338 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 45.5 ms ] thread
This is genuinely amazing. The complete lack of editing. And strangely some of the videos were allowed to have copyrighted content in the background (meaning ContentID wasn't live or hasn't been retroactively applied) really sells the scene. Like, the last one has Taio Cruz's Dynamite playing in the background. Amazing. The Ea-Nasir Tablet of our time.
For me, the YouTube embed player wants a login:

“Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot.”

(iPhone Safari)

The Ea-Nasir tablet is in a museum, but at least I can see pictures of it without giving my personal information to a multi-trillion dollar corporation.

Do you use iCloud Private Relay? YouTube gives that message and Google requires a CAPTCHA for web searches very often when iCloud Private Relay is enabled.
No, I don’t have that enabled.
>allowed to have copyrighted content in the background

I might be wrong in your specific case, but generally YouTube doesn't just remove videos with copyrighted audio. Often copyright holders instead make it so that the video with their songs will have ads and they'll receive all the ad revenue.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7002106?hl=en

"Depending on the copyright owner's Content ID settings, Content ID claims can:

- Block content from being viewed.

- Monetize content by running ads on it and sometimes sharing revenue with the uploader.

- Track the viewership statistics on the content.

Any of these actions can be geography-specific. For example, a video can be monetized in one country/region and blocked or tracked in a different country/region."

When this happens don’t you typically also see the track registered at the bottom? ContentID took them a long time to develop if I’m remembering right.
> And strangely some of the videos were allowed to have copyrighted content in the background

What is strange is actually how we put up with copyright interfering how we communicate to this extend. Sharing a slice of your life as-is should not be something that other people have a say about.

> However, this two-click upload feature was short-lived when Apple severed ties Apple severed ties with YouTube by removing its homegrown app in 2012.

"Apple severed ties" repeats.

Time Cook doesn't wear ties. Coincidence? I think not!
Thanks! Gonna fix this later tonight
There were a time when you could had a 8" tablet on Win8 with People app having a feed from Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin and something else too (Twitter?)

In a mere months it was gutted on every side and Windows tablets (rspecially 8" favour) gone the way of DoDo

That was the remnants of windows phone. The people app would automatically sync all of their social accounts for a person.

As Microsoft moved more of those apps out of the inbox image and to the store, the functionality slowly stopped working.

The sunset of windows phone ended the rest of those features.

Yes but my feel (at the time, by the sources slowly dropping and degrading the functionality) it wasn't MS who slowly strangled that functionality. Do you have any articles on that? I'm really interested on what ecactly happened that time and considering the whole Nokia debacle...
Whatever Microsoft was doing, it's also the case that the social apps pulled back the APIs, as they wanted to own the feed views and push recommendations over chronological view. When Cambridge Analytica hit the news media, that was a nail in the coffin of open social APIs, but they were already dead.
(comment deleted)
Lots of digital cameras use an incrementing number in the filename. If you ignore the prefix part, I wonder what is the most commonly uploaded filename number for photos and videos?
IMG_XXXX is actually a standard for digital cameras

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_rule_for_Camera_File_sy...

TFA, "Apple uses the ‘IMG_XXXX’ naming convention for all images and videos captured on iOS devices, where XXXX is a unique sequence number." isn't very accurate, as the numbers are not unique. They're just sequential. if you take 1001 images, the file system will actually create a new folder and roll the digits back to 0000 to avoid overwriting

Thanks for fact-checking me on this. When writing this, I didn’t consider what would happen on the 10,000th image. I will add an asterisk on this line!
Although as that link says, the prefix depends on the manufacturer. My Sony Mavica cameras have MVC_, newer Sony cameras are DSC0, my Fujifilm cameras have DSCF, I think IMG_ is pretty unique to Apple
>I think IMG_ is pretty unique to Apple

You'd be thinking wrong. Canon cameras also use the IMG_ format. It's been a while since I've dealt with GoPros, but I'm pretty sure they are IMG_ as well.

While it's nice to hold onto what you know from experience, extrapolating that to end-all-be-all knowledge is just not a good stance. Especially in the light of information from people with wider breadth of information.

> Canon cameras also use the IMG_ format.

