It's a video of a woman reciting a poem that she wrote for her eldest son that speaks of her love for her son and her wish that he would get "off the streets". Emotional, honest, real. YouTube like I've never experienced. Brilliant.
This project is fantastic and has potential in bringing people closer together. I just watched a man propose to his girlfriend in another language. (I'm pretty sure she said yes!)
This is a great find and a very somber video. It brings me a smile to know that this lady will wake up to her video having thousands of views and hundreds of likes, as well as many lovely comments.
This is... fascinating on a very personal level. I've never been a "YouTube" guy; I'd rather skim/read an article than watch a video. I've never binged, never clicked-clicked-clicked my night away on Youtube, and generally when sent a 17 minute video tutorial, ask/search if there's a 30 seconds writeup.
But this... this is mesmerizing. As cheesy as premise may be, you do feel a little like an outsider voyeur - not in a perverse sense, but in the having-no-expectations-or-context sense. Each video proves a gem, and timing is right. And knowing that you may be the only person who has ever seen it just adds to mystique... absolutely brilliant! :O
It reminds me of the Adult Swim show "Robot Chicken". Not exactly in content but in format and style. Just random things, slices of life, from people across the world.
In the same vein of avoiding bubbles, I browse reddit by 'Top Of The Hour'. Filtrated enough to be decent quality, very fresh content, and not yet subverted by bubble affiliation or mind hiveing.
- Video IDs are spit out onto a Socket.io connection. (Another person claims it’s synchronized, which seems likely.)
- While one video plays, another player is in the background buffering the next video. Making it quite seemless.
- The code is from 2011, apparently, and it feels like it. You have code in script tags and plain old unminified JS, not to mention jQuery. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s almost nostalgic at this juncture.
So many of the videos it was pulling up had IMG/MOV/DCS in the title that I wondered if that was the strategy for finding unwatched videos, but I don’t think so, it must just be a consequence of many people uploading videos directly from camera files.
One remark I do have is that it seems to not be picking the most recent videos. There might be good reason for that (maybe waiting filters out bad content, or content that will have views?)
"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."
That is from the initial page load. So it would seem that the title pattern that you observed is intentional
It's probably a strategy to find videos that were recorded IRL by real people.
There's a ton of content on YouTube that's generated automatically, as well as marketing videos, screencasts, etc. but those are not going to be nearly as interesting as something that someone recorded and uploaded by hand.
And it makes me wonder about using similar approaches to break down the echo chambers we find ourselves in. We have a perception of what's normal based on what we see, but what we see is based on what we're already exposed to and what we ourselves do. Randomly seeing what a bunch of other people did this week? Great for that.
I also saw someone rave about "Donut" this week - schedules random 1-on-1's with people in your company to help with cross-pollination and bigger picture context. Chat Roulette and what a dumpster fire that is comes to mind, but I wonder if a LinkedIn-based service of a similar nature would be good just to learn about other companies, other corporate cultures, etc..
Your comment reminded me of interviewing.io and their strapline "chat roulette without the dicks"
Similar idea but for engineering interviews and practice interviews
I work at a dumpster fire of a company, but Donut Buddies still shines through with benefits to me. I don't even think others are aware of its true value. I often will make cross-functional inferences about company level things, or will bring up strategy from a different part of the company in discussions, and I have other engineers kind of just stare at me and say ".... how do you know that?"
"from, get this, talking to my colleagues on a regular basis"
Yup also no button for me. I am in a corp environment so possibly something blocked (youtube is for example, so am not expecting the site to work anyway)
I kind of like the periodic switching and "hands-free" experience, but the idea itself isn't too original[0][1][2] and I am not a fan of the video taking up about 25% of my screen estate, the rest taken up by an unrelated, distracting stock space video.
Video feed is synced across viewers. Even if you, as a user, click the button to keep watching a specific video, once you resume live mode, it's synced with other clients once again.
You can also see how many viewers are currently on the site, if you inspect the websockets messages.
The titles of all the videos shown are random strings based on the default media file names of some popular devices, such as iPhone or Samsung Galaxy. Some examples of these titles would be IMG_8869.MOV, DSC 0711 or MVI 6710.
All the videos, requested in real time, are not more than one year old. They are almost undiscovered, usually with very few views (or not even one).
I'd like a back button, so the stream pause/resume isn't such a high cognitive load high-stakes high-regret "oh, that looks ... drat, too late" decision. Or perhaps a fade transition?
Very interesting concept! I wish there were a bit more control, like being able to disable the automatic skip-to-next-video that happens after only a few seconds.
