Comment by kannonboy
1 year ago
I love that the view count is included in the minimalist UI. I came across one with zero views, and there's something so intimate and exciting about being the first person to watch an ancient home video (even if it's shaky handycam footage of a horse, narrated in Russian).
As an aside, hats off to Google to being able to serve an 11 year old video with no noticeable delay from what must be the coldest of caches.
I felt slightly uneasy myself - the first thing I saw was a mum laying on her bed doing a selfie-video with two small kids (probably between 2 and 4 years old) singing a song to daddy.
That felt like a total invasion of their private lives.
I've had the same videos from my own kids, and while there is nothing embarrassing or shameful about it, it's not something I'd want broadcasted. Maybe it hit a nerve for me as it is so very very similar to my own life right now. Sure yeah they uploaded it to YouTube and it's public but it still felt wrong to watch that.
Kinda ruined my day a bit - feel kinda bad for viewing it.
That slight unease used to permeate the entire internet (and made it exciting and genuinely thrilling!), and now that you've articulated it out loud it makes me think it's a critical missing part to all those "nostalgia for the old web" thinkpieces people love to write these days. Granted, I was a teenager in the 90's literally growing up into the world as the web grew up around me, so there was slight unease in all aspects of life, but that feeling of the unknown, of not totally being sure what you're going to discover (good or bad) when you surf from link to link, maybe that's really what's missing in the sanitized, commodified 2024 internet.
Or maybe I'm just overthinking it lol
Nah, i agree. I'm a little younger but i distinctly remember adults around me heavily warning about using the internet and especially putting anything about yourself into it. There was a great distrust between people and the internet in the early 2000's, but then kids got ipods that could text and call, and network effects meant that you _had_ to be on Facebook, and slowly over time Facebook and MySpace started to not feel like the danger zone, like it was separate from all those warnings cause it was just you and your friends chatting at 2:00a.m., nobody was gonna bother to look at you. Then the social media empires grew and expanded and it kinda became the entire internet (that people use) started to feel like not the danger zone. You could do anything there, and huge company's would create walled gardens that would hide the worst aspects and let you pretend it was a safe and open place, to their benefit of course. Adults stopped warning, kids became adults, and now to hear a warning about the internet is incredibly rare. We also just think that there's so much shit there, nobody would take the time to notice us, and everyone else is posting their entire lives anyways so why not? Strange times
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> but that feeling of the unknown, of not totally being sure what you're going to discover (good or bad) when you surf from link to link, maybe that's really what's missing in the sanitized, commodified 2024 internet.
https://wiby.me search engine brings that feelings back.
this.
this site felt like browsing the small web - just in video mode for someone like me that got derailed by into all the walled garden hubs of the modern enterprise-web felt refreshing and, yeh, 90' nostalgic
Hmmm, YouTube is clearly part of the new web though... and this seems to be very similar to TikTok ?
Ruined your day? Although it is undoubtedly tech voyeurism the fact that these observations occur in every day life and don’t violate people’s privacy I would just like to invite you to get out more.
==occur in every day life and don’t violate people’s privacy==
Plenty of things happen in every day life, but are private (sex, break-ups, proposals, Dr. visits, etc.). I also noticed lots of these videos have people in the background. I doubt they were they notified that a video was being taken and uploaded publicly.
==I would just like to invite you to get out more.==
Maybe an alternative is to invite yourself to ask questions about why there are multiple comments with the same sentiment rather than reflexively telling them how to feel/act?
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I don't think it is invading their privacy-with-a-big-P (after all I have no idea who these people are or where the lived etc), it is more just socially it felt inappropriate.
I think if a young family was sat on a park bench doing this and you went and sat on the bench between the mother and the father it would be considered at the least incredibly rude and inappropriate. Even if they are in a public place and you are not technically violating any laws, you'd still be acting in a way that most people would disagree with.
This is what it felt like to me.
