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!)
I found some obscure music video that had like ~200 likes with no downvotes but it didn't lasted long... not idea if it's bots that downvote stuff or just weird people (hate the word "haters" but that's what I mean)
It's when you change upvotes and downvotes so that the ration stays similar, but now you can't consistently find if your downvoting bot had any effect.
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.
When I go to YouTube on a fresh device without being logged in, it's a pile of steaming clickbait and pop-internet-culture garbage. On my account, by contrast, YouTube is full of mostly great recommendations of high-quality content and I can pretty much always find several new and interesting things to watch should I feel like it.
(I watch stuff like Kurzgesagt, Smarter every day, AvE, Rick Beato, Today I found out, Wisecrack, Wendover Productions, Practical Engineering, Vox, Crash Course, SciShow... that's just from browsing my current recommendations. I would guess none of that shows up for fresh accounts)
The problem I have is that my recommendations are usually full of stuff I'm already subscribed to. Discovering new things is really hard and usually just happens by reading about it elsewhere.
Clean it of trash and you will receive less trash recommendations. Fully cleaning isn't effective as the average video quality is lower than most HN public would like to watch. Having mostly good videos you like makes it recommend more similar content to you.
It's not just average video quality, it's that (as far as anyone can tell), the algorithm optimizes for expected value of total watch time, as opposed to optimizing for just the likelihood of watching the next video. Basically, the recommendations behave as though they "hope" that you will go down a conspiracy or outrage rabbit hole and binge 12 hours of garbage.
For me it correctly "hopes" I'll go down science rabbit holes, which I do. I'm similar to the person above, I watch a lot of educational content, and I also get suggested great content.
Right now I see the follow up to the guy who build his own VGA card, video of someone building a camera that can see wifi, and a PBS video on the "quantum internet". All great suggestions.
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).
they probably log a 'shadow view' but recommendations seem to be directly based on your watch history since your recommendations are lost when you completely clear it.
The recommendations will mostly be derived from the videos you have saved in playlists. And the front page will always shows Youtube Mixes about the last song you were listening to, at the time of turning off the watch history.
Do a significant amt of YouTube users use playlists? I’ve always assumed no. Unless perhaps they are doing it for music since you’re talking about YouTube Mix. And songs.
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.
I'm currently unaware of any recommendation engine that's worth acknowledging.
Netflix, Amazon, Youtube, PornHub, etc... they're all accomplishing little more than "similar to the one, and only one item you last saw", with dramatic shifts in "profiling" from one or two videos.
Actually, Netflix acknowledges this and splits the recommendation into "because you watched X..", so at least it covers a greater range (eg last 5 things seen)
I'm damned sure they could be much more useful if they would let me tell them what I like, by implementing rating systems that are worth using (e.g. the ability to browse and edit previous ratings in a sane fashion)
but user-useful recommendation is not the actual goal, so really its just that our metrics are wrong. It's probably great according to view counts.
That's the bottom line right there: thinking that recommendations are useful to YOU is naive and missing fundamental things about the experience.
That said, you can indeed tell them what you like but by use of negative space. When you get bombarded with obviously horrible recommendations, do the two-step process of clicking 'Not Interested' (if possible without even watching the video, or you can check it in incognito mode, assuming they're not watching that even more closely) and then 'tell us why', and respond 'I'm not interested in this channel: "undesirable video maker".
That assumes you can be sure you want to nuke the channels and subjects in question, but when it's clickbait channels and/or alt-right propaganda it's generally easy to identify and not get wrong. I'm sure the same would be true for leftwing propaganda, but the stuff I don't want pushed on me has a whole language and lexicon that's easily recognizable by video title, channel title and attempted clickbait image. If stuff trips my sensors on those grounds, I'm generally comfortable nuking it unseen.
The only one I think is good is when I build radio stations off custom playlists on Google play music. Generally speaking, most of the songs are good, and like 40% will get added to the playlist as well.
I don’t use this, or Spotify, but those are the only two systems I’ve heard people give praise for the recommendation engine — I suspect that its because music playlists are almost equivalent to a rating system.
That is, the user is capable of efficiently informing the engine of their taste, and there’s significant incentive for the user to consistently re-evaluate their ratings (playlists), so it can be trusted as up to date.
Another very important aspect is that playlists are useful enough to the user that they actually want to maintain it.
For example, amazon, netflix and pornhub all have rating systems, but they’re not at all useful. The interface isn’t useful enough for reviewing and reflecting on, its not comprehensive enough to keep as a primary list (because it only covers what they offer, which is very limited) and there’s of course no impact on the recommendation engine (because the rating systems are not worth using; chicken and egg). No sane person would touch the things (beyond “upvoting”, which isn’t significantly related to taste)
Imo ratings are absolutely vital to useful reccomendation, but they’ve been totally neglected
The radio stations off custom playlists are indeed pretty good, but the recommended ones on the home page are often horrendous and very short (songs will basically get repeated after less than 1 hour).
last.fm is great for recommendations after you've been scrobbling for awhile. I've picked up so many artists from checking out recommended every once in awhile.
On this subject, clicking through to some of these videos in incognito gave me what I guess must be the "default" suggestions - which included not just beauty tips spam but far-right speakers and loyalist marches in Belfast. I'm guessing the latter is related to the date but it's not something I'd expect to be the default! Watching even one video then made it more normal, even when trying to generate recommendations based on the no view videos.
Or otherwise paid for (which I think still counts as 'ads'), or tuned towards engagement.
I think quite a lot has to do with machine learning working out that if you panic the human animal they pay attention to threats, and therefore to maximize engagement 'if it bleeds, it leads' (old newspaper maxim). Newspaper editors can (and might not) automatically apply a social-benefit heuristic or sense of social shame (not wanting to be a 'muckraker' or troublemaker), and machine learning may not even start with such a concept.
If engagement was maximized by turning viewers into cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers (CHUDs), machine learning would simply make note of that and run as hard as it could in that direction, since it doesn't have a larger context in mind unless programmed to do so.
(Such a larger context is actually sort of controversial: lot of people demonize the very concept of social justice, and without it you get these hacks to maximize engagement by tapping into really unmanageable human/animal behaviors)
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.
This logic would require them to re-scrape every video forever, which is unreasonable.
I think a better approach for everyone involved would be to only store references to videos which were posted more than x minutes ago. I'm not sure if they have that information when scraping though.
>It seems that a lot of users will upload video which is by default published [and then they change it to private] //
So to avoid that sort of unexpected public-ing (ie publishing) only one extra scrape would be needed. Or, if they knew the period over which the setting was normally changed then they could just delay the scrape until most would have already been changed.
I imagine though, in part, the 'fun' is catching inadvertent publication and morality is no t considered.
It actually has nothing to do with "fun". As I mentioned in my other comment, we don't expose our database publicly and nobody but us can see that a video is unlisted.
It would beat the purpose of our service would we delay our identification, and it would actually require some significant engineering efforts in order to introduce such capabilities into our system with significant economical impact on our business.
Has "unlisted" ever been known to mean "private"? I never assumed it was - rather it was just a video that would not appear in searches or recommendations on YouTube.
> 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.
It definitely doesn't invalidate the problems with the current model, I'm just saying that for all our talk of how bad YouTube is, no one has yet come up with a way to fund an alternative that keeps the good qualities without the bad ones.
So the question really just becomes: is the good of YouTube worth the bad?
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?
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.