Oh, you can, you need to press the round circle (which I mistook for a spinner-type indicator), icons that require you to first read instructions are bad icons. A button with a text on it, or a checkbox would have made more sense. But hey, it works, so it's cool!
PSA: Watch in an private/incognito tab/window. If you are currently logged into your google account, this WILL pollute your watched history: https://www.youtube.com/feed/history
You can click X on them and quickly remove them. If there's truly way too many (you left it open for hours), you can go to your Google's Activity page, filter youtube and delete everything from today with a button.
Also consider using Firefox and enabling `privacy.firstparty.isolate`, which will separate the cookies for third-party embeds from their own domain, thereby preventing this (as the embed doesn’t see you as logged-in).
Some like me actually appreciate the youtube recomendations based on the previously watched content, but need to be extra careful when watching some kind of content that is likely to be weighted a lot by "power users". Example, I do not follow videogames, but I do enjoy watching speedruns of old games ocassionally, so I need to watch it on incognito mode so I won't have my recommendations flooded with videogame videos.
Because a lot of people care of recommendations? If you watch news on yt then maybe recommendations are garbage but if you watch videos related to some niche activity or music then recommendations are a godsend.
Oh, you think you can actually disable it? its just an UI setting, Google keeps tracking you anyway. Go ahead and try it, disabling does nothing to the recommendations.
Others are suggesting practical reasons for having watch history enabled, but I would think that the vast majority have it enabled simply because that is the default.
history augments memory when searching for specific things one remembers. having it polluted by random videos embedded on third party might not be great. history also drives recommendations, so again having random video views will ruin coherence of the home page suggestions
I wish you hadn't told me that. I thought I saw something suspicious when I resumed switching and yep, that's a bunch of topless elementary schoolers at a pool party. I suppose it doesn't technically violate YouTube's policies but jesus I did not want to see that.
Really like this! I remember the musician Burial would sample covers on YouTube of songs he wanted to sample with next to 0 views. So you had this double whammy of getting the vibe of the original song and the intimacy of a bedroom recording wrapped into the sample. Feel like there's so much potential to get neat stuff outta the onslaught of personal footage on youtube.
I guess on one level it's invasive as hell but in an increasingly streamlined online experience it's nice to get glimpses at all the other stuff that's going on out there.
Does this respect the 'unlisted' setting for a video? I recently uploaded some videos and set them all to unlisted, and yet some of them received views despite me not viewing them or handing out a link. I meant to dig into that more but forgot after getting distracted. Can unlisted videos be found by a program like this, which I assume is using the API?
We [0] index YouTube actively and see way over 5.5B videos [1] at this point. We catch a lot of unlisted videos and we did try to figure out how is that possible in the past.
It seems that a lot of users will upload video which is by default published with the default settings and thus is visible from the outside. Even if they change the settings fairly quickly, automated systems like ours will already know about the existence of that video.
There could be other reasons but this seems the most likely, especially as a video that is being uploaded can be published fairly swiftly.
It sounds like you are aware that you are scraping videos that are later re-labeled as "unlisted", but you don't mention what you do to mitigate this problem.
Even if it may not be illegal, at the very least it would seem un-ethical to link to private videos like this, and it would seem trivial for you to "re-scrape" your database every now and then to check whether any existing videos have changed from listed -> unlisted, and if they have, remove them.
> 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).
How does it work, technically? Is there an API to pull videos with a certain title format within a certain range, and then are the sections of video randomly chosen?
> The server currently pulls in videos daily from youtube. Search criteria is [TAG]XXXX with upload time this week, where TAG is a raw video prefix such as 'dsc' or 'img'. This search turns out to be a good approximation for the data set of home videos created in the last week.
A somewhat similar "sampling" experience is searching for a high-frequency term like "a", and filtering for an upload date of last hour or day[1]. Non-English terms and time of day bias on geography.
This is the same search method I use to continuously play back YT videos on a dedicated small screen connected to a raspberry pi in my apartment. Definitely shows an amazing cross section through humanity. The great thing about the camera file name is it’s language and region agnostic. So you really get everything.
Awesome. I've been trotting this idea out for years as an interesting but silly website I should make: videos even the uploaders didn't watch. I'm so excited to see it at the top of HN. This might inspire me to execute on one of my other absurd ideas.
this is an awesome idea, for a handful of different reasons. "A feed of the present". The post got my attention because of the domain name. Perhaps including your description "A feed of a present" would get more deserved attention
I love this, what I really need is a back button or history though, what if i see something I love and then it switches before I think to hit the freeze button? It is gone forever? (As far as I'm concerned)
I think this is an amazing way of both estranging us from humankind by viewing our world from the outside as if we were aliens, and of widening our horizons by giving us access to the immediate experience of people from all walks of life, all over the planet.
