kannonboy 13 hours 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.

  • mattlondon 7 hours 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.

    • kevinsync 4 hours 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

      • wholinator2 3 hours ago

        Nah, i agree. I'm a little younger but i distinctly remember adults around me heavily warning about using the internet and especially putting anything about yourself into it. There was a great distrust between people and the internet in the early 2000's, but then kids got ipods that could text and call, and network effects meant that you _had_ to be on Facebook, and slowly over time Facebook and MySpace started to not feel like the danger zone, like it was separate from all those warnings cause it was just you and your friends chatting at 2:00a.m., nobody was gonna bother to look at you. Then the social media empires grew and expanded and it kinda became the entire internet (that people use) started to feel like not the danger zone. You could do anything there, and huge company's would create walled gardens that would hide the worst aspects and let you pretend it was a safe and open place, to their benefit of course. Adults stopped warning, kids became adults, and now to hear a warning about the internet is incredibly rare. We also just think that there's so much shit there, nobody would take the time to notice us, and everyone else is posting their entire lives anyways so why not? Strange times

        • johnisgood an hour ago

          I wonder if the no warning part is a consequence of too much moderation, so people think everything or most thing is so moderated it no longer warrants a warning?

    • mdanger007 5 hours 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.

      • supplied_demand 4 hours ago

        ==occur in every day life and don’t violate people’s privacy==

        Plenty of things happen in every day life, but are private (sex, break-ups, proposals, Dr. visits, etc.). I also noticed lots of these videos have people in the background. I doubt they were they notified that a video was being taken and uploaded publicly.

        ==I would just like to invite you to get out more.==

        Maybe an alternative is to invite yourself to ask questions about why there are multiple comments with the same sentiment rather than reflexively telling them how to feel/act?

        • Dylan16807 an hour ago

          > multiple comments with the same sentiment

          Multiple comments saying it felt creepy or multiple comments saying it ruined their day to any extent? Those aren't the same thing.

          • supplied_demand an hour ago

            There is literally a comment thanking the person who made the original comment because they felt the exact same way.

            ==Thanks - that's exactly how I felt after watching a view videos==

            The original comment was a long explanation that ended with: ==Kinda ruined my day a bit==

            Seems like pretty tame language to get worked up about, I see two qualifiers in merely 6 words.

            • Dylan16807 42 minutes ago

              Without more clarification, I am unsure about whether feeling the same applies to the day ruining or just the direct reaction.

              > Seems like pretty tame language to get worked up about, I see two qualifiers in merely 6 words.

              I don't think anyone here is worked up.

      • mattlondon 4 hours ago

        I don't think it is invading their privacy-with-a-big-P (after all I have no idea who these people are or where the lived etc), it is more just socially it felt inappropriate.

        I think if a young family was sat on a park bench doing this and you went and sat on the bench between the mother and the father it would be considered at the least incredibly rude and inappropriate. Even if they are in a public place and you are not technically violating any laws, you'd still be acting in a way that most people would disagree with.

        This is what it felt like to me.

        • hoten 2 hours ago

          If I can tweak the metaphor, it's more like sitting on a vantage point within the park and peering at them with binoculars, far enough away that they can't see. It's still ick but definitely intrudes on them far less.

          • fluoridation 24 minutes ago

            No, it's more like someone took a photo of themselves to show to their family, and after they were done with it they left it on a bench in a park (perhaps not realizing that the photo wouldn't magically go away on its own), and a long long time afterwards someone happened to stumble upon it and look at it.

      • lukan 4 hours ago

        "don’t violate people’s privacy"

        Did you asked the kids in the videos (who are grownups or teenagers now) if they are ok with random strangers watching their kids life?

        Also I would doubt, that most people were aware, that they were uploading the video to the general public.

        So there are surely worse things going on, but I also felt uneasy after watching such private videos.

        • fluoridation 16 minutes ago

          >Did you asked the kids in the videos (who are grownups or teenagers now) if they are ok with random strangers watching their kids life?

          >Also I would doubt, that most people were aware, that they were uploading the video to the general public.

          Those sentences are working against each other. You don't need to ask for permission to observe something in public. That's what makes the public sphere public; that there are restrictions and expectations in the private sphere that don't exist in the public sphere. If someone mistakenly believes they're in private when they're not, that's unfortunate for them. It's their responsibility to know where they are, not your responsibility to act according to their expectation. You're not obligated to avert your gaze if someone walks out in public not wearing pants by mistake. Is it polite to do it? Sure. Is it wrong not to do it? No.

