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!
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.
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.
Just like in the Internet?
it's getting better
Mastodon is a walled garden
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…
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.
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.
And the former default is no longer developer friendly. (Or friendly to anyone else, really.)
Youtube certainly isn't developer friendly.. their APIs have very strict limits that often force people to go down the scraping route
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.
> 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.
"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.
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.
"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.
The regurgitated content is often in the form of comments in popular threads.
Even blocking has changed!
Probably Twitter? Tumblr and Blogger were for regular blogging, not micro-blogging.
Oh you'll be back.
http://www.insecam.org/ is another fun one. Random unsecured security cameras from around the world.
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.
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
Do you think that websites really don't track you if you switch all the toggles?
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.
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
There were a bunch of subreddits based on obscure videos with default filenames.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_Curry
Seems like she retired recently.
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.
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.
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 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).
Some people don’t like that YouTube knows too much about them
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.
why would you stay logged on all the time?
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.
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 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.
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.
The Tubular fork of NewPipe is worth noting, https://github.com/polymorphicshade/Tubular n a Revanced patched YT app would also work.
You essentially described Musi, although it still serves you the Google ads and its own occasional ad every now and again
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/musi-simple-music-streaming/id...
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.
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."
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
For those using firefox's autoplay blocker, http://astronaut.io/ doesn't work at all unless you whitelist it.
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.
Works for me (current ESR on Linux).
Feels like an Adam Curtis documentary.
> 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.
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.
Very funny.
What a lovely idea!
> 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.
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepIntoYouTube is a reddit sub to bring up videos like these.
The first one I clicked on was similarly heartwarming - it's just a video of an ultrasound, zooming in on the heartbeat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_N4rAauRvU
> Mar 14, 2014
That kid will be 10 soon.
In Korean age, this kid is 11 already and about to turn 12!
Eleven in four months?
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.
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 ..
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.)
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.
/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.
Mine start with GH, like GH011634.MP4
Here's another ADORABLE one I found of a little kid almost getting the soccer ball into the net (MVI_1012.MOV) -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6eYAxaXijc
I love the rawness of this. I've noticed I tend towards a feeling of everyone else in the world being so alien, living some totally different incomprehensible life from mine. (Or more than I'm the alien, and everyone else is living a normal, enviable life.) Seeing little snapshots like these, most of them seemingly just for memory's sake, makes me feel a little more human. Hard to get on any social media, where there's also some curation going on.
> I've noticed I tend towards a feeling of everyone else in the world being so alien, living some totally different incomprehensible life from mine. (Or more than I'm the alien, and everyone else is living a normal, enviable life.)
Same.
> Seeing little snapshots like these, most of them seemingly just for memory's sake, makes me feel a little more human.
For me these videos only highlight the previously mentioned state of affairs.
Twitter used to have an app, Periscope. You could start a livestream any time, anywhere. And viewers could fine live streams on a world map.
For a few months, it was possible to feel the incredible simultaneity and richness of human lives. Someone biking, another person cooking. Day in one place, night in another place.
It was ahead of its time. And too expensive for Twitter to keep running for too long. But it was a precursor to today's Snapschat's map view and Instagram live streams.
And before that, there was Bambuser which was very similar to Periscope but launched some 8 years earlier. It never gained the popularity of Periscope, likely at least partly due to its Nordic rather than Bay Area roots - but, oh boy, was it fun!
At any time of the day you could go to the website and watch normal people around the globe doing random stuff. And chat with them!There weren't any real influencers at the time (at least not on the platform) and monetization wasn't possible, so people's motivations for live streaming stuff was not to make money but rather the joy of sharing a moment or just experiencing new cool technology. It got a bit less joyful when the Arabic Spring started and the platform got used by many in very dire situations but it remained incredibly interesting to follow.
The company still exists, though they stopped offering free-to-use consumer services long ago.
they should bring it back
I think Twitter is losing enough money already, doubt they could afford to do that
I’m struggling to imagine Elon Musk doing that.