That's a sweeping statement that is definitely not true for all cameras Canon has made.

So even if some Canon cameras do use the format, that does not negate my comment. The EOS line of Cameras like the 1D, 5D, 7D, etc definitely do. I'm looking at content from them now. If they have changed that with their mirrorless line, that still does not invalidate my comment.
The most common number will probably be something very low since in many cameras the numbers reset when you format/erase the card.
The website http://astronaut.io/ does a similar thing but for recent videos, and not just from iPhones. From the home page:

> These videos come from YouTube. They were uploaded in the last week and have titles like DSC 1234 and IMG 4321. They have almost zero previous views. They are unnamed, unedited, and unseen (by anyone but you).

At one point you might be at a school recital in Malaysia, and the next minute you are at a birthday in Ecuador. It's amazing!

For those using firefox's autoplay blocker, http://astronaut.io/ doesn't work at all unless you whitelist it.
Works for me (current ESR on Linux).
It works if you use the default autoplay blocker setting ("block audio"). Probably you are using the setting "block audio and video" as default (I use that too) and in our case we have to whitelist it.
There were a bunch of subreddits based on obscure videos with default filenames.

https://old.reddit.com/r/IMGXXXX/

There is / was also r/DeepIntoYoutube which was dedicated to good videos that only had a handful of views.

It reminds me of this grandma that played Skyrim for ages but never had any views, but thanks to one of these discover pages, she got a following of tens of thousands.

And before that it was a neat trick to find obscure images in your favorite search engine. "Index of" is/was also a good keyword to get at file listings.
I love astronaut.io! Open it in an incognito window so that your YouTube watch history doesn't get too crazy.
Or maybe its a good way to reset it
If I visit Youtube without being logged in, all I see is junk.

Why would a regular user of YouTube ever want to reset their watch history?

Some people don’t like that YouTube knows too much about them
Some people don't like living in a personalized bubble.
I only ever watch youtube or view web pages in incognito/guest mode or other browser profile that deletes all cookies when I close it (which I do at the end of every day).
why would you stay logged on all the time?
I watched a few videos then opened YouTube in another tab and checked my watch history. It doesn't show the videos from this site. I think in general it doesn't track embeds from other sites.
Better would be to stop using Youtube's algorithm for discovery - then your watch history is irrelevant.
> At one point you might be at a school recital in Malaysia, and the next minute you are at a birthday in Ecuador. It's amazing!

The same as if you just used a website or extension to play random youtube videos?

> play random youtube videos?

I feel like that would result in a lot more "hey guys don't forget to like and subscribe" type of videos.

Probably not unless they're weighted by popularity. There's a very long tail of content on YouTube. Most videos are viewed by nobody.
if anyone know the person who maintains that site or if that person reads this: this site would be massively improved if the speed of the ISS footage playing in the background were simply slowed down a little. right now it gives this feeling of rocketing forward which is a very different vibe from the premise of the site. the user should float slowly to emphasize the thoughtful nature of the activity and enjoy the sensation of watching the world go by.
I just opened it in incognito in Chrome on Android

noticed that the YouTube videos continue playing without interruption even when I switch to another tab or minimize chrome altogether and switch to another app.

how can we harness this power to play our favorite audio tracks in background (without any ads to boot ... shhh don't tell Google)

I also notice that the website triggers a browser warning when loading that it is not secure.

There are browsers extensions for this. I can't recommend one because I don't use this anymore. On Android this would mean using Firefox or another browser allowing extensions. Or you can give a YouTube address to MPV with the --no-video parameter. Or use NewPipe or one of its forks and open the YouTube kink with it in audio only mode. Or use invidious, but this last option is harder and harder to use. Or yt-dlp -x to download the audio of course.
Background playback just works with Firefox on Android with no extensions required.
(comment deleted)
There was an iOS app that used to let you do this; it would play music via Youtube embeds in a hidden web view, exposing its own UI for all the functionality you'd expect from a music streaming app.

Whether this was legal is... a gray area, it was a somewhat legitimate company that won some kind of Canadian startup contest on TV, but the music industry was, very predictably, furious at their business model.

