years ago

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

londons_explore3• 2 years ago

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'd be needing to serve the video with different encoding settings/codecs/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.

londons_explore3• 2 years ago

It really amazes me that they don't simply say that any video that doesn'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.

nomilk• 2 years ago

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.

jacinda2• 2 years ago

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).

jacinda2• 2 years ago

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.

system22• 2 years ago

Damn, it was brutal.

arookery• 2 years ago

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.

mparnisari2• 2 years ago

I got tons of babies/kids, and pets.

system22• 2 years ago

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

NooneAtAll3• 2 years ago

I get only static, even if I refresh

did it break?

primozk• 2 years ago

Use the remote.

yohannesk• 2 years ago

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

apexalpha• 2 years ago

The hell, the first one I got was two people dissecting a cat.

I guess it did say random

michaelsshaw• 2 years ago

Here's my favorite one so far:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jggYnez6gQ0

paulluuk• 2 years ago

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.

zigman1• 2 years ago

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

drooopy• 2 years ago

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

tpoacher• 2 years ago

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).

shrx• 2 years ago

Doesn't work in waterfox either.

encom• 2 years ago

Broken on Vivaldi as well.

dwroberts• 2 years ago

It works fine in Firefox on a desktop

probably_wrong• 2 years ago

Firefox on mobile works too.

dudefeliciano• 2 years ago

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 :)

supermatt2• 2 years ago

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

rob• 2 years ago

As the great Nas has rapped:

    No idea's original, there's nothing new under the sun
    It's never what you do, but how it's done

echelon_musk• 2 years ago

Here's to hoping we get the Premier album for Christmas!

stcg• 2 years ago

Ecclesiastes 1:9

    What has been will be again,
    what has been done will be done again;
    there is nothing new under the sun.

jerrre• 2 years ago

there's room on the internet for multiple sites, finishing it is nice

chamomeal• 2 years ago

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

venusenvy47• 2 years ago

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/

63936473• 2 years ago

To be fair it's all just astronaut.io with a different scope

johtso• 2 years ago

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.

einpoklum• 2 years ago

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" :-\

kshitij_libra• 2 years ago

IMG_0163 - Gold

n0vella• 2 years ago

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

VanTodi• 2 years ago

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.

mimsee• 2 years ago

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

mensetmanusman2• 2 years ago

Nature channel stuff is sfw

recursive2• 2 years ago

another horse

Thank goodness

CM302• 2 years ago

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.

preciousoo• 2 years ago

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

miunau2• 2 years ago

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.

XorNot• 2 years ago

Seems to bizarre to me that the "zero streams" playlist isn't a feature actually.

smitelli• 2 years ago

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.

climb_stealth• 2 years ago

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'm still using it.

I'm not aware of anything else that has persisted since then. Old email accounts, forums, games - everything is gone now and inaccessible for me.

reddalo• 2 years ago

YouTube wasn’t always tied so strongly to a Google account

They 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 "better".

It's here: https://www.youtube.com/gaia_link

dmezzetti• 2 years ago

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!

Netcob• 2 years ago

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.

dwayne_dibley• 2 years ago

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.

xnorswap• 2 years ago

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.

lblume• 2 years ago

The apiKey thing is actually scary though, so many firebase keys...

With that said, I don't really find this metaphor to be applicable though. If these videos don'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.

hombre_fatal• 2 years ago

"Share to Youtube" 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/family, but you can'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's ridiculous to realize some personal playlist you'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' walls. And you had no way of knowing that until one of your friends told you that your question on "Foreskin restoration support group" showed up on their wall.

You're probably in the top 1% of product/UX designers if you spend just 10 seconds pondering the level of privacy the average user expects as they do things in an app.

amelius• 2 years ago

Why is there vignetting at the edges of the videos?

Is that a known iPhone defect?

thinkingemote• 2 years ago

CSS over the player box

boxshadow: 0 0 200px rgba(0,0,0,0.9) inset

riow• 2 years ago

Very cool

csmpltn• 2 years ago

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?

logicallee• 2 years ago

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.

graeber_28927• 2 years ago

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.

p0w3n3d• 2 years ago

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

buro9• 2 years ago

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

coreyhn• 2 years ago

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

mensetmanusman2• 2 years ago

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

kalli• 2 years ago

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

GNOMES• 2 years ago

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.

danhau• 2 years ago

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

JanneVee• 2 years ago

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.

ryandrake• 2 years ago

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.

capital_guy• 2 years ago

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.

pimlottc• 2 years ago

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)"

JKCalhoun• 2 years ago

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

tr3ntg• 2 years ago

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.

ezfe• 2 years ago

Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot

bloomingeek• 2 years ago

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.

m0n01d• 2 years ago

reposts. every day a new one.

shriracha• 2 years ago

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

cryptozeus• 2 years ago

Content world before ai , pure and organic !

quartz• 2 years ago

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.

duckkg5• 2 years ago

Simple, effective and enjoyable UX. Nicely done.

albertojacini• 2 years ago

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

yuters• 2 years ago

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?

BobAliceInATree• 2 years ago

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.

nickdothutton• 2 years ago

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.

m4632• 2 years ago

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

gartdavis• 2 years ago

Is this an empathy test?

soulclap• 2 years ago

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.

85392_school2• 2 years ago

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

lbrito• 2 years ago

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!

nrvn• 2 years ago

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?

drvladb• 2 years ago

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

CM302• 2 years ago

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't equate to it being designed for a TikTok or Instagram style feed...

SoftTalker• 2 years ago

Early YouTube limited videos to a few minutes. Also early phones didn't have a lot of memory to make long videos.

robotmachine• 2 years ago

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

MortyWaves• 2 years ago

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.

diimdeep• 2 years ago

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

Aeroi• 2 years ago

Damn, I got Gangnam styled on video #3.

upmind• 2 years ago

How did you crawl so many videos on YouTube?

nwatson• 2 years ago

I watched a few, but if the wrong video pops up and hasn't been filtered / 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 "History" tab and see/prove the video came through YouTube UI action. But random videos from unknown sites are too risky.

aprilthird20215• 2 years ago

I'm not really sure what the worry is here.

Legally compromising material? From watching a YouTube video? Also wouldn'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

24Todd54• 2 years ago

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

nefrix• 2 years ago

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

yup_sto• 2 years ago

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

tempodox2• 2 years ago

I love archaeology, digital or otherwise. Great project!

tempodox2• 2 years ago

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

xkbarkar• 2 years ago

This is amazing.

beretguy• 2 years ago

Meh. It tells me to sign in. I'm not doing that.

sdwrj• 2 years ago

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

IMG_0001

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