Isn't that exactly what he did when live-streaming on X last year?
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1653608284606312448
"This is 2015 Periscope code. Yeah, seems like we just need to improve it a bit."
GPS spoofing ruined any potential for local-first content.
> YouTube automatically removes harmful or violent content, so what remains exists in a unique, almost paradoxical state: forbidden, yet harmless.
What exactly is forbidden, by who? I don't get the use of that word there.
Also, anyone who doesn't know the "before" and "after" search operators is missing out on some excellent nostalgia-trawling similar to what is described here.
"cat before:2007" -> 2005 to 2007, the OG cat videos
"skateboard before:2010" -> yes
"assange interview before:2016" -> then filter for longer videos
"parkour after:2009 before:2015" -> parkour videos from 2009 to 2015Hey! My intention with this sentence is to say that although the content is publicly available, the viewer may feel like they're still "not allowed" to be watching it.
Others in the comments articulated this better than me: > 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.
I tried to distill it in a couple words in the blog, bc I didn't want to harp on it. In retrospect, I could've explained it better.
Thanks for this, a few months ago I was trying to find an old video but it was impossible to find with regular queries, there's just too much SEO garbage recently added to YouTube.
Thank you so much for this! I love & miss all the videos from the old days.
From my notes. Maybe it's useful to someone. Not comprehensive as there are other brands and other iterations I'm sure. Many dpreview.com sample galleries show original filenames. Some forums list filenames, youtube descriptions can list model names, pdf manuals and manufacturer websites sometimes list the names. There isn't really a good list of these that I know of.
○ Apple
- IMG_0001
○ BlackMagic Design
- A001 * C001
○ Canon
- 100-0001
- 101-0001
- 10x-0001
- IMG_0001
- MVI_0001.MOV
○ Casio
- CIMG001
- CIMG0001
○ Fuji
- DSCF0001
○ GoPro
- GX010001.MP4
- GH010001.MP4
○ HP
- HPIM0001
○ Jenoptik
- JD0001
○ JVC
- MOV_0001.mpg
○ Kodak
- P0000001.KDC
- DCP_0001
- 102_0001
○ Konica Minolta
- PICT0001
○ Kyocera
- KIF 0001
○ Nikon
- DSCN0001
- DSC_0001
○ Nokia
- DCM001
- DCM0001
○ Olympus
- Pmdd0001
○ Panasonic
- Pmdd 0001
- P1000001
- P0001
○ Pentax
- IMGP0001
○ Polaroid
- DSCI0001
○ Ricoh
- R0010001
- R0020001
○ Samsung
- P1000001
- SAM 0001
- SH100001
- SV100001
- S7000001
○ Sanyo
- SANY0001
○ Sigma
- IMG0001
○ Sony
- DSC0001
- DSC00001
- DSC_0001
- MAH00001
○ Misc
- Mmddyy-hhmmss
- Yymmdd-hhmm-ss
- yyyymmdd_hhmmss
- VID_yyyymmdd
- mmddyy 3g2
- mmddyy 3gp
- PXL_yyyymmdd_hhmmssms.mp4
Somewhat related, this list of names is useful to generate these casual real looking images using images generation models.
It was discovered recently with Flux that using just IMG_1234.jpg as a prompt gives you a very casual photo like images.
https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1fxkt3p/co...
https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1fxdm1n/i_...
Nikon defaulted to DSC_0001 for some time now, may still do but I don't have any Z series gear to check.
In my notes the Sony section was listed Sony / Nikon, but there was non-Nikon pattern in there and I removed the Nikon label to reduce inconsistency. Then I didn't update the Nikon section to include the other pattern. :) Should be fixed now. If you notice anything else, let me know!
DSC_XXXX originates from Sony's "Digital Still Cameras" but has been used by multiple other manufacturers. Besides Nikon, my old Canon DLSR also used this naming scheme by default.