Eventually, Apple got scared enough of being sued along with them that they caved in and removed the app, but that took far longer than I thought it would.

There's a good article at https://torrentfreak.com/apple-removes-parasitic-streaming-a...

On Android you can use NewPipe for a similar experience. For obvious reasons it's not on Google's Play Store, but you can get it from F-Droid or Github.
I use Brave android. No ads and I can close phone or do anything on it and the video will be playing with no problem
I use Video Background Play Fix [1] (along with uBlock of course). "Firefox for Android can continue playing video even if you switch to another tab or app. However, sites can detect these user actions with the Page Visibility API and the Fullscreen API. This add-on is designed to block events and properties exposed by the APIs."

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/video-bg-play

Many ways to do that on Android. NewPipe or its fork Tubular, Clipious, LibreTube, or host a local instance of Invidious or ViewTube and access them using the browser.

F-Droid and the ability to still run software outside of Google's walled garden is the last remaining reason preventing me from switching to iPhone. I've tried Yattee on iOS and it's okay on Apple TV but seriously doesn't come close to the power of Tubular on Android.

There's something magical when one location becomes the default for something. A site like this would be impossible if YouTube wasn't the place for videos.

It's why I'm sad that we no longer have one obvious default for microblogging. It was such a rich source of thoughts. That's all gone now.

And the former default is no longer developer friendly. (Or friendly to anyone else, really.)
I can't tell if this trail of talk is about Tumblr, Blogger, or something else - idnk, does anyone else remembers Astroatlas?
I’m pretty sure they’re referring to Twitter.
Twitter still exists. Renamed. Same exact thing. You can create an account and post whatever random things you want. Some people might follow you. Some might not. If you see something that makes you sad, you can block the person who posted the sad thing.
It's a walled garden. Unless you are logged into an account it's basically a private network.
All social media have to be walled gardens or be free-prey for ravenous AI bots. Evolution at work.
or be free-prey for ravenous AI bots

Have you recently been on X?

I think your parent comment is talking about AI bots consuming the content, while you seem to be making a point about AI bots posting content.
There are thousands of bluecheck AI bots that just copy-paste/regurgitate or just make up stupid content and post it continuously to get engagement views and money.

It is really worse than before.

Why are you following them?
You don’t need to follow someone to see their content. When you open the app the default timeline is the “For You” one. Sometimes you don’t even notice that the app has switched back to “For You”, X definitely doesn’t really want you staying on the “Following” tab.
The regurgitated content is often in the form of comments in popular threads.
"Popular" tweets (of which these bot accounts often fall into, because they're propped up by bot responses and engagement farming) are pushed into your feed even if you're not following (or engaging) with them.
I'm not following them, I just see them in any damn mildly interesting thread out there.
"no longer developer friendly" referring to them re-pricing their API to make aggregating data for fun monetarily infeasible.
Not just aggregating data for fun. It made third-party clients like Tweetbot impossible. Similar to non-old.reddit.com, the web interface has been crappy for a pretty long time, but was easily worked around by using better clients.

No more.

> Same exact thing.

It very much is not. No third-party clients; can’t see threads without an account; owner inserting himself and his ideology at the centre; fewer and less diverse participating people; diminished trust in the platform; more spam; different verification rules… Even the character limit is different.

Probably Twitter? Tumblr and Blogger were for regular blogging, not micro-blogging.
Youtube certainly isn't developer friendly.. their APIs have very strict limits that often force people to go down the scraping route
We don't need centralization for this. Federated protocols like mastodon have friendlier APIs than some of the most popular walled gardens of today...
Discovery sucks, though.
it's getting better
Mastodon is a walled garden
Can you elaborate?
Mastodon the software isn't. Mastodon the community is because they want to control who is and isn't allowed to federate.
iiuc your argument, it would be more accurate to phrase it as: mastodon, lemmy, and other federated social protocols are like archipelagos of small islands.

Or, you were referring to bluesky.