My only worry is that it selects for people who don't know or care to properly name their youtube videos, e.g. after watching for ten minutes, I'm yet to see a young person from the West. Though this is probably one of the reasons why, for me, the videos are so strikingly unfamiliar.
My anecdotal observations are that the lonely, unloved videos typically consist of home movies, personal vacation videos, children's sporting events, and group exercise. Except for the exercise, it seems like the kind of stuff you'd find on any family's VHS tapes from the 80s and 90s.
Can anyone explain the prevalence of group exercise videos? Has anyone had radically different experiences?
I like the concept and it looks good.
Some criticism: After pausing a video, it still goes to the next video after a couple of seconds.
I'm also seeing way too many XHR requests on a paused video. It's like the next video is already playing but invisible? The network tab just looks way too messy.
I recall being told at one time that the great majority of youtube uploads are never watched even by the person who uploaded them. This fact figures prominently into how they decide to transcode, store, and distribute uploads.
Not really being serious: Are we inadvertent being hooked into an attempted YouTube DoS by resource exhaustion?
It works go something like: System transcodes when demand is applied; normally demand misses 90% of videos; demand surely focuses only on unprocessed videos; 'attack' diverts resources to processing videos that would otherwise have never required processing.
Is this a joke? Whenever I press the button it skips to the next video instead of preventing it from switching. So the ones I want to see are immediately stopped. It's quite frustrating but I guess that's the point?
I can see how this could be confusing.
If you click it once, on a fresh log in, it will stop switching. When you press it again it will resume switching.
This shows how much YouTube could benefit from a "I'm feeling lucky" button. No algorithms (except for flagging inappropriate content), no filter bubbles, just a random video uploaded from another human.
Doesn't anyone question that youtube is basically run by an ad service? If you really want to connect to people then why does "company x" wants to know and keep tabs?
Why is there a thumbs up or down in the first place? Or even, why doesn't the number of views matter to you in this case. "company x" had a great search engine but now it seems crippled by the fact you can't say: "exclude the top x percent popular results"
I'm writing this because when I searched for something obscure, I go to page 8 of the "company x" results and got slapped multiple times with "suspicious behaviour" notifications and had to wait or solve a captcha.
Agreed. The especially weird thing for me is that when I suggest ads are perhaps not great, I get energetic replies along the lines of "why do you hate newspapers/TV/video and want to kill them!1!"
I think of the ad ecosystem as like a tree that has grown so tall and dense that little can grow beneath it. If that tree weren't there I don't think we'd have nothing. I think we'd have a richer ecosystem with many more things growing.
Not just an ad service. Google is a content publisher, as revealed recently in the leak of the "ML Fairness" documents. And this website loads over "http" for maximum cookieage. Enjoy a 5MB+ "GO" button? No thanks. You?
You're right, it's expensive and needs to be funded.
Suppose I had an alternate funding model. Also suppose I wanted youtube to change it (note: I never said that). How does that invalidate the bad things I pointed out with the current model?
You never said whether or not you agreed with my original points.
What is filter criteria except zero views? I had think finding gems in this set would be much harder but this site is somehow popping up lot more good than junk.
The entire value here, for me at least, is a) randomness an b) fact they haven't been watched before.
There's so much curatrd stuff (which is great), and all tech companies are trying so hard to send me what they think I'll like / agree with, it's refreshing to step out of that box.
Edit: apologies if, perchance, I missed some subtle sarcasm btw... You never know on them interwebs
That seriously defeats the purpose of the site: unflitered discovery, nonjudgement, kismet, etc. Our global culture is deviating towards the norm because our tech encourages that behavior. I love it for what it is.
I recently put forward the idea there's enough music in the world already[1] because millions of songs on Spotify have never been heard[2]. And of those millions of unheard songs, many are probably not by musicians but by "poseurs" who don't care about the craft of songwriting.
Perhaps we need something like Astronaut for Spotify?
Amazing concept. This was an incredible thing to uncover during my few minutes on the site:
https://youtu.be/1rvPbeHjzlk
It's a video of a woman reciting a poem that she wrote for her eldest son that speaks of her love for her son and her wish that he would get "off the streets". Emotional, honest, real. YouTube like I've never experienced. Brilliant.
This project is fantastic and has potential in bringing people closer together. I just watched a man propose to his girlfriend in another language. (I'm pretty sure she said yes!)
