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Just randomly stumbled upon this and almost teared up a bit. Absolutely beautiful, and brilliant.
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About 50% of the videos were by Chinese people. Interesting to think how Asian a random sampling of the earth's population would be. North America is only 7.6% of the global population but overwhelmingly dominate in popular media.

Great site.

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Not just popular media. The internet in general seems to assume being 'American' is the default and online communities seem to have a lot more American users than those from other regions (even compared to other places that also speak English).

If you ever want proof... well, go through your YouTube subscriptions and ask yourself how many of the channels are by people from the US. For me the number is about 50-60%.

OK, now go through your Baidu Video subscription list and tell me how many are American: http://video.baidu.com/

Oh? You don't have any Baidu video subscriptions?

Are you sure it's the "internet" assuming that you're an American? Or is it just that you hang out on the internet where Americans tend to hang out?

That's probably got more to do with you hanging out at "American places" due to a language barrier. Many countries that don't speak English have online platforms with vast communities of their own. There are massive social and video platforms in Asia/Europe you probably never heard of.

Russian/European version of Facebook is called "VKonakte". Chinese version of YouTube is called "YouKu", Chinese Facebook is called "Weibo". In those places you will barely find any American users or people that speak a lot of English.

It's not a random sampling of Earth's population. It's a random sampling of the "video uploader" population.
It's a random sampling of the "YouTube video uploader" population.
What makes you think so? You just hang out where the rest of the Americans are too :)
Things like this make me want to travel more. There is _so much_ out there to see and experience, so many people to meet and learn from, each with their own story and world entirely oblivious to yours.
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PSA: Watch in an private/incognito tab/window. If you are currently logged into your google account, this WILL pollute your watched history: https://www.youtube.com/feed/history

That said, I really do like the concept. It's literal reality TV. Very cool.

Oddly the videos don't end up there for me. Which is somewhat disappointing because I would like to share some of them with others.

This tool needs a "link to video" or "share video" button.

I had to disable uorigin adblock and use incognito.
Ah, you're right. Privacy Badger (which I love for exactly this reason) was breaking it.
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Ya I wish it would leave a trail on the side of the videos you've gone through.
The youtube embed normally has all of that by default. They explicitly prohibit the user from accessing any of those.
Does it matter they appear in your history?
Kind of. It matters for me because it will ruin my video recommendation list.
You can delete those from your history, somewhere in profile settings.
(creator here) thanks for the heads up! i had disabled my youtube history completely and didn't notice this...
Sounds like a feature. Would polluting my history help prevent YouTube from recommending me the same stuff over and over?
I find myself doing this on Youtube when I watch certain videos, to avoid having similar videos as recommendations.

I suppose the feature was supposed to help one discover videos they could be interested in, but I now actively avoid watching a number of them with a logged-in session.

Very cool. I wish you could easily go to the original video.
I had the same thought. I'm also curious what that brownish circle toggle does.
I think if you select it you'll stay on the current video
Yes, I saw a few videos I liked that I suppose I'll never find again.
Check your youtube history.
Apparently YouTube's history page doesn't include videos watched while signed out. Thanks, though.
The video ID shows up in the developer console. Not ideal, but a method you can use.
Click the YouTube logo on hover.
Really interesting concept here socially. I'm not sure this kind of discovery mechanism really exists with services like YouTube. Likely there are randomizers, but this is really scraping from the "every day" user, which is so different from what most of us are used to seeing on YouTube.
Not so much the "every day" user, but more specifically those people not savvy enough to title their videos or set them to private. I'll guess that 1/3 of these videos the author didn't even know they were public. The other 1/3 doesn't really care if they are or not, and the final 1/3 got as far as uploading the video from their mobile device and didn't even know it made it online for all of us to see.

I bet if you did an analysis of users leaving the default titles on their videos, it would be the same group of people that leave the default name on their home routers. Technology simply doesn't fuel these people, it is just a vessel they hop on and hop off when they want to accomplish something. We, on the other hand, live in it every day. This astronaut site is very interesting in that it shows you what a disparity there is between the savvy and the non.

Ah, you've put it in a much better light. "Every day" is clearly not the right description here. I think an interesting look anyway.
This is a really beautiful piece of art. I just wanted to say well done. It's a very grounding experience watching it for a few minutes

If you could click through to the source video then that would be great.