Mastodon contains several sub federations that near automatically ban each other’s users… So a very tribal and extremely violent archipelago of small islands…
I don't see why a site like this couldn't search one or more of the top video sites if there was healthy competition.
Found Footage Festival on Youtube does the same thing. They have fans of the show "mine" for img's and submit interesting/weird/funny ones. It's part of their bi-weekly shows where they review weird and interesting VHS tapes and old public access shows.
It would be very interesting to get a view of the source code for such a site. There are other interesting ideas that could be done by mixing videos selected using other filters etc.

By any chance is this or similar on github :)

https://github.com/wonga00/astronaut

I remember looking through the code awhile ago, it's nice and simple!

Uses socket.io w node.js + express, a crawler script searches YT periodically to keep the videos fresh. The server iterates randomly through the video list, telling all clients through socket.io which video is next, and when to switch.

I can imagine that it gets boring really quickly to skim through random untitled YouTube uploads. Maybe back then when YT did have a weak filter and initially waved through the videos there could have been something worth finding.

Would be cool to see some statistics on how many videos over the years get removed with each new protection and censorship update. For example the latest medical disinformation campaign not only forces creators to avoid certain words completely, but also flagged and deleted pre-existing videos.

It’s sad and dangerous that any topic could get forbidden and erased not allowed to keep a history. The Internet Archive is unfortunately a target now and efforts are being taken to undermine it partly. It’s already a thing to have records deleted from the archive which should be the most worse thing when your whole concept is to archive.

I strongly suggest IA mirrors around the world in various countries with different legislations so that the censorship of each country is not reflected in the IA mirror of the other.

>It’s already a thing to have records deleted from the archive which should be the most worse thing when your whole concept is to archive.

IA doesn't delete archives, they merely make them inaccessible. Perhaps that's a distinction without a difference in the near-term, but it means things like copyrighted content will be republished after copyright expires.

Feels like an Adam Curtis documentary.
http://www.insecam.org/ is another fun one. Random unsecured security cameras from around the world.
Insecam is truly a pearl among websites, when you’re in your feels at 3 am on a random (work)day and then you can look at somewhere at the opposite side of the world that’s already going through the day, maybe it’s already noon there or something.

The vibes hit different

This site has the cookie permissions dialog which has "reject all", but I think this rejects only the "opt-in" cookies.

The "legitimate interest" cookies, which are equally comprehensive but are on a different tab, are not rejected by this, and to reject them you have to turn each one of them off by hand, scrolling down a massive list.

If you select "reject all", the dialog instantly closes, I think with the legitimate interest cookies all in use - but I can't check, because I know of no way to get the dialog back up again, which is why I'm saying "I think".

When sites pop this one up, I leave - and notably, The Register, the UK news site, started using it a year or so ago.

(comment deleted)
Do you think that websites really don't track you if you switch all the toggles?
The issue is the duplicitous nature of the consent form.

If the consent form itself is like that, then you already have no trust in the site, let alone asking the question of whether or not a non-duplicitous consent form could or could not be trusted.

I enabled the uBlock Origin Annoyances filter to block most of those cookie popups. It's not enabled by default. Clicking "reject all" has no practical effect on my privacy. If I wanted to keep something secret, I'd use e2e encryption instead of making websites do a pinkie promise
I think usually the standard wording for this option would be something like "Reject all non-essential cookies" and they left out the second part of that sentence. I'm not saying it's OK but maybe it's a mistake that was done in good faith.
GP is alluding to the fact that several tracking networks will place their cookies in the "legitimate interest" category, because the rationale is that them making money by monetizing user data is their "legitimate" moneymaking interest.

There's not a lot of good faith in that, and it's arguably not valid according to GDPR.

> They are unnamed, unedited, and unseen (by anyone but you).

This doesn't seem to be the case at all. First two videos it showed me had double digit views. Third one had over a thousand.

> ...have titles like DSC 1234 and IMG 4321.

IIRC, the DSC_XXXXXX naming scheme is from Samsung smartphones. (Or maybe just Android in general?)