Pro-level (1D) Canons let you set the three prefix letters.
what's the default though? defaults matter, most people don't change them.
Fujifilm also uses _DSF0001 for Adobe RGB images.
> GoPro GX010001.mp4
What annoys me is that when a video is split into multiple files (because of sd card limitations etc), it increases the first number, giving you files that sort really weird. So I film GX010001.mp4, then after 8 minutes it starts a new file GX020001.mp4, GX030001.mp4 etc., and then later that day when I make a new clip, it has GX010002.mp4. This breaks sorting by filename. Can sort by creationdate, but for the chaptered videos they often share the same original datetime as well, making it quite confusing when dealing with loads of gopro videos. (I just published some tooling I've written for creating street view content from gopros, so felt all the quirks lately https://github.com/Matsemann/matsemanns-streetview-tools/ the gopro max starts with GS btw)
Very heartwarming. I have an "android named" video uploaded to YouTube a few years ago, and because there is copyrighted background music going on (which I didn't realize at the time) YouTube is threatening to delete it. I don't know if they will or not, not sure when they put the "will delete" tag on it.
My late wife is in it. She died recently. I didn't know that video was still up there until I read your post. And now my heart breaks.
If you remember the account details to log in to the account which uploaded that video, you can go to https://studio.youtube.com, click "Content", and under the 3-dot menu for each video you can click "Download" to get Youtube's copy of your video.
Hoping that helps. Otherwise, you might try something like https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp.
If you can send me the link I will happily rip it from YouTube for you and send it to you via any method you prefer. Sorry for your loss.
YouTube now has a new feature to replace copyrighted background soundtracks with free ones automatically, using some AI magic to edit the movie while preserving views, links, likes, etc.
Very nice feature, though I haven’t used it myself to say if it works as labeled. It should be an option now when you get a violation warning.
This reminds me of something I've been thinking a lot about. which i think is big techs greatest failure: interoperability
I first thought of this when seeing someone take a picture of their computer screen. There is just so much friction in moving data.
I should be able to take anything off any screen and move the source material to any other screen on any device or cloud with a simple 1-click process. Including the devices of a friend or family member.
Microsoft forced OEM's to replace the right ctrl key with a copilot key. really it should have been an 'interoperability' key.
It's not a failure, it's big techs greatest feature. Try to imagine the likes of Windows, Office, Apple, AWS, Social Media etc. without lock-in, network effect or all the other names for missing interoperability.
I usually joke that the hardest problem in computer science that is not yet solved is sending a file between two devices.
Notable example: freaking printers.
Email baby!
Doesn't fit the requirement of "between two devices". Email involves a lot of other servers on the way (pure network devices like routers doesn't really count I guess) :-P
Only up to 18 MB or so. ;)
uunencode the data and split into as many emails as necessary
And not always instant.
Tech giants consider interoperability as a bug, not a feature. They want you locked into their ecosystems.
It’s the tragedy of product lock-in and closed systems.
In about 2007 or so my brother and I used to find super obscure blogs with no comments, read them and then write detailed responses to the author and share it with our friends. We always kept it positive, and said encouraging things. Most of the time the posts had been written in the 90s or early 2000s. We just did it knowing that probably one or two people would get notified of a new comment and maybe feel happy that someone read their post.
Cool! I have done that myself a time or two.
Ever get a good response back?
I have been surprised a time or two ending up in a conversation with someone who took the time same as I did. Just because we could.
I think "blogs" as in "web logs" with features like comments (trackbacks and linkbacks came later) only appeared around 2000 or 2001.
But still, plenty of blog posts from early 2000s to comment on in 2007, especially on the likes of LiveJournal or Blogger.
I think I am going to start doing that =D.
I wonder what keywords or tricks I might use to find such blogs in the current days.
It worked, I guess - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y31wZNbbrUI
Beautiful.
