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.
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.
Or maybe I'm just overthinking it lol
https://wiby.me search engine brings that feelings back.
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
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?
Multiple comments saying it felt creepy or multiple comments saying it ruined their day to any extent? Those aren't the same thing.
==Thanks - that's exactly how I felt after watching a view videos==
The original comment was a long explanation that ended with: ==Kinda ruined my day a bit==
Seems like pretty tame language to get worked up about, I see two qualifiers in merely 6 words.
Having said that, it also seems like a bit much for that other commenter to find it worth policing their feelings like that.
> Seems like pretty tame language to get worked up about, I see two qualifiers in merely 6 words.
I don't think anyone here is worked up.
--The original commentor said that it "kinda ruined their day a bit" and felt a little intrusive.
--Then someone responded by saying that is was just things that occur in every day life and doesn't violate anyone's privacy.
--Then I responded to clarify that things which occur in every day life can still be intrusive to privacy i.e. sex, breakups, drug use, etc.
I did not say that people were having sex in these clips, nor did the original commentor.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/11/theres-a-good-reason-wh...
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.
context is everything in public settings. Was it a tired old man on a cane that clearly needed to sit down? clearly it's rude for the couple to at least not scoot over. is the bench super long? there's probably no real beef as long as you're not directly sitting in their personal space.
In this case, these are clips uploaded over a decade ago for one reason or another. Realistically it's the same case-by-case. In general I don't really feel any guilt per se.
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.
>Also I would doubt, that most people were aware, that they were uploading the video to the general public.
Those sentences are working against each other. You don't need to ask for permission to observe something in public. That's what makes the public sphere public; that there are restrictions and expectations in the private sphere that don't exist in the public sphere. If someone mistakenly believes they're in private when they're not, that's unfortunate for them. It's their responsibility to know where they are, not your responsibility to act according to their expectation. You're not obligated to avert your gaze if someone walks out in public not wearing pants by mistake. Is it polite to do it? Sure. Is it wrong not to do it? No.
Not when the topic is privacy. This is not someone walking in public, those are videos out of private homes. Just because someone uploaded something, does not mean he had
a) the rights to do so (I saw a clip where a women asked a bit angry, are you making a movie?)
B) was aware what he is doing
(Google and co do have a incentive to mislead people about who will be able to access data)
So it might be technical legal. It if is moral, is up to yourself to decide.
Yes, it's like someone watching a private video on their phone while on the train. You don't have a right to not have someone looking over your shoulder if you do that. While out in public you have implicit permission to look over someone else's shoulder because that's what "public" means. Public means the absence of privacy.
>a) the rights to do so (I saw a clip where a women asked a bit angry, are you making a movie?)
>B) was aware what he is doing
Both are the problem of whoever took the video and/or uploaded it, not of the person watching it later.
But if I have my screen careless in the open, that is on me.
Well, I didn't talk about what is OK or not OK. What I said is you don't have a right to not have someone looking over your shoulder. Unless that person is touching you or following you to do it, there's nothing you can do to stop someone who's snooping at your screen in public if they don't want to stop.
very explicitly uploaded with the intent that others would see it
It sounds crazy now, but having worked with people a lot to make software that makes sense to them, this... Is not far fetched in the slightest.
Given the time frame and the newness of the iPhone and that entire model of interacting with media and the internet, I think it's pretty likely that many of those videos were published without the understanding that anyone would be able to view them.
Regardless of my guess on this, you can't assume to know what anyone's intent is, especially someone you don't know who posted something on the internet over a decade ago.
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.
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.
Except they literally explicitly uploaded it to YT.
I'm sure it never crossed their mind that 15 years later an aggregator would be resurfacing them.
The quandry is that people feel insignifigant and don't care if a dozen strangers see their posts.
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.
this may have even been pre-Google, so yes. You would have needed to create a youtube account, sign its TOS, and then press the corresponding options to upload a video to the internet. I don't think even back then people just auto-uploaded everything on heir phone; YT had pretty strict limits at that time anyway.
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.
Sadly that doesn't stop family from reposting from those more private platforms to public social media...
> Luckily there's a decent number of platforms/apps out there which make it easy to share with family without making stuff public.
I forget the other competitors in this space as its been a few years since we last looked into it.
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.
Keeping all that private and never watched video ready-to-serve must cost so much, with zero revenue.
Collecting data for one purpose (video sharing site), but then using it for another (training AI) is very much verboten.
They can probably use the public stuff tho.
Though what I was commenting on here wasn't so much the cost of storing a video at all, but storing it in 'warm' enough storage that you can load it really quickly.
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.
The moat and stickiness concepts are ok, but "candy store" is more fruitful.
Of course what constitutes candy is different for every product and you need to understand your customers to know what "flavors" they want
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.
> Google updated the post to read, “We do not have plans to delete accounts with YouTube videos at this time.”
You could try downloading different audio formats and see if any of the available ones contain non-garbled audio.
For example:
yt-dlp -F "https://youtube.com/watch?v=a28_aXgrgXE"
[youtube] Extracting URL: https://youtube.com/watch?v=a28_aXgrgXE
[youtube] a28_aXgrgXE: Downloading webpage
[youtube] a28_aXgrgXE: Downloading ios player API JSON
[youtube] a28_aXgrgXE: Downloading player 62ccfae7
WARNING: [youtube] a28_aXgrgXE: nsig extraction failed: Some formats may be missing
n = l9bNLKrDBBdCJtknGqU ; player = https://www.youtube.com/s/player/62ccfae7/player_ias.vflset/en_US/base.js
WARNING: [youtube] a28_aXgrgXE: nsig extraction failed: Some formats may be missing
n = Z-MlQqu4ClRjI62sqw_ ; player = https://www.youtube.com/s/player/62ccfae7/player_ias.vflset/en_US/base.js
[youtube] a28_aXgrgXE: Downloading m3u8 information
[youtube] a28_aXgrgXE: Downloading MPD manifest
[info] Available formats for a28_aXgrgXE:
ID EXT RESOLUTION FPS CH │ FILESIZE TBR PROTO │ VCODEC VBR ACODEC ABR ASR MORE INFO
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
sb2 mhtml 48x27 1 │ mhtml │ images storyboard
sb1 mhtml 33x45 1 │ mhtml │ images storyboard
sb0 mhtml 67x90 1 │ mhtml │ images storyboard
233 mp4 audio only │ m3u8 │ audio only unknown Default
234 mp4 audio only │ m3u8 │ audio only unknown Default
139-dash m4a audio only │ 427.60KiB 48k dash │ audio only mp4a.40.5 48k 22k DASH audio, m4a_dash
139 m4a audio only 1 │ 427.60KiB 48k https │ audio only mp4a.40.5 48k 22k low, m4a_dash
140-dash m4a audio only │ 853.17KiB 96k dash │ audio only mp4a.40.2 96k 44k DASH audio, m4a_dash
251 webm audio only │ 851.41KiB 99k dash │ audio only opus 99k 48k DASH audio, webm_dash
140 m4a audio only 1 │ 853.17KiB 95k https │ audio only mp4a.40.2 95k 44k medium, m4a_dash
160 mp4 108x144 30 │ ~962.40KiB 108k dash │ avc1.4d400b 108