Ah, this is where this comes from. There has been rumours flying around in Stable Diffusion / Flux circles that you would get much more realistic pictures when you include a photo id like IMG_0416.
I don’t think it comes from these Youtube videos – Flickr and other photo upload services are a more likely source of training images with default file names.
Maybe its a combination of both.
It seems exceedingly unlikely to me that frames from random YouTube videos would have been used to train image generation models. First off, they're difficult to extract and second, the quality of individual video frames is very low, especially if we're talking about 15 year old phone videos at what, 480p at the very best!
You are probably right. I approached it from a high-value dataset perspective but would agree that fuzzy frames probably don't help much.
Its not a rumor, you really do and you can try it out yourself. Unfortunately its very finnicky and you cant really leverage it to produce a realistic image of what you want since any further prompting seems to override it.

Its like a ghost in the machine prompt.

Makes you wonder if its possible with the right seed, scheduler, and prompt to complete recreate the original.
Hey, OP here! This is my first ever HN post- I appreciate the warm reception.

A couple hours after posting this on my site, I found this incredible vid of a woman telling her partner she’s pregnant. Incredibly heartfelt, and only 16 views https://youtu.be/refKFdcojlE?si=l-PssLVYmmOPjjjA

It was posted over 10 years ago. I wonder if the family even knows that this video still exists.

> Mar 14, 2014

That kid will be 10 soon.

Eleven in four months?
Presumably there are still about 9 months to go in that pregnancy before the child is born.
I always thought, that would make way more sense. But a bit harder to find exact dates probably ..
Assuming it takes someone roughly 4-6 weeks to realize they are pregnant, the child was probably born in or around November 2014, and will be turning 10 in the next couple weeks.

I suppose the woman filming the video could have taken much longer to realize (unlikely, but possible), or chose to wait to tell the father until several months later (also unlikely, but possible), but either way, the kid is turning 10 now-ish, not 11.

It's also possible that this video was posted well after it was taken, in which case we can't say much about the age of the kid, except that it likely happened before this "Share to YouTube" functionality was removed from iOS.

Only if your culture measures age from conception instead of birth.
this is you why can't reuse calendars
I don't understand your comment.

(By the way, presumably there are still about 9 months to go in that pregnancy before the child is born.)

In Korean age, this kid is 11 already and about to turn 12!
Why does he walk off at the end? Did he still not believe her do you think?
He also said, "My heart just dropped". That's a curious thing to say.
I guess as in 'dropped a beat'. The news was so surprising his heart stopped momentarily.
It's the opposite, usually. "My heart dropped" is a sense of doom, foreboding, a realisation of oncoming cataclysm. Like 'as I saw the second plane come into view my heart dropped'.

Of course, people don't use language in a consistent way, and people will use terms thinking they mean e.g. their antonym.

It's probably a common initial reaction to learning of impending parenthood. Life will never be the same. Initially one might only see the looming challenge of the mountain to climb.

I was going to explain the way i saw it, but i erased it and decided it's probably best not to give my thoughts in case he or someone in his life came across the comments out of respect.
This makes me hopeful, the internet can still be interesting when we manage to break away from the attention trap of infinite feed and the prepared content designed to optimize likes. Feels like the raw homepages of a long time ago.
I love the potash game! That’s hilarious.
A little bit tangent, and I'm definitely looking at it from rose colored glasses... but been playing with it for the 30 minutes, and most of the videos look so real? Like when you go on TikTok / Instagram nowadays, there are obviously unlimited amount of content. But there's this sense of everything being edited multiple times, people trying to create their own "brand", nothing looking real. It's a shame how we over-financialized everything and sucked out the fun. Or maybe I just got old.

Side note, I'll also recommend people to look up "X city in 1990s / 2000s" on YouTube. San Francisco, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Toronto, London and etc. have cool slice of life content from people who were very into camcorders.

I see parallels with this and RuneScape. Now it's all about efficiently grinding stats or flipping stuff on the exchange. Back in the day it was all about trimming armor and buying gf.
I think that has more to do with being a kid vs being an adult. Kids are probably still buying gfs on Roblox and Minecraft today (disclaimer: I have no idea what kids play these days lol)
It's intelectually lazy to dismiss any concern about societal change as "you have just gotten old".
> I'm definitely looking at it from rose colored glasses

It's not rose tinted glasses, it's just a poor comparison.