This reminds me the trick to make recent text-to-image model generate highly realistic (but amateur) photos by adding "IMG_XXXX" into the prompt. Although these videos have nearly zero views on YouTube, they may be part of the training data behind these models.
It’s also the default naming for every digital SLR, phone camera, etc… lots of which upload with file name as title to Flickr and many other photo sharing services, most of which have also been used in training data.
DSC, IMG, etc etc.
> Apple uses the ‘IMG_XXXX’ naming convention for all images and videos captured on iOS devices, where XXXX is a unique sequence number.
For what it's worth, Apple are just conforming to the JEITA/CIPA DCF standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_rule_for_Camera_File_sy...
“DCF file names” specification sez… http://www.kronometric.org/phot/std/DC-009-2010_E.pdf#page=2...
“File names conforming to the following rules are called DCF file names.
• The file name is 8 characters (not including the file extension).
• The first four characters consist only of the upper-case alphanumeric characters shown in Table 1
• These are referred to as the DCF file name Free characters. They shall not contain two-byte characters or special codes.
• The four characters that follow are a number between "0001" and "9999". "0000" shall not be used. These four digits are referred to as File number.
• Files with the same file number stored in the same DCF directory are considered to be object component files as defined in 4.3.2.”
It's really cool that such standard exists, the worst thing about Pixel phones is stupid filenames of pictures and videos, not only it's not following this standard, but contains WRONG timestamp. For example, picture with name `PLX_20241101_115855.jpg` was taken at 12:58:55, not 11 as the name suggests, but also picture with name `PLX_20240913_191525.jpg` was taken at 19:15:25. A video on the other hand would have a timestamp offset -1, the offset changes depending on time of the year and it's different for pictures and videos. It's annoying af, because pictures and videos in the same folder will not be sorted chronologically by filename.
A lot of the DCF standard is designed around the limitations of FAT file systems, e.g. filenames limited to 8+3 characters, directories limited to 9999 "items" (which I assume is to make sure that there won't be more than 65,536 files in a directory). As Pixel phones don't use FAT, Google probably doesn't feel bound by this standard. Their naming convention allows the phones to store all photos/videos in a single directory.
Potentially daylight savings related? E.g. file names are in UTC, whereas local time obviously isn't
Yes, it's DST related. Now explain why DST offset is different for pictures and videos ;)
Programming employment-creation measure - to prevent them doing damage elsewhere by adding abstraction madhouses.
Well they need to be different in _some_ way, right :)? Why not use timestamp offset for this
While this comment is a joke, it's tragicomically true as well.
Way too often have I encountered, or hacked in myself, such "business rules".
"Except for these seven transactions from before [random date/time] all transactions made between 01:00 and 01:15, with a round amount, are recurring payments to X. Can we not just use that instead of this data-migration that you've budgetted?" (not literal request, but close enough).
The danger -off course- lies in that this over time becomes actual business logic and that meaning is assigned to (meta)data that was never intended to carry such meaning.
The solution -I've found- starts with what DDD calls "ubiquitous language", where everyone (within a domain!) assigns the same meaning to the same things¹. And model the software around that, never the other way.
¹ So maybe there's a 150 year old rule that states that recurring transactions are those that happen between ...etc. etc. That this is actually a settled and used meaning within the domain experts/users/stakeholders. In that case - IMO - it's far better to lean into it rather than assign some is_recurring_for_x boolean or such that has no meaning in the domain.
because the extensions are already different. jpg and mp4
Ok, fair point... I guess it's just that different teams were doing photo and video then
FWIW that is not a Pixel-specific issue. I encountered this on other cameras (IIRC Olympus and GoPro) as well. It's maddening.
The issue stems from the fact that images are written with proper EXIF time and timezone metadata while videos from the same camera might only store a timestamp field. Whether that's local time, UTC, or something else depends on the camera and how you configured it.
British? Sounds like it's recording UTC time in the file name, which is only correct during winter.
2024-11-01 is in winter, 2024-09-13 is in summer. So the effect seems to be the opposite of what you say.
