YouTube videos that have almost zero previous views

[creddit]

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.

[fbelzile]

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!)

[gbudee]

What a discovery. I feel a bit intrusive getting to experience it. I hope her communication succeeds.

[acangiano]

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.

[marapuru]

Wow, very touching. I wonder if her son has seen this already.

[NikolaNovak]

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

[m463]

It's sort of like channel surfing all the "local access" channels in the world

[ddalex]

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.

[Causality1]

Reminds me of a Youtube recreation of Vine's original incarnation, VinePeek.

https://i.imgur.com/QE9U5tJ.jpg

[jchw]

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?)

[gamerDude]

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.

[TallGuyShort]

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..

[maroonblazer]

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%.

[agscala]

There's a subreddit dedicated to this sort of thing, check it out:

https://www.reddit.com/r/IMGXXXX

[hnzix]

also /r/deepintoyoutube.

[kenjackson]

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.

[rathish_g]

Disable uBlock Origin. I had the same problem

[fortran77]

C'mon. You know you have to turn of noscript, etc, to get most sites like this to work.

[retube]

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)

[cjsawyer]

I have the same issue with iOS Chrome

[arielweisberg]

Interesting idea, but the “Go” button is not appearing for me on Safari mobile.

[alxmdev]

That's Apple trying to save you!

[dave5104]

It doesn't appear for me either on Firefox or Chrome. Maybe too much traffic?

[theon144]

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/

[krn]

> 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...

[blackbrokkoli]

Press "F" to go to fullscreen :)

[ronniegeriis]

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.

[alexgrcs]

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).

[mncharity]

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?

[kennywinker]

Left-arrow key goes back to the previous video, right arrow key takes you forward. Not sure if there’s an option for mobile.

[dusted]

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!

[chias]

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

[yaleman]

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 :(

[amarshall]

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).

[dragonwriter]

Or, just pause viewing history; YouTube has a control for that.

[human20190310]

Why would someone who is concerned about their watch history have watch history enabled at all?

[Causality1]

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.

[vcanales]

Interesting, it didn't add anything to my watch history on Safari; is this a browser thing?

[JansjoFromIkea]

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.

[dorkwood]

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.

[chrsstrm]

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?

[doh]

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...

[mistermann]

If one is added to a playlist they can, at least.

[ilikehurdles]

No they will not be listed when the user searches for them.

[herpderperator]

> 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.

[nickdibari]

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)

[dang]

Thread from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13413225