Then you get things like this: https://youtu.be/syiSYMPwFck
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What a discovery. I feel a bit intrusive getting to experience it. I hope her communication succeeds.
~1 kiloviews now with 152:3 thumbs ratio, why would someone dislike this!?
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This is a great find and a very somber video. It brings me a smile to know that this lady will wake up to her video having thousands of views and hundreds of likes, as well as many lovely comments.
Wow, very touching. I wonder if her son has seen this already.
This is... fascinating on a very personal level. I've never been a "YouTube" guy; I'd rather skim/read an article than watch a video. I've never binged, never clicked-clicked-clicked my night away on Youtube, and generally when sent a 17 minute video tutorial, ask/search if there's a 30 seconds writeup.
But this... this is mesmerizing. As cheesy as premise may be, you do feel a little like an outsider voyeur - not in a perverse sense, but in the having-no-expectations-or-context sense. Each video proves a gem, and timing is right. And knowing that you may be the only person who has ever seen it just adds to mystique... absolutely brilliant! :O
It's sort of like channel surfing all the "local access" channels in the world
It reminds me of the Adult Swim show "Robot Chicken". Not exactly in content but in format and style. Just random things, slices of life, from people across the world.
Absolutely brilliant point.
In the same vein of avoiding bubbles, I browse reddit by 'Top Of The Hour'. Filtrated enough to be decent quality, very fresh content, and not yet subverted by bubble affiliation or mind hiveing.
I tried that just now and it shows lots of memes. How do you do that and have it show regular content?
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Reminds me of a Youtube recreation of Vine's original incarnation, VinePeek.
https://i.imgur.com/QE9U5tJ.jpg
The implementation here is somewhat interesting.
- Video IDs are spit out onto a Socket.io connection. (Another person claims it’s synchronized, which seems likely.)
- While one video plays, another player is in the background buffering the next video. Making it quite seemless.
- The code is from 2011, apparently, and it feels like it. You have code in script tags and plain old unminified JS, not to mention jQuery. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s almost nostalgic at this juncture.
So many of the videos it was pulling up had IMG/MOV/DCS in the title that I wondered if that was the strategy for finding unwatched videos, but I don’t think so, it must just be a consequence of many people uploading videos directly from camera files.
One remark I do have is that it seems to not be picking the most recent videos. There might be good reason for that (maybe waiting filters out bad content, or content that will have views?)
"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."
That is from the initial page load. So it would seem that the title pattern that you observed is intentional
It's probably a strategy to find videos that were recorded IRL by real people.
There's a ton of content on YouTube that's generated automatically, as well as marketing videos, screencasts, etc. but those are not going to be nearly as interesting as something that someone recorded and uploaded by hand.
There are plenty of videos without that format. Those titles are just sequential file names of many cameras.
This is a really weird premise for a site, but after a couple videos, all I could think was, this is an awesome glimpse at humanity.
And it makes me wonder about using similar approaches to break down the echo chambers we find ourselves in. We have a perception of what's normal based on what we see, but what we see is based on what we're already exposed to and what we ourselves do. Randomly seeing what a bunch of other people did this week? Great for that.
I also saw someone rave about "Donut" this week - schedules random 1-on-1's with people in your company to help with cross-pollination and bigger picture context. Chat Roulette and what a dumpster fire that is comes to mind, but I wonder if a LinkedIn-based service of a similar nature would be good just to learn about other companies, other corporate cultures, etc..
Your comment reminded me of interviewing.io and their strapline "chat roulette without the dicks" Similar idea but for engineering interviews and practice interviews
I work at a dumpster fire of a company, but Donut Buddies still shines through with benefits to me. I don't even think others are aware of its true value. I often will make cross-functional inferences about company level things, or will bring up strategy from a different part of the company in discussions, and I have other engineers kind of just stare at me and say ".... how do you know that?"
"from, get this, talking to my colleagues on a regular basis"
I wasn't going to click the link but your comment prompted me to.
Wow. It's a fascinating look at what likely makes up a large majority of YouTube content that I would otherwise never come into contact with.
I also love how the creator packaged it up as a though an alien visitor was using YouTube to sample our civilization. This is the 99%.
There's a subreddit dedicated to this sort of thing, check it out:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IMGXXXX
also /r/deepintoyoutube.
I just have views of a planet and some spacecraft flying above the surface. How can I get the actual videos to play? There is no GO button anywhere.
Disable uBlock Origin. I had the same problem
I didn't have to disable uBlock myself, only whitelist it in noscript. Then I hovered over the word Go and the Go button appeared.