> British?
Nope, but it's a Pixel thing
...and collisions between filenames that would happen because of the "wraparound" after 9999 images/videos are avoided by storing them in different directories.
Oh man this is so great: I’ve been having a shitty day and I’ve been smiling from ear to ear since about the second paragraph of this post. When no one is trying to actively distort the Internet for monetization it’s every bit as magical as it was in September of 1994 and I remember why I took this up as a trade.
Good job on putting this #1 HN.
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 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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
To future historians: once I'm dead for 2+ generations, feel free to consider any information of mine as public domain.
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.
I feel exactly the same
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...
It’s more like you’re continually checking hundreds of windows, just in case it happens…
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.
True but I would probably not share her naked video on HN
i mean i personally look elsewhere, bc getting caught looking would feel really shitty for them probably.
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.
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.
I miss those days too, but my recollection of Youtube is a little different. Lots of piracy for example.
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.
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.
Excellent read, OP! I really enjoyed this, especially being your very first post here. I hope to see more posts from you in the future.
I didn't know this feature existed back in the days, and you just cannot ignore the haptic feedback feeling when you watch original, unedited content from random people who were filming not for the sake of publishing to the mass but just for themselves and friends/family to keep these records as memories. This reminds me of the pre-smartphone era where people used to own handheld, personal cameras to capture special moments of their lives as souvenirs.
Also, regarding these "IMG_XXX" videos, one notable pattern is that they all have very low number views, for an obvious reason. The odd one to this pattern is this pregnancy video, which had the number of views jumped from 16 in ten years to to 1,650 in 10 hours. Also, checking the comments' section, they are all new, with the first (oldest) one being posted 9 hours ago.
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.
Used to have a raspberry pi + small hdmi screen on a shelf, and it would randomly play these raw uploads 24/7, new video every 2 minutes. It was fun to encounter random home movies all day. Very hard to maintain due to use of YouTube-dl, plus legacy search API that I was eventually kicked off of after unsuccessfully arguing for my continued use as an art project. My version searched for 4-5 different camera prefixes including IMG_. Would be fun to remake the backend with a headless browser framework + YouTube-dl.
> Very hard to maintain due to use of YouTube-dl, plus legacy search API
With yt-dlp you can do this:
yt-dlp ytsearch5:IMG_0416
Great tip! Would love to not have to maintain a headless script. Just set YouTube-dl to update on a cronjob.
> I was eventually kicked off
Woah, can you expand on that? Did you get IP banned from YouTube?
No, to my memory they were phasing out the API except for case-by-case allowed usage. I think I opened a support ticket to justify continued access, with a description of my project, but they denied my use case. I can’t remember now if access was cut off, or if limits were dropped so low it was unusable, but the project became infeasible.
Same thing reported by author of: https://default-filename-tv.neocities.org/
I did this and the 2nd video I found was of a recording of "Disco 2000" by the Pulp at a festival:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DCFCQ9GYUY
By coincidence this is one of my favourite songs by one of my favourite bands.
Nice find. Also one of my favorite bands and one of my favorite songs of theirs.
Edit: I found the set list for that show:
https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/pulp/2011/hyde-park-london-en...
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
Reading half way through the post, I thought what the author going to do was to analyze the distribution of numbers in the filename, and, I don't know, maybe give an estimation about how often people take photos or videos, based on the time, country, etc. That would be an interesting study.
ironically, im glad this post wasn't about that. that would've been too typical of HN imo. why talk about metadata when you can just enjoy the data itself??
Once upon a time you could do this directly on google with things like “index of” and find candid things from people’s shared folders
Surprised that nobody is talking about the other obscure file name "Webcam video from" that was attached to untitled videos made in the webcam recorder that used to be built into the site.
Tangent, but I miss that iPhone era. I remember holding an iPhone for the first time. Someone showed me a map app (maybe Google Maps) and it took me a second to realize I was looking at a map of where I was, and remember thinking "how does it know?", and just being so mesmerized by it.