          • lukan 3 minutes ago

            "Those sentences are working against each other. "

            Not when the topic is privacy. This is not someone walking in public, those are videos out of private homes. Just because someone uploaded something, does not mean he had

            a) the rights to do so (I saw a clip where a women asked a bit angry, are you making a movie?)

            B) was aware what he is doing

            (Google and co do have a incentive to mislead people about who will be able to access data)

            So it might be technical legal. It if is moral, is up to yourself to decide.

    • arethuza 7 hours 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.

      • stronglikedan 4 hours ago

        > very private

        very explicitly uploaded with the intent that others would see it

        • latexr 4 hours ago

          We don’t know that. As per the webpage, this could’ve been uploaded directly from the Photos app on an iPhone, by people who didn’t really understand the consequences. Maybe they uploaded it and thought they’d get a private link to share with one specific person. Most people are not tech savvy and don’t fully understand the possible ramifications of their sharing.

          • dimator 2 hours ago

            The fact that many of these have exactly 0 views makes it totally plausible that the uploaders had no idea that this video existed.

          • steve_adams_86 2 hours ago

            I can imagine people thinking "YouTube" was a video service for You, indicating that you'd be uploading something private for You to share as desired.

            It sounds crazy now, but having worked with people a lot to make software that makes sense to them, this... Is not far fetched in the slightest.

          • dan353hehe 2 hours ago

            Yeah I just got a video of an infant taking a bath. I have small kids my self so nothing new, but not something I would want on the internet for everyone to see. And I doubt that the mom, and now the teenager who was the kid, would want broadcast everywhere.

        • supplied_demand 4 hours ago

          The world was a lot different 15 years ago, both YouTube and iPhones were new and not full understood by the average person. Anyone who has designed a UI knows that not all actions are explicit.

        • efdee an hour ago

          More likely: uploaded with the intent that a very limited audience would see it, thinking it would drown in the pool of videos uploaded to YouTube or maybe not even aware that other people could stumble upon it.

    • manmal 5 hours 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.

      • johnisgood an hour ago

        I have seen recently uploaded videos (or reels, or "tiktoks") which were intentional... Shit's wild. People now know, yet... They sometimes do the most disgusting shit ever for the attention (likes, views).

    • stronglikedan 4 hours ago

      > That felt like a total invasion of their private lives.

      Except they literally explicitly uploaded it to YT.

      • rescripting 4 hours ago

        At the time this was probably the one of the most convenient ways to share videos with loved ones. It wouldn't cross your mind that these videos were "public" because no one had the link but you.

        I'm sure it never crossed their mind that 15 years later an aggregator would be resurfacing them.

        • recursive 3 hours ago

          Is there a more convenient way now? Not being sarcastic, but it's still pretty damn convenient.

          • jonny_eh 33 minutes ago

            I use Google Photos. Apple Photos would work too. Or any of the messaging apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, etc.

          • 85392_school 2 hours ago

            These days you can unlist the video.

            • jonny_eh 34 minutes ago

              That was possible then too, but took an extra step. Defaults are important.

            • throwawayq3423 an hour ago

              YOu think people know how to do that? Or even remember their content is there for all to see?

    • jnovek 7 hours 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.

    • theodric 5 hours 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!

  • giancarlostoro an hour 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.

  • dheera 31 minutes ago

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

  • gear54rus 9 hours 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.

    • rkagerer 9 hours ago

      Clicking the date opens it in YouTube.

      • jonny_eh 33 minutes ago

        That's a shame, I like the ephemeral nature of these.

  • hoseja 10 hours ago

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

    • supermatt 9 hours 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.

      • Mashimo 9 hours ago

        AFAIK youtube is profitable now. It was not for years, but is now.

        • dnissley an hour ago

          Can you post your source? Last time I checked (and quickly checking around now) I didn't see any announcement from Google about Youtube being profitable.

        • eru 8 hours ago

          Yes, but it could perhaps be more profitable, if they cut spending on this aspect?

          • whereismyacc 7 hours ago

            For every year that passes, storage becomes cheaper, but the total size of youtube's video repository grows. I wonder what the net effect of all that is in the end. Ever increasing costs? Or maybe it kinda evens out.

            • eru 3 hours ago

              Interestingly, if storage cost decreases geometrically over time, then the total storage cost of storing a video for all eternity is finite.