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allow javascript and whitelist following domains: googlevideo.com raw.githubusercontent.com youtube.com ytimg.com
C'mon. You know you have to turn of noscript, etc, to get most sites like this to work.
That's like saying you need to plug the cable ;) Sounds more like some cross browser issue.
Tried that. Same problem.
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Yup also no button for me. I am in a corp environment so possibly something blocked (youtube is for example, so am not expecting the site to work anyway)
I have the same issue with iOS Chrome
Interesting idea, but the “Go” button is not appearing for me on Safari mobile.
That's Apple trying to save you!
It doesn't appear for me either on Firefox or Chrome. Maybe too much traffic?
Working for me on Firefox for Android.
I kind of like the periodic switching and "hands-free" experience, but the idea itself isn't too original[0][1][2] and I am not a fan of the video taking up about 25% of my screen estate, the rest taken up by an unrelated, distracting stock space video.
0: http://defaultfile.name/
1: https://www.randomlyinspired.com/noviews
2: https://www.incognitube.com/
> but the idea itself isn't too original
It's not immediately clear which one is the "original one", but this one has been around since at least 2012[1].
[1] https://github.com/wonga00/astronaut/commit/a9bdaf0d00588b7a...
Press "F" to go to fullscreen :)
Video feed is synced across viewers. Even if you, as a user, click the button to keep watching a specific video, once you resume live mode, it's synced with other clients once again.
You can also see how many viewers are currently on the site, if you inspect the websockets messages.
I created a very similar app:
https://alexgarces.github.io/loststories/
The titles of all the videos shown are random strings based on the default media file names of some popular devices, such as iPhone or Samsung Galaxy. Some examples of these titles would be IMG_8869.MOV, DSC 0711 or MVI 6710.
All the videos, requested in real time, are not more than one year old. They are almost undiscovered, usually with very few views (or not even one).
I'd like a back button, so the stream pause/resume isn't such a high cognitive load high-stakes high-regret "oh, that looks ... drat, too late" decision. Or perhaps a fade transition?
Left-arrow key goes back to the previous video, right arrow key takes you forward. Not sure if there’s an option for mobile.
For anybody else that thought this doesn't work, you need to first select the circle pause button at the bottom to put the controls in "focus"
Very interesting concept! I wish there were a bit more control, like being able to disable the automatic skip-to-next-video that happens after only a few seconds. Oh, you can, you need to press the round circle (which I mistook for a spinner-type indicator), icons that require you to first read instructions are bad icons. A button with a text on it, or a checkbox would have made more sense. But hey, it works, so it's cool!
Quoting astrocat from the previous thread:
PSA: Watch in an private/incognito tab/window. If you are currently logged into your google account, this WILL pollute your watched history: https://www.youtube.com/feed/history
Turns out, even before you click on "OK" to start watching, it's doing it in the background - my watch history is now full of hours of this junk :(
You can click X on them and quickly remove them. If there's truly way too many (you left it open for hours), you can go to your Google's Activity page, filter youtube and delete everything from today with a button.
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Also consider using Firefox and enabling `privacy.firstparty.isolate`, which will separate the cookies for third-party embeds from their own domain, thereby preventing this (as the embed doesn’t see you as logged-in).
Or, just pause viewing history; YouTube has a control for that.
Will that pause recommendations and everything else with the already weak algo?
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Why would someone who is concerned about their watch history have watch history enabled at all?
Some like me actually appreciate the youtube recomendations based on the previously watched content, but need to be extra careful when watching some kind of content that is likely to be weighted a lot by "power users". Example, I do not follow videogames, but I do enjoy watching speedruns of old games ocassionally, so I need to watch it on incognito mode so I won't have my recommendations flooded with videogame videos.
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Because a lot of people care of recommendations? If you watch news on yt then maybe recommendations are garbage but if you watch videos related to some niche activity or music then recommendations are a godsend.
Because they want useful recommendations and astronaut is feeding Google bad data?
Oh, you think you can actually disable it? its just an UI setting, Google keeps tracking you anyway. Go ahead and try it, disabling does nothing to the recommendations.
Others are suggesting practical reasons for having watch history enabled, but I would think that the vast majority have it enabled simply because that is the default.
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history augments memory when searching for specific things one remembers. having it polluted by random videos embedded on third party might not be great. history also drives recommendations, so again having random video views will ruin coherence of the home page suggestions
I wish you hadn't told me that. I thought I saw something suspicious when I resumed switching and yep, that's a bunch of topless elementary schoolers at a pool party. I suppose it doesn't technically violate YouTube's policies but jesus I did not want to see that.
Why not? Pedophilia is not a communicable disease.