And Angry Birds.
There were a bunch of subreddits based on obscure videos with default filenames.
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.
This comes across to me like a sort of "voyeur porn"...in the sense like how "food porn" excites the stomach...and sports excites competitive spirit.
What I'm gathering from the comments here is that these videos excite faculties of man that are less carnal than the other examples.
Be that as it may.
Some time ago there was a website that showed you a random YouTube video. Like truly random. The biggest discovery to me was that a typical video has 0-1 views, nearly always <10. I bet most people don't realize this is how YouTube actually looks like. And I guess it's also a good small reminder to all people trying to become famous on social media.
I believe the website tried to find videos with least bias possible by doing some clever searches using YouTube API (so not just videos titled IMGXXXX). Maybe it was trying to do partial matches on video ID.
> The biggest discovery to me was that a typical video has 0-1 views, nearly always <10. I bet most people don't realize this is how YouTube actually looks like.
This is also interesting when thinking about how to optimize a video platform. You can see how the vast majority of videos could be evicted to cold / slow storage.
I have uploaded a bunch of similar stuff...
Videos are so big and cloud storage for it pretty expensive. since nothing I film is nuclear launch codes, I just upload it all to youtube as a way to store it for free.
Also gives me a handy sharing link for sending to friends too.
I'm so glad these videos are still on there. As much as I consume youtube now, this brings back memories of when it was literally "YOUtube". Truly a glorious time!
It’s sad that only Google can (and honestly a bit surprising that Google hasn’t) use multimodal video models to index the semantic contents & transcripts of these videos for search. Huge long tail of unique content.
It is! I've often wanted to search for something that happens in a video instead of just the title, description, and keywords.
it would be a totally game changer and super helpful for months then people start abusing it to gain views anyway like the current web
You used to be able to do something similar (probably still can) by using common URL patterns for insecure/unauthenticated security camera feeds. You could even use google to find them! I loved the late 00's/early 10's web.
> 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.
Thanks! Gonna fix this later tonight
Time Cook doesn't wear ties. Coincidence? I think not!
I'd love a tech write up from the YouTube folks starting from when someone was wondering "Why is all this data waking up from the lukewarm storage layer today lmao" opens HN "ah ok"
I found a band I really like by searching on the ampersand, "&"
https://youtu.be/pLJ85XExZtQ?si=75ZykQeUjgItcpDM
Not sure what triggered it, but I began odd searches a while ago and want to echo many of the "feels like the good old days" type comments.
Video made without any real production intent is compelling. It is pure, raw, just human and many of us hunger for that because the big media players dominate hard for fear of losing to their peers it seems.
And that behavior is expensive to us.
Watching these videos made me sad. It's a stark reminder that the old internet I grew up with is over. And I'm not even that old. I miss the candid content, from when people just uploaded whatever they felt like without incentive. YouTube is an industrial clickbait farm now. Social media is driving people apart and turning them into narcissists.
Wow, I hope there's a similar video platform now, filled with casual everyday videos of normal people, it'll be precious documentation for human kind.
>YouTube automatically removes harmful or violent content
What a bizarre and obviously false claim to make for no reason in the middle of the article
>Between 2009 and 2012, Apple iPhones and iPod Touches included a feature called “Send to YouTube” that allowed users to upload videos directly to YouTube from the Photos app.
A feature Nokia with Android One used to have too, but Android itself doesn't have.
I love the potash game! That’s hilarious.
