YouTube is Full of Old, Unseen Home Videos. Now You Can Watch Them at Random (yahoo.com) 18
From a new web project called IMG_0001:
Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in "Send to YouTube" button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMG_XXXX filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives. Inspired by Ben Wallace, I made a bot that crawled YouTube and found 5 million of these videos! Watch them below, ordered randomly.
The Washington Post reports that it's the same 22-year-old software engineer who created Bop Spotter — that phone on a telephone pole using the Shazam app to identify songs people play in public.
And his new site includes only videos "posted before 2015, with fewer than 150 views each and durations shorter than 150 seconds." In about 12 hours total, Walz said, he coded a website that takes millions of these unedited, raw videos from more than nine years ago and serves them to viewers at random. The resulting project, titled IMG_0001 and hosted on his personal website, plays out like a glimpse into different worlds: Hit play and your first video may show teenagers practicing a dance in a high school hallway. That wraps up, and it rolls into footage of a dog frolicking in a snowy backyard...
Viewers were gripped by the videos' unfiltered nature, a contrast to the heavily produced and camera-aware content found on TikTok and YouTube today. Writer Ryan Broderick wrote in his newsletter Garbage Day that the project is "beautiful, haunting, funny, and sort of magical. Like staring into a security camera of the past." Mashable's Tim Marcin called it "the kind of authenticity that's all too rare online these days."
The website has more than 280,000 views and millions of video plays, Walz said — meaning plenty of viewers are sticking around to watch many of the videos.
The article includes an intesting observation from Christian Sandvig, a digital media professor at the University of Michigan. "The people who made the video might not even remember that they shared them!"
The Washington Post reports that it's the same 22-year-old software engineer who created Bop Spotter — that phone on a telephone pole using the Shazam app to identify songs people play in public.
And his new site includes only videos "posted before 2015, with fewer than 150 views each and durations shorter than 150 seconds." In about 12 hours total, Walz said, he coded a website that takes millions of these unedited, raw videos from more than nine years ago and serves them to viewers at random. The resulting project, titled IMG_0001 and hosted on his personal website, plays out like a glimpse into different worlds: Hit play and your first video may show teenagers practicing a dance in a high school hallway. That wraps up, and it rolls into footage of a dog frolicking in a snowy backyard...
Viewers were gripped by the videos' unfiltered nature, a contrast to the heavily produced and camera-aware content found on TikTok and YouTube today. Writer Ryan Broderick wrote in his newsletter Garbage Day that the project is "beautiful, haunting, funny, and sort of magical. Like staring into a security camera of the past." Mashable's Tim Marcin called it "the kind of authenticity that's all too rare online these days."
The website has more than 280,000 views and millions of video plays, Walz said — meaning plenty of viewers are sticking around to watch many of the videos.
The article includes an intesting observation from Christian Sandvig, a digital media professor at the University of Michigan. "The people who made the video might not even remember that they shared them!"
Needs to be rebranded as F-YouTube (Score:1)
Too many reasons to hate YouTube, but this one sounds like a really feeble bid for the eyeballs of incredibly bored people. What kind of ads will they target at people who are interested in such a dumb feature? Really dumb gold miners?
Most annoying recent change to YouTube is the full-screen mode switch. I thought it was some kind of double-click thing, but that's not it. Nor is it clearly linked to any position on the screen. Yes, there is a place that is supposed to bring up the full-screen mode, but now
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This is more training to turn you into an even dumber consumer, nothing more. Stop thinking at all.. ex
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* uh oh, I'm seeing ads on Slashdot mobile site lately, someone figured out how to randomize the ad server domains and shove ads into iframes from what I can see. Someone else noticed this here, anyone got ideas for countermeasures?
Me too. I thought my pi-hole was broken, but it's working fine. Must be some jerk at Slashdot decided to squeeze us all a little bit harder. Probably the same jerk who decided that the "disable advertising" button for subscribers would do nothing to stop ads.
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Hmm... I am not a subscriber by I have the "Disable advertising". I never selected it, so I don't know what it does. My take is that I'm willing to ignore the ads if it helps--but it pretty obviously doesn't. LOTS of things could be fixed if Slashdot actually had a viable business model, eh?
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s/by I have/but I have/
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I think the point is to mine the "diamonds in the rough". Those videos that get very little views - but knowing the rule that '90% of everything is crap", this could mean there might be something among the unwatched that might be good.
So the whole point is simply to pick out what the algorithm ignores and see if it's worthwhile. Maybe some creator is showing off neat things but their reach is so small nobody sees it.
It's literally trying to beat the algorithm by including content the algorithm ignores just
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Sounds like the gold rush mentality. However I think you'd have better odds with cryptocurrency.
Re: "Youtube full of old, unseen videos." (Score:2)
The "auto upload" feature means these are videos that might not have been meant for public viewing at all.
Vignetting (Score:3)
The fake vignetting his player is placing over the videos to make them look older is annoying.
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the videos are all available with a simple search and the ususal interface. search for img_0001 or img_whatever and enjoy countless hours of the bizarre cultural randomness of our collective past.
dunno why he even needed a bot for this, the videos are right there. the site is just cheap attention whoring and if there was an opportunity to somehow present this thing in an inspiring, evoking or thought provoking way, it's lost.
It's a gem (Score:3)
As someone who has bought many 8mm reels on eBay because of the nostalgia of seeing other people's lives in 40s-70s I appreciate this project. Yes, the videos are available already on YT, but this collects them for a nice viewing experience. But during my watching about 50 videos, I found one (IMG_0283) which piqued my interest as it's a choir and band from what looks to be a middle school because of the song they were singing. As Google Assistant couldn't identify the song, I set to find the video on YT and indeed could not find it there. Then I realized that if you click on the date underneath the video, it'll take you over to the video on YT. Very handy. So, does anybody know this song [youtube.com]?
This idea is soo old, prior art exists (Score:2)
pretty cool (Score:2)
some real funny ones with 10 views. happens sometimes when you are searching for something randomly, and you hit some crazy video that only has like 20 views. but this makes it easy!
makes you wonder what happened to the dad yelling at his kid. Are they still friends? is the dad dead?
pretty fun.
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Something about this feel like the start of a Black Mirror episode...