(creator here) thank you! yeah i think i masked the youtube logo during my failed attempts to get this to work on mobile. i'll see if i can bring it back.
Wonderful.

If you like this, you might like these other two pages which exist -- like this page -- to demonstrate the breadth of human experience:

https://paperplanes.world/ http://radio.garden/

I've never seen/used the raido one before but I did see/use paperplanes.

While I enjoyed paper planes, it was quite brief. I played with it for 15-20m max before I stopped. I've been watching this (on another monitor) for probably half an hour. Way more engaging and deep. Love this.

Paper Planes told me "This experience requires WebGL and a modern browser." I have a MacBook Air, fully updated, with Google Chrome. It redirects me to the Google Chrome download site. Any clue what I'm doing wrong?
Everyone keeps saying they saw such beautiful things

I just got stuck watching a guy eat an entire jar of mayonnaise without stopping

[EDIT] Just realized that the websockets that fuel the video transitions are suffering the same 503s as the other assets — so the feed 503'd, and I got stuck on an unending, non-changing video of a guy looking into the camera as he ate so, so much mayonnaise.

whole site's throwing 502's intermittently, here's a list of video id's of what sorta content it shows (for people interested but can't use it).

q2XBK_PZgWY RQjdcyRwwP8 P9bcm3uT0NY I4WgpPg9EcA UOZVb91HwrQ rlZKRgtI3bs ovAjtEWUEGc BzVuPNSzP1E Y1fqjCxkdI8 R3HILwnTfTc 0gip2UCMc5o 6G8rpU3jZCw rNZeQ1UXP7Y DHa7hX-43a4 LpeRgRl8HG4 4Fs9rj9uLyk NnWE6QMczfQ Lqbya6dBfDA QRrAGrxDYCE DjaZ2LKwhfI

As someone who regularly searches IMG_0123 to see things like "mayonnaise man" before astronaut.io existed: you must share the link to the video. There's no excuse for the lack of a link.

Also, this service does not work with iOS, which is a shame.

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Agreed, "mayonnaise man" sounds like an internet legend in the making. To claim it is not beautiful without a link, but give such a fascinating description...
You can't link, since whoever made this site disabled any and all controls on the videos. Even the youtube button in the corner is blocked off.

This is one of the most evil implementations of video embedding i've ever seen.

Well, isn't it the whole point, though? :)
What exactly is the point in your opinion? I have no idea which exact point you're referring to, and the point as i understood it is 100% undermined by the implementation.
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the videos are linkable back to youtube via the logo now :D

i think the main side effect is if you accidentally click the video, it stops, which ruins the illusion of a continuous live stream (like television), but that's the tradeoff at the moment i guess ever since the old embed api was deprecated.

Cheers for the quick fix, and the explanation. I'm happy to know it was only an aesthetic misstep.
This is quite addictive. Spend a good 15 minutes watching this before "waking up" from this collective dream. There were video-snippets that disturbed me(dog fighting, voyeurism of sleeping people in transportation[not sure if there is a special category for that]), but otherwise it was a pleasant experience.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
This is an amazing idea, and beautifully executed. Many of these videos are wonderful to witness.

My only wish was that there was a skip button. Some of the videos were quite loud and/or in a few cases, not interesting (at all).

So, how do I press "go" that's mentioned in text in the overlay?
Same here. I'm now getting 502 Bad Gateway but maybe Disconnect or uBlock were blocking something.
Had the same issue, Just refreshed a couple of times and it appeared. I guess the site is overloaded
I think one of my extensions was blocking it, try in an incognito window.
I had to disable PrivacyBadger for it to work
I just saw a splash screen, no videos.

Then 502 bad gateway.

:-/

The link is not working for me.
I saw a guy with the ISIS flag making a speech... I'm probably on some list now.
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Ha! I got the same one and just posted the same comment.
I absolutely died! It was so funny.
Its honestly hard to be mad at the thing, I was laughing for a good minute. I want more youtube like this.
"This video has been removed by the user."
Yeah, sadly; this could have gone viral. The las time I checked there were about 200 views and a 22 to none like/dislike ratio. Although it is probably better this way.
Video removed by user... What was it?
Would make an awesome background for chromecast.