I am missing the link to the thread, but diffusion models also give a very consistent output when prompted with `IMG_{number}` part of the reason could be the training data distribution
Other/older digital cameras used similar sequences of letters and numbers like DSC_0001 and a few more I can't remember atm. It might be fun to search for those too.
nice! I'm really lucky having this cool video (4 views) for my birthday dates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOs05AhmxDU
Just entered my birthday too, and found one of the cutest baby video ever
Thanks for the article
I personally don't have a problem with this, but this really made me feel like I don't understand the community of this forum sometimes. HN every day has multiple posts which drive so many comments about how privacy is lost and everything needs full E2EE, trust no one, etc. Then there is this post which is also a breach of privacy (much more than some things complain about), and yet the reaction is "wow, this is so pure and amazing to view into these candid moments". It feels like some cognitive dissonance. Still, personally I thought this was a cool post.
There are a few things that come to mind that make this different:
1. This isn't really privacy breaching. For someone who taps the "share to youtube" button without knowing what it means, sure, but even that is pretty explicit that you're sharing it. Not sure why the article itself says people didn't know what the button would do before tapping it, so I'd like some further explanation of this point.
2. It's opt in, not opt out. Spending time with most "normal" people has shown me that very few people give a crap about going into settings menus to configure exactly how ther data is used or collected, or otherwise switching to a service that gives them that control. When HN complains about privacy being dead, they are complaining about this apathy end how it gets exploited. This feature does not exploit that apathy.
3. This gives us something that we actually want. When most services invade your privacy, it's usually for things like advertising, targeting content, and data brokering. Things that I know I personally have a lot of issues with, and I feel I'm not alone. This button doesn't do those things, it just gives us interesting videos. So much so that most of the fascination with these videos is that you can feel the absence of those issues.
This website isn't a breach of privacy. The original upload process wasn't privacy preserving.
The videos are already public on YouTube.
How is this a breach of privacy?
If it's that easy to upload a video from your camera roll to YouTube (Two clicks) it's not that hard to imagine that this can happen by mistake or by someone who doesn't know that it uploads as "public" by default.
Maybe they just wanted to send this video to a friend and didn't have the technical understanding that this will then be visible for everyone searching for it on YouTube.
This is cool. In a similar vein with a more continuous display, check out astronaut.io
Very cool- always good to appreciate how tech has evolved and some of the culture and technical branches that have stemmed from that
https://youtu.be/9oAP2A98qLc?si=MaRGwcJlIyV0-Iff
“THE CULT- SHE SELLS SANCTUARY- LIVE DETROIT 2010”
Pretty great.
"Turn roll Nate roll some little" might be burned into my brain now.
All of these ordinary footages should be preserved.
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
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.
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!
The most common number will probably be something very low since in many cameras the numbers reset when you format/erase the card.
I wonder if we will soon have Data Archeologists, who will try to find these hidden long forgotten gems on the Internet.
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.
Gunshots at 1:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MR3mv5SbAi4&t=17s Maybe a slamming door, why so many slams? Obvious barking dog, then the wicked desperate woman's scream
I can't believe how many random memories YouTube may contain! It's amazing!
I wish I would _just_ create and share, instead of getting stuck in analysis paralysis trying to perfect it.
So many touching snapshots into the actually important things in life. Very cool.
omg, where is this from? (some kinda app that overlayed 3d animations?) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOSWZduStYs
That looks like a 2D image with an alpha channel based on the background color of the image. Watch the shadow of the bot as it crosses the edge if the desk.
I want to play the potash game.
It's like one day on earth project, but for every day
Scrape and preserve these videos, someone
This is so wholesome.
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.
The article is mildly infuriating.
Between 2009 and 2012, Apple iPhones and iPod Touches included a feature called “Send to YouTube”
Proceeds to feature two videos from 2015.
You’re all acting like these videos are from ancient times.
In tech, ~12 years is a lot. Judging by how fast our devices evolve, they are ancient
But judging by any other criteria, they're just yesterday.
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 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.
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>.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
yeah agreed. I don't think Cory Doctorow is right about everything but I think he was dead on with enshittification
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.
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.
2:30am at a 7-11 near Disney World - 1987
There's a 2014 update to that video made by the same people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8n11y2lxrE
The smoking is the most shocking part to me!
was about to post this myself. such a great example of this
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.
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.
Is what?