              Though what I was commenting on here wasn't so much the cost of storing a video at all, but storing it in 'warm' enough storage that you can load it really quickly.

        • iamgopal 7 hours ago

          What could be cost of total storage of YouTube ? Edit : About billion USD per year.

        • b3lvedere 5 hours ago

          Since when did that stop shareholders to make even more money?

    • kristopolous 8 hours ago

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

      • supportengineer 5 hours ago

        Once you live to a certain age, you realize this is true about everything in your life.

        • kristopolous 23 minutes ago

          I'm increasingly thinking of customer product relations in terms of giving treats to your users.

          The moat and stickiness concepts are ok, but "candy store" is more fruitful.

          Of course what constitutes candy is different for every product and you need to understand your customers to know what "flavors" they want

      • seanw265 5 hours ago

        I got charged by Squarespace the other day, and it immediately raised red flags—I've never done business with them before.

        Then it clicked: this was for an old domain I’d purchased through Google Domains. I knew Google had sold its domain business to Squarespace, but in the moment, I’d completely forgotten about it.

        Oh well.

    • ThrowawayTestr 6 hours ago

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

lelandfe 14 hours 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.

  • someone7x 4 hours 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

  • raverbashing 12 hours 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 6 hours ago

    I got a dude beating a horse with a stick!

    • lelandfe 5 hours ago

      Far Side caption: Terry was never any good with idioms

quartz 4 hours 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.

nickdothutton 4 hours 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.

CM30 9 hours 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.

  • smitelli 5 hours 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.

  • miunau 8 hours 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 8 hours ago

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

      • datadrivenangel 5 hours ago

        Most things with low popularity are rated appropriately. There are definitely some hidden gems, but most media that is created is simply bad.

        • miunau 5 hours ago

          This is a lazy take. The reason is that there is money involved in picking who is at the top of the playlists. It's no big secret the big record labels own large parts of the music streaming industry. They are simply getting their investment back. There is no incentive giving money to any small third parties in terms of promotion. Spotify doesn't even pay out for songs that get under 1000 streams per year anymore.

          This is not even getting into the investment companies that buy artist catalogues wholesale, and therefore have a major interest in keeping old songs in constant rotation for the decades to come.

          Saying any of it is a meritocracy is pure ignorance.

          • lelandbatey 2 hours ago

            I don't think they're saying it's a meritocracy, I think they're uncontroversialy saying that a playlist of songs with up-till-now zero plays would be a huge amount of garbage, e.g. poorly made FL Studio/Garage Band experiments, not even interesting music just kinda bad music.

      • wholinator2 6 hours ago

        Yeah, it seems like it could be a great feature for helping level the playing field a bit and discover some hidden gems that no one would have ever heard. But I imagine that at some point 'no streams' would have to turn into 'low streams' but that's fine.

  • preciousoo 8 hours ago

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

dudefeliciano 10 hours 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 :)

  • rob 9 hours 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
    • stcg 7 hours 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.
      • quesera 6 hours ago

        Pretty sure Nas was first though. I can't even find Ecclesiastes on Tidal.

        • wrkta 4 hours ago

          Whoever said it first was lying.

        • jabroni_salad 3 hours ago

          the joke lands a lot better in the original Cylon.

    • echelon_musk 7 hours ago

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

  • venusenvy47 7 hours 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/

  • chamomeal 8 hours ago

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

  • jerrre 9 hours ago

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

  • supermatt 9 hours ago

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

  • 63936473 7 hours ago

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

peterldowns 14 hours ago

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 14 hours 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... ?

    • pearjuice 12 hours 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.

      • peterldowns 4 hours ago

        That’s an extremely unfair characterization. It was an honest attempt to make a product; the product didn’t catch on; CNN acquihired the team.

      • dewey 4 hours ago

        You are just describing a regular startup, that’s not a pump & dump which makes it sound like a scam.

  • pbhjpbhj 7 hours ago

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

Netcob 8 hours 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.

  • xnorswap 4 hours 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.

  • dwayne_dibley 7 hours 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.

yuters 4 hours 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?

lbrito 2 hours 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!

macintux 13 hours 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 13 hours 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 9 hours ago

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

upmind 13 minutes ago

How did you crawl so many videos on YouTube?

paxys 13 hours 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.

  • femto 8 hours 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 6 hours ago

    My second video was from a strip club

  • ffsm8 13 hours 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 12 hours 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.