The absolute vast majority of these videos have double digit if not any views. You're seeking them out, using a little quirk of naming and the poster's DGAFism. There is no pretense of promotion to a large audience or virality. Anything spoonfed you on a Tiktok or Instagram feed could not be more different. The default Youtube experience is the same as mass Tiktok. Moreover you can find plenty of similar material like this on Instagram and Tiktok if you go looking for it, that is after all what most people are using it for, bumming around with their friends. The algorithm isn't going to spoonfeed this to you, and obviously Youtube never did either.

I believe Reddit in particular actually has gotten much more optimized in the past 15 years. I don't think this is rose colored glasses, the content really is much more engaging and addictive, with more short form videos and content that can be understood immediately at a glance.
This may be so, but I don’t know how it counters the fact that there is more essentially unwatched and obscure content produced on these platforms than ever.

And it's not like this particular content was once popular in the "good old days", the view counts are literally 0 in some cases.

I was on tiktok in 2019/2020 and for a brief period it was just ordinary users messing around and posting whatever they felt like. No tiktok shop, very few ads or thinkpieces, nobody was trying to build an audience. A lot weirder and a lot more fun
Commercialization and infiltration of advertising-dollars-seeking "influencers" ruins social media sites.

I miss the early days of the internet (and especially YouTube) so fucking much. I'm 28 now, and I've been online since 2009. I think 2009-2014 was the GOLDEN AGE of the internet for me, especially on YouTube.

yeah agreed. I don't think Cory Doctorow is right about everything but I think he was dead on with enshittification
I'm old enough to have seen multiple golden ages / phases of the internet and was thinking about pointing out every era has one based on your age.

But then again, I kinda suspect there's some deeper truth going on where your mentioned golden age might be one of the last though?

Yeah, the ubiquity of smartphones and the rise of Facebook and Instagram (post-acquisition) as an open platform for advertisers versus mostly for early adopters/enthusiasts really killed the "fun" of the internet.

Also, I remember how many different frameworks and "rich internet application" technologies existed back then (Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, Apple QuickTime, etc.). In many ways, the internet was a much more diverse and a much more 'unpredictable' place back then.

> really killed the "fun" of the internet.

The original eternal September[1] predates my entry to the internet by a couple of years, but the cycle repeats eternally.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Yeah, I'm of the same vintage. Never really felt eternal september impacted the newsgroups I frequented as they didn't appeal to AOLers, and felt it was exaggerated. But it feels real now with engagement metric following content creators and influencers, and the way platforms enable it now.
For me it was 2003 to 2010. I said this multiple times, and it is that I'm working on a essay about qhy Internet was more enjoyable back then.

But sometimes I think the only reason (or the main reason) is that I was a teenager. It isn't about internet, it is about the user and how they saw the worldwide at that time...

I'm a couple of years older, and I generally agree with you. But even up until 2016 it was generally tolerable. There was a point in time when every single social media changed from "you and your friends" to "you and the world". Which opened the hellscape of influencer and branding world. I'm not sure what exactly accelerated it - Facebook/IG going algo-view first, TikTok starting to get traction even when it was just a dancing app, or the entire A/B science. Oh well...
What happened right around 2016 was a combination of the internet being weaponized in the political space and the destruction of of revenue for legacy media because of Facebook and Google and other walled systems which ingested their IP and served it to their users. This effectively made people paranoid of data that didn't immediately fit into their world view because the concept of any shared truth was shattered and at the same time it felt like everything and everyone on the internet was targeted to misinform you.

The 'mainstream media' was never taken seriously by people savvy in the early tech spaces, so the loss of it didn't really hit us as particularly impactful. But that loss made it so that the 'mainstream' no longer had any 'ground truth' they could all fall back on that would be the arbiter of correct and incorrect information, and so truth became whatever felt most right to a person at the time.

This of course has more to do with the people and culture you most identify with, rather than any kind of objective comparison of data, so groups looked more inwards and became ossified in dogma and refused to look at any other perspective in good faith. And here we are.

I've been on the Internet since 1995.

I remember the first banner ad!

Wikipedia didn't exist. It was possible to run out of websites to visit. People were, in general, super friendly, aside from the trolls on AIM trying to crash other people's clients. (IRC was a separate place though, I mostly spent time on websites.)