Interesting, it didn't add anything to my watch history on Safari; is this a browser thing?
Really like this! I remember the musician Burial would sample covers on YouTube of songs he wanted to sample with next to 0 views. So you had this double whammy of getting the vibe of the original song and the intimacy of a bedroom recording wrapped into the sample. Feel like there's so much potential to get neat stuff outta the onslaught of personal footage on youtube.
I guess on one level it's invasive as hell but in an increasingly streamlined online experience it's nice to get glimpses at all the other stuff that's going on out there.
I love the perspective this gives you. You watch for a few minutes and remember how many things are going on outside of your own little world.
Does this respect the 'unlisted' setting for a video? I recently uploaded some videos and set them all to unlisted, and yet some of them received views despite me not viewing them or handing out a link. I meant to dig into that more but forgot after getting distracted. Can unlisted videos be found by a program like this, which I assume is using the API?
We [0] index YouTube actively and see way over 5.5B videos [1] at this point. We catch a lot of unlisted videos and we did try to figure out how is that possible in the past.
It seems that a lot of users will upload video which is by default published with the default settings and thus is visible from the outside. Even if they change the settings fairly quickly, automated systems like ours will already know about the existence of that video.
There could be other reasons but this seems the most likely, especially as a video that is being uploaded can be published fairly swiftly.
[0] https://pex.com
[1] https://blog.pex.com/what-content-dominates-on-youtube-39081...
It sounds like you are aware that you are scraping videos that are later re-labeled as "unlisted", but you don't mention what you do to mitigate this problem.
Even if it may not be illegal, at the very least it would seem un-ethical to link to private videos like this, and it would seem trivial for you to "re-scrape" your database every now and then to check whether any existing videos have changed from listed -> unlisted, and if they have, remove them.
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That blog post is missing most of the images, by the way. It makes the post a little difficult to understand as most of it is referencing the graphs!
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If one is added to a playlist they can, at least.
No they will not be listed when the user searches for them.
> 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).
How does it work, technically? Is there an API to pull videos with a certain title format within a certain range, and then are the sections of video randomly chosen?
Edit: Found this https://github.com/wonga00/astronaut - answers some questions:
> The server currently pulls in videos daily from youtube. Search criteria is [TAG]XXXX with upload time this week, where TAG is a raw video prefix such as 'dsc' or 'img'. This search turns out to be a good approximation for the data set of home videos created in the last week.
Reminds me of Forgotify: a website that displays songs that have 0 plays on Spotify: http://forgotify.com/
Fun fact: if you listen to a song returned from the site it'll never be seen on the site again (as it would have >0 views)
Thread from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13413225
Interdimensional cable, Morty.
For me the first video result was, what at first glance appeared to be a robot welding a barbecue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LblUWrJXfSA
Pretty good find, looks more like an excavator bucket, not a barbecue though.
Check this subreddit for a similar and a bit weirder experience
https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepIntoYouTube/
A somewhat similar "sampling" experience is searching for a high-frequency term like "a", and filtering for an upload date of last hour or day[1]. Non-English terms and time of day bias on geography.
[1] "a"/"last hour": https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=a&sp=EgIIAQ%253...
No stop words, that's curious?
http://www.petittube.com/ is 100 times better
Yeah can confirm this is a new way to not only experience Youtube, but the internet itself.
This was one of the first few that popped up for me, a cyberpunk/Terry Gilliam reality thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPyfqim1KA8
This is the same search method I use to continuously play back YT videos on a dedicated small screen connected to a raspberry pi in my apartment. Definitely shows an amazing cross section through humanity. The great thing about the camera file name is it’s language and region agnostic. So you really get everything.
LOL - found this diamond in the rough. Not sure if creepy dude filming women or actually his job? https://www.youtube.com/user/federicomarocchio/videos
Most of them seem related to beauty pageants, and the others are cosplayers, probably showing off their costumes.
Awesome. I've been trotting this idea out for years as an interesting but silly website I should make: videos even the uploaders didn't watch. I'm so excited to see it at the top of HN. This might inspire me to execute on one of my other absurd ideas.
this is an awesome idea, for a handful of different reasons. "A feed of the present". The post got my attention because of the domain name. Perhaps including your description "A feed of a present" would get more deserved attention
One minute in and I saw a video that appeared to show an older guy secretly recording a girl playing hopscotch.
The concept is great. It's real, and that's amazing, but it's also a reminder of how terrible people can be.
No matter where you look on YouTube, there always seems to be a pyramid scheme to hop onto:
https://youtu.be/PKqKLntvLFE
I hope he was able to retire after all!