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"don’t violate people’s privacy"
Did you asked the kids in the videos (who are grownups or teenagers now) if they are ok with random strangers watching their kids life?
Also I would doubt, that most people were aware, that they were uploading the video to the general public.
So there are surely worse things going on, but I also felt uneasy after watching such private videos.
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Thanks - that's exactly how I felt after watching a view videos - I came away feeling a bit disturbed - largely because the things I watched were very wholesome but also very private.
> very private
very explicitly uploaded with the intent that others would see it
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I think, back then, many people didn’t realize their videos are going to be available to the whole world. They might have uploaded them just to send a link to relatives, and fumbled or missed the privacy toggle. Lots of very private videos on there.
I have seen recently uploaded videos (or reels, or "tiktoks") which were intentional... Shit's wild. People now know, yet... They sometimes do the most disgusting shit ever for the attention (likes, views).
Because the truth is it’s likely that most of these were never meant to be public. People will say that it’s the fault of the user and thus there is no guilt attributable to the viewer, but I sincerely doubt most of these users knew they were making it public and may not have if they knew.
While I don’t think intentionally surfacing these videos is wrong in any legal sense of course, I think it’s wrong ethically.
Exploiting someone’s mistake in this manner is not noble.
It’s the same reason we (good folk) look away when someone’s clothing accidentally reveals more than they intended, though it would be within our right to look.
I choose not to view these because I don’t believe it was intended that I should, and without the consent of the creator I chose to err on the side of decency.
I think that comparing children to private parts or intimacy is a symptom of the current hysteria about pedophilia. We are so conditioned to wanting to protect children and being terrified of being accused of being a pedo yourself. It's probably how the Salem witch hysteria was. What if it's possible to see children simply as smaller people, and not jump to hysterics upon seeing people in their family? If there was a naked kid in the bathtub or something you could report it (they have AI that can detect this anyway).
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a lot of these unethical arguments veer on this idea that creating an account and publishing online content in this early smartphone era was some foreign concept. I don't subscribe that even in 2006 that people were that internet illiterate.
people didn't change, our perception of the internet changed (for better and worse). I still see enough people posting intimate stuff way past my boundaries that I think this is simply how some people are wired. I'd definitely wager that 90% of the people who I'd notify of this in some sort of census would not bother to delete/unlist these videos.
Well said. Although cool in a technical sense, I can't get myself to open the site because of ethical reasons. However, in my younger more ego driven coding days I would have looked at it like a really fun challenge and a chance to show everyone my skills. The ethics of it would have been an afterthought.
> That felt like a total invasion of their private lives.
Except they literally explicitly uploaded it to YT.
At the time this was probably the one of the most convenient ways to share videos with loved ones. It wouldn't cross your mind that these videos were "public" because no one had the link but you.
I'm sure it never crossed their mind that 15 years later an aggregator would be resurfacing them.
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Who says it was explicit? They may have done so without understanding the implications.
Your insistence that people did this intentionally, fully understanding what they were doing, is pretty weird. You have no idea why people uploaded these, what their level of technical proficiency was when they did so, or what they understood about the availability of the videos they posted.
Maybe don't claim to read people's minds, and be open to the idea that people do things for a variety of reasons, and often don't consider (or even know that they should consider) the implications of everything they do.
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I think it’s also a reminder that the internet felt so much safer in 2010.
My sister (who is apparently wiser than most of us) has always refused to sharing pictures and videos of her kids on the internet and in 2010 that felt very old-fashioned. Now, because the internet feels so much more dangerous, it’s become a completely normal take.
My wife and I have been pretty mindful about what we share on even quasi-public social networks when it relates to our kids. Luckily there's a decent number of platforms/apps out there which make it easy to share with family without making stuff public.
Sadly that doesn't stop family from reposting from those more private platforms to public social media...
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First video I got was some happy people (families, by the sound of it) popping off a few rounds at the range with AR-15s. My day has been improved!