Forums had horrible UIs, the latency was awful. Compared to dial up BBSs that came before the user experience was much worse.

Everything was authentic. People just doing stuff, posting about what they loved. Uploading art they made and photos they took. The barrier to entry was high (you needed to own a scanner and be able to figure out how to set it up!), but not so high that determined non-technical users couldn't muddle through and still make great things.

Same. For me, usenet was "social media", long before social media was a thing. I remember in college hanging out in a newsgroup for people looking for a pen pal, and later exchanging letters with someone on the other side of the country whom I never met in person.

Pretty crude by today's standards, but also a lot more genuine and less risky. At that time there were a lot of people on the internet like me, college kids discovering it for the first time.

I got on in late '93. I definitely feel like I visited every web site. I seem to remember most of them being HTML tutorials :D
I've been on the Internet since 1999, and I feel a strong sense of nostalgia for those early years. For me, the period from 1999 to 2010 was the "golden age" of the Internet. It was a time of exploration, creativity, and genuine connection. I imagine that people who joined even earlier might feel a similar nostalgia for their own era on the web.

I also wrote about my experiences and why I consider this time the golden age in a blog post here: <https://susam.net/web-golden.html>.

IMO we need to move past the follower/following model on social media.

Having followers is the best way to get followers, which creates a fame snowball.

The result is that a few uploads get a bunch of attention, and most uploads get very little attention. The typical user feels lonely, isolated, neglected. Jealously means the attention-rich users, the ones with lots of followers, become targets for bullies -- and that leaves them miserable too. No one is happy.

Platforms with a more equal distribution of attention, such as IRC, didn't have these problems.

Virality was a mistake.

You might like this website: https://www.cameronsworld.net/

It's a Geocities archive containing websites hosted on the platform from the 90s/00s. I really like the creativity and authenticity in the archived sites, it's like looking at a mirror into the past.

The absolute freak show that is the TikTok top daily videos isn’t weird enough for you?
People doing a weird thing for clicks is not the shtick for me. People sharing their weird life, maybe.
TikTok's vine era. Sadly gone.
(comment deleted)
I think a big part of it is that this search doesn't involve "the algorithm" at all. There is no recommendation engine here, what you search for by pure ID is nothing but the unfiltered schism of what people record with their phones and unpretentiously/accidentally click "Upload" with no hope of clout chasing or really even a bare inkling that anybody might actually WATCH what they recorded.
There's definitely a lack of authenticity these days.

I was on the park the other day and there were these two dudes and one was filming the other walking and talking to the camera. They'd look at the shot and then he'd walk back and do it again and again. Multiple times.

I've also seen people talking regularly to their friends and then suddenly go into "influencer mode" and yell "tell us what you think in the comments! :kissy_face:" then go back to regular talk like nothing happened.

The word "cringey" is overused but it feels like such an inhuman behaviour and so weird to see live. Like the person just suddenly got possessed by some entity other than themselves.

(comment deleted)
[flagged]
That's certainly one way to look at it. For sure there's a lot of stuff that shouldn't have been shared. And for sure probably was abused by pedos. That doesn't mean that was the only or even predominant use case. Most people using the internet never end up interacting with pedos in any way, and assuming that dealing with pedos is the driving force here feels a bit narrow-minded.
[flagged]
Digital version of "I just bought some films from a yard sale". The good old days before enshitification.
this is valid of course but it makes me think about how totally different this is to that. the world has changed even more in this case i think.
/r/DeepIntoYouTube addict here. There are a lot of patterns like this you can use to find bizarre YouTube videos with next to no views, based upon the default numbering scheme of various cameras. Just one example: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=MVI_7812.MOV .. and yes, you can rattle through thousands of numbers for just that one.
If you want to look for GoPro videos, start at GX010001.MP4 and increment from there.
(comment deleted)
This is cool. In a similar vein with a more continuous display, check out astronaut.io
Worked great for me!
Likewise. Got an error at first, then it was working fine.
Ah, yeah I did get a couple errors at first, but kept trying then it worked great.
this is what youtube and reddit was like during 2011. it was calm, serene, accepting, warm, human. it was just this perfect mixture of user friendliness, people knowing how to type and use computers and just before the internet was taken seriously by anyone and corrupted by money. before social media became a serious political consideration. i remember very clearly that even at the time it felt too good to be true. these videos capture that feeling pretty well. it was all unfiltered and it made you feel like you were connected to the world. like you had your finger on the pulse of the world. or like the entire world was inside your computer. really warm fuzzy vibes. i still miss that. but now i am too busy to spend so much time on the computer anyway.
You're speaking of a world that doesn't exist. Even back then people were trying to make money out of YouTube.
>Even back then people were trying to make money out of YouTube