I love this, what I really need is a back button or history though, what if i see something I love and then it switches before I think to hit the freeze button? It is gone forever? (As far as I'm concerned)
The site logs each video to your browser's console in the format `Playing {0} in [object Object]`. You can rewatch by visiting https://youtu.be/{0}.
I think the videos are fleeting by design
I have regularly been doing these kind of searches for years and have always loved the spontaneity of the results I found.
We are far from the "SHOCKING: A WHALE EATS A BABY LIVE!!!" with the red circled preview image.
Absolutely incredible. I felt like I had a bird's eye view to humanity.
I think this is an amazing way of both estranging us from humankind by viewing our world from the outside as if we were aliens, and of widening our horizons by giving us access to the immediate experience of people from all walks of life, all over the planet.
My only worry is that it selects for people who don't know or care to properly name their youtube videos, e.g. after watching for ten minutes, I'm yet to see a young person from the West. Though this is probably one of the reasons why, for me, the videos are so strikingly unfamiliar.
These should just be running 24/7 in a lobby of a building somewhere
"Go" button is missing on Chrome and Brave, background video doesn't work on Brave. Cool website though, I could watch this for hours.
I don't see any buttons on FF 68 either. I was able to just click around for the first one.. can't find one to get videos playing.
My anecdotal observations are that the lonely, unloved videos typically consist of home movies, personal vacation videos, children's sporting events, and group exercise. Except for the exercise, it seems like the kind of stuff you'd find on any family's VHS tapes from the 80s and 90s.
Can anyone explain the prevalence of group exercise videos? Has anyone had radically different experiences?
Are these curated? Or is it truly just new things?
This kid is awesome
https://youtu.be/kJ1owcGo-QA
This kid is awesome
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvKbUPMkbqM
I like the concept and it looks good. Some criticism: After pausing a video, it still goes to the next video after a couple of seconds. I'm also seeing way too many XHR requests on a paused video. It's like the next video is already playing but invisible? The network tab just looks way too messy.
It's pretty cool that the first video that I got was on my language and one of the more classic songs about the struggle against oppression here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t&v=brNbYfwMEjM
Wish this had a better UI on mobile
FYI. When you share the link on Facebook no description or picture is added. Cool site
I recall being told at one time that the great majority of youtube uploads are never watched even by the person who uploaded them. This fact figures prominently into how they decide to transcode, store, and distribute uploads.
Not really being serious: Are we inadvertent being hooked into an attempted YouTube DoS by resource exhaustion?
It works go something like: System transcodes when demand is applied; normally demand misses 90% of videos; demand surely focuses only on unprocessed videos; 'attack' diverts resources to processing videos that would otherwise have never required processing.
Is this a joke? Whenever I press the button it skips to the next video instead of preventing it from switching. So the ones I want to see are immediately stopped. It's quite frustrating but I guess that's the point?
I can see how this could be confusing. If you click it once, on a fresh log in, it will stop switching. When you press it again it will resume switching.
If you like this, you might find this interesting as well: https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepIntoYouTube/
This shows how much YouTube could benefit from a "I'm feeling lucky" button. No algorithms (except for flagging inappropriate content), no filter bubbles, just a random video uploaded from another human.
Wow, incredible. I feel like an alien watching this strange planet called earth.
I'm flabbergasted. Such precious, rich, true and amazing moments of life.
I really love the way it connects people, but...
Doesn't anyone question that youtube is basically run by an ad service? If you really want to connect to people then why does "company x" wants to know and keep tabs?
Why is there a thumbs up or down in the first place? Or even, why doesn't the number of views matter to you in this case. "company x" had a great search engine but now it seems crippled by the fact you can't say: "exclude the top x percent popular results"
I'm writing this because when I searched for something obscure, I go to page 8 of the "company x" results and got slapped multiple times with "suspicious behaviour" notifications and had to wait or solve a captcha.
Agreed. The especially weird thing for me is that when I suggest ads are perhaps not great, I get energetic replies along the lines of "why do you hate newspapers/TV/video and want to kill them!1!"
I think of the ad ecosystem as like a tree that has grown so tall and dense that little can grow beneath it. If that tree weren't there I don't think we'd have nothing. I think we'd have a richer ecosystem with many more things growing.
Not just an ad service. Google is a content publisher, as revealed recently in the leak of the "ML Fairness" documents. And this website loads over "http" for maximum cookieage. Enjoy a 5MB+ "GO" button? No thanks. You?
Lets at least try to be fair here though: hosting the amount of content YouTube hosts, and delivering it to viewers, is not inexpensive.