      • ffsm8 12 hours ago

        Not sure where you're getting that alt-right circle from, it's just regular Internet lingo. Unless you consider people like Hasan alt-right too? Would be mind-blowing for sure, but hey, to reach their own.

        Got popular during the pandemic, though it predates it

        https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Coomer

        • kridsdale1 an hour ago

          Many people still believe that 4chan et al are Alt Right.

          They’re just what 14-28 year old boys are up to, sans filter algorithms. It’s the whole spectrum.

        • bertylicious 10 hours ago

          The idea itself is so regressive and shaming, I don't find it surprising at all that the political right is drawn to it.

  • beernet 13 hours ago

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

mastazi 14 hours 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)

JanneVee 5 hours 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.

  • capital_guy 2 hours 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.

  • ryandrake 5 hours 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.

VanTodi 9 hours 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 9 hours ago

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

nrvn 2 hours 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 hours ago

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

password4321 13 hours ago

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

  • debo_ 13 hours ago

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

    • 0_____0 6 hours 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 13 hours ago

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

xxr 14 hours ago

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

  • __turbobrew__ 13 hours ago

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

    • topherclay 12 hours ago

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

  • sim7c00 13 hours ago

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

MortyWaves 2 hours 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.

paulluuk 11 hours 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 10 hours 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

coreyhn 6 hours ago

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

kalli 6 hours 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

tpoacher 10 hours 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).

  • dwroberts 9 hours ago

    It works fine in Firefox on a desktop

  • shrx 10 hours ago

    Doesn't work in waterfox either.

    • encom 3 hours ago

      Broken on Vivaldi as well.

Aeroi an hour ago

Damn, I got Gangnam styled on video #3.

password4321 14 hours ago

I'd like to learn more about crawling YouTube, I don't think they appreciate that.

  • serf 14 hours ago

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

soulclap 3 hours 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_school an hour ago

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

babyent 14 hours 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 14 hours 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.

arookery 12 hours 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.

tigerlily 14 hours 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 9 hours ago

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

pimlottc 5 hours 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)"

jacinda 13 hours 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.

tr3ntg 4 hours 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.

bloomingeek 4 hours 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.

graeber_28927 7 hours 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.

GNOMES 5 hours 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 5 hours ago

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

albertojacini 4 hours ago

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

stefanpie 13 hours 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.

  • mparnisari 12 hours ago

    I did the same thing! Haha

csmpltn 7 hours 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 6 hours 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.

shriracha 4 hours ago

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

duckkg5 4 hours ago

Simple, effective and enjoyable UX. Nicely done.

cryptozeus 4 hours ago

Content world before ai , pure and organic !

JKCalhoun 5 hours ago

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

nomilk 13 hours 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.

  • jacinda 13 hours 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).

n0vella 10 hours ago

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

buro9 7 hours ago

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

p0w3n3d 7 hours ago

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

ezfe 4 hours ago

> Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot

mensetmanusman 6 hours ago

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

amelius 8 hours ago

Why is there vignetting at the edges of the videos?

Is that a known iPhone defect?

  • thinkingemote 5 hours ago

    CSS over the player box

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

drooopy 11 hours ago

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

ivolimmen 14 hours ago

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

apexalpha 12 hours ago

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

I guess it did say random

m0n01d 4 hours ago

reposts. every day a new one.

dmezzetti 8 hours 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!

sarpdag 13 hours ago

Authentic and nostalgic, I am enjoying watching.

mparnisari 12 hours ago

I got tons of babies/kids, and pets.

NooneAtAll3 12 hours ago

I get only static, even if I refresh

did it break?

  • primozk 12 hours ago

    Use the remote.

    • yohannesk 10 hours 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

system2 12 hours ago

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

boredtofears 13 hours ago

Absolutely mesmerized by this, thank you.

ChrisArchitect 14 hours 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.

  • Twisell 13 hours 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 11 hours 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.

      • Twisell 10 hours ago

        One upside is that it hopefully prevented developer to ship half-baked software that rely on filename and can't handle duplicate name gracefully.

        You can't prevent collisions (multiples sources/counter reset/date reset, etc). So it's actually nice to have an unforgiving standard that will bite you if you make unfounded assumptions.

superkuh 14 hours ago

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

  • dybber 14 hours ago

    The first video I got was from some KKK ritual.

    • dyauspitr 13 hours ago

      Those people are probably elected officials now

riow 7 hours ago

Very cool

einpoklum 10 hours 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" :-\

diimdeep 2 hours 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

khana 7 hours ago

[dead]