Funny you say that because flipping through a few videos on the site just now, I came across one of a young child (say 2yo) playing nude in the pool. I reported it, of course.
Link? :P
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> As an aside, hats off to Google to being able to serve an 11 year old video with no noticeable delay from what must be the coldest of caches.
And remember that depending if you visited with an iphone, or an android, or a smart TV, or a Chromecast, they'd be needing to serve the video with different encoding settings/codecs/MPEG profiles. So for the hardly ever watched videos, they either need to keep transcoded copies in 10+ formats, all ready to serve with no latency for years, or be ready to live transcode.
It really amazes me that they don't simply say that any video that doesn't get at least 1000 views will count towards your google drive storage quota.
Keeping all that private and never watched video ready-to-serve must cost so much, with zero revenue.
I think they will/are using it for AI/ML training. After all, it is data created by a human, so useful in the newly polluted sea of AI generated content.
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The first video I got was of a really cute baby making baby noises. Made me very happy. It had 0 views.
View count is nice but I'd like to be able to share a video that I got with someone else, I think that would be a great function.
Clicking the date opens it in YouTube.
That's a shame, I like the ephemeral nature of these.
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I'm really anxious Google will also kill this aspect of Youtube one day.
As soon as it gets split off from google and they no longer have the money machine to fund them and have to fight on a level regulatory-monitored ground for ad revenue you can bet your ass it will.
AFAIK youtube is profitable now. It was not for years, but is now.
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It was already partially killed when in 2017 YouTube switched all unlisted videos to private.
Which I now just realize why they did that : a lot of people didn't understand the difference.
Sadly, a lot of other people did understand the difference, and did not expect this kind of switcheroo, and now there's a bunch of effectively dead links covering more than a decade of videos.
Google: if you like it, it's going away.
Once you live to a certain age, you realize this is true about everything in your life.
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I got charged by Squarespace the other day, and it immediately raised red flags—I've never done business with them before.
Then it clicked: this was for an old domain I’d purchased through Google Domains. I knew Google had sold its domain business to Squarespace, but in the moment, I’d completely forgotten about it.
Oh well.
You should get YouTube Premium so they can pay for all those servers.
Anyone aware of public archives of videos like this? These are so cool and I imagine that in the future this would be an incredibly valuable peek into history given how raw it is.
https://archive.org/details/movies?tab=collection
They've already announced deleting videos from unused channels. So it's only a matter of time
https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/18/youtube-will-no-longer-be-...
> Google updated the post to read, “We do not have plans to delete accounts with YouTube videos at this time.”
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I know a video from roughly 11+ years ago where the audio got messed up, not sure how to even begin to report that. Was some niche "inside joke" type of meme. I have to wonder how many videos got re-encoded by YouTube that got screwed up inadvertently.
yt-dlp https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp lets you list and download different formats offered by YoTube for videos.
You could try downloading different audio formats and see if any of the available ones contain non-garbled audio.
For example:
Output:
And then download each of the "audio only" entries from the table. In the case of the table for the video I chose:
Here I used the '-f' option to choose each of the 'audio only' formats available for the example video, and then I used the '-o' flag to specify a custom format string for the output files so that the file names include the format id making them unique from each other and corresponding to the entries in the original table.
This gives me files containing each of the audio formats that were available from YouTube.
The timestamps of the files are set by yt-dlp to correspond to timestamps it got from YouTube.
It might be worth to be careful about downloading alternate format versions of too many videos. I could imagine that downloading alternate formats of too many videos from YouTube could trigger something on their side to make them think you are a bot or something. Of course that's just speculation and I don't know if YouTube actually does that. Hopefully doing it for a single video won't get your IP banned by YouTube.
I don't think they are being served from Youtube (?)
There's an iframe with a link to the youtube api. When I watched a video, it was being streamed from a server named rr4---sn-p5qlsny6.googlevideo.com