What alternative funding model do you propose?
You're right, it's expensive and needs to be funded.
Suppose I had an alternate funding model. Also suppose I wanted youtube to change it (note: I never said that). How does that invalidate the bad things I pointed out with the current model?
You never said whether or not you agreed with my original points.
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What is filter criteria except zero views? I had think finding gems in this set would be much harder but this site is somehow popping up lot more good than junk.
There is also a similar website called http://www.petittube.com/
There's also http://www.youhole.tv/ which is pretty great
Not a good name, at first glance 'petite tube' sounded like a porn site.
This is interesting and also worrying. The first video it found for me featured a medical patient giving away their full name and date of birth.
This can be found on many social media profiles. What’s the concern?
Those aren't usually connected to the person's medical problems.
That said, the "patient" may not be one; lots of trainee doctors and nurses use YouTube to show their abilities, using mock patients.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxkpDHfgvpY
Well well
I got that one too.
Sorry to hijack, but I am trying to find any contact information for the creator. Can anyone help me with that? It's very positive.
Try commenting on the video.
Generally speaking, asking for help doxxing someone isn't considered kosher.
Ok. Well Id love to chat with him about @bksenior on any social platform. Thanks for the help. His idea is great.
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What a great experience, I really like it withe the sound off, it becomes very dreamlike and I feel even more like an astronaut.
I'm a little disturbed that it appears to have started playing immediately, but with the text and go button as an overlay.
https://youtu.be/OFXAK8WcJ1A
This is such a brilliant idea. Wish YouTube made something like this to improve discovery. I am already a fan.
How does someone create something like this? Is there a reverse sort by view count or something like that?
Pretty nice concept ! I don't get the "astronaut" part, though. What am I missing ?
Maybe because you're looking from the outside in, into regular people's lives?
Or maybe because an astronaut explores the space between the stars, and watching unwatched videos is exploring the space between YouTube "stars".
Great, my first video was a group of cosplayers dancing to music from "THE IDOLM@STER".
Brings back memories of the Hare Hare Yukai craze.
I'm trying to find any contact information of the creator, can anyone help me with this?
Here's the GitHub repo for the site: https://github.com/wonga00/astronaut - I'm sure you can go from there. :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13414515 From the last thread.
Awesome concept, great execution. Great thing to stumble on at the beginning of the day!
Well, I didn't expect to find something like this today! Pretty damn cool.
this made me lol.. still laughing at this tho https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhpzNDwm6H4
This was surprisingly satisfying to watch. Thanks for doing this
This is super cool! I spent like 30 minutes whatching it
Very nice, reminds me of the old internet. :-D
It needs an "upvote" or "downvote" button so people can filter out the better videos that others should watch.
But... That's literally the rest of YouTube, no?
The entire value here, for me at least, is a) randomness an b) fact they haven't been watched before.
There's so much curatrd stuff (which is great), and all tech companies are trying so hard to send me what they think I'll like / agree with, it's refreshing to step out of that box.
Edit: apologies if, perchance, I missed some subtle sarcasm btw... You never know on them interwebs
That seriously defeats the purpose of the site: unflitered discovery, nonjudgement, kismet, etc. Our global culture is deviating towards the norm because our tech encourages that behavior. I love it for what it is.
That's exactly what it shouldn't contain!
so amazing, thanks!, is there something similar about instagram stories ?
Try pressing the spacebar.
This functionality is broken in Safari for me. Works in Chrome.
Great use of search
Thank you for this.
This is fantastic.
This is awesome.
Github this!
https://github.com/wonga00/astronaut
STOP HIDING THE VIDEO CONTROLS
I actually like that feature. It forces you to see the video as the author intended, kind of like watching live TV.
Yes, but I can't adjust the audio level.
How do I put this politely... Fuck what the author intended[0]; use youtube-dl[1].
0: That was the polite version.
1: http://youtube-dl.org/
I recently put forward the idea there's enough music in the world already[1] because millions of songs on Spotify have never been heard[2]. And of those millions of unheard songs, many are probably not by musicians but by "poseurs" who don't care about the craft of songwriting.
Perhaps we need something like Astronaut for Spotify?
[1] https://write.as/poseur-to-composer/poseur-approach-to-makin...
[2] https://tonedeaf.thebrag.com/spotify-turns-5-reveals-theres-...
Now do one that finds and downrates videos shot with the camera turned the wrong way.
Upload videos to bitchute instead
有爱，warm heart
Garbage.
<[Astronaut.to]> The nighttime, sniffling, sneezing, aching, coughing, stuffy-head, fever, so you can rest medicine.