It's a matter of degree. Early YouTube was much closer to what the parent poster describes than the YouTube of today.

When I first discovered YouTube and uploaded videos, the thought of making money (let alone making a living) was nowhere in my mind.

There were people trying to make money but that wasn't the default and the attempts at doing so weren't as repetitive.
I miss those days too, but my recollection of Youtube is a little different. Lots of piracy for example.
I understand that these videos were made public, but still this kinda feels like violating people’s privacy. They most likely never intended for us all to watch their personal videos a decade later.
It's no different of inadvertently watching your neighbor naked through her window because you happened to look at the wrong time.

You know it's wrong but you won't look elsewhere...

True but I would probably not share her naked video on HN
It’s more like you’re continually checking hundreds of windows, just in case it happens…
(comment deleted)
i mean i personally look elsewhere, bc getting caught looking would feel really shitty for them probably.
I think that is neither a normal situation to be in nor a normal thing to do.
Please define normality, in the meantime I'm giving a try :

Normal men have balls, balls make man attracted to women -> normal men get their attention grabbed by inadvertently looking at pretty naked woman.

It's from a time before the internet became full of people trying to hurt you.
FTFY - It’s from a time when those people weren’t as brazen about it.
I'm surprised yours is the only comment from this perspective. I get the draw and innocence of such videos, but I agree spreading them knowing they were most likely uploaded accidentally seems a violation of these people's privacy.
Why on earth would you assume that most of these are an accident?
Even the OP has this to say:

> In fact, many were likely uploaded by accident or with a misunderstanding that complete strangers could see it.

Throughout the article, there are reasons why one would think that (like most having zero views, no descriptions, no engagement etc).

If you upload a video and set it to public, you're responsible for that. End of story.

It is not the responsibility of others to guess your intentions.

> and set it to public

That's the issue. These people likely didn't affirmatively do that.

IIRC at least for a while it defaulted to unlisted and then at some point YouTube changed all unlisted videos to private which removed a lot of videos from view where the original uploader was no longer around to set the video to public.
Do you know for sure they agreed explicitly to it being public?
This is what I don't get about historians reading old people's letters to each other. Most of Alexander the Great's letters that are read are fake, but for the ones that are real, did anyone ask for his consent first? What makes anyone think that we should be privy to their inmost thoughts put to stone? Even if he did, is it informed consent if he did so not knowing that billions could one day consume this idly? People really need to learn consent.
I think a case could be made that it’s fair that a person of his influence on the world loses a bit of his privacy a couple of thousand years after his death.
This is even true for "celebrities" today: there are different rules about where they still get to keep their privacy, and even then the society's thirst for the most intimate details is unrelenting. I am not saying this is "fair", but that it's recognized that "celebrity" has quite some downsides too.

OTOH, people featured in these videos are not going to hold a press conference when they start a new job (eg movie filming, sport team changes, winning elections), or even about a terminal illness they might be facing, where all of those are quite common with celebrities.

People need to learn consent for people who've been dead for hundreds or thousands of years? Why? In the end, everything we leave behind belongs to our species' history and culture. There's no moral obligation for privacy under these circumstances the same way there is for somebody who's alive now. It just makes it unnecessarily difficult for future historians to put arbitrary restrictions on what they're allowed to read and share.
To future historians: once I'm dead for 2+ generations, feel free to consider any information of mine as public domain.
Indeed: I would feel bad looking over them even if I know that most are innocous enough.

It's the usual, the fact that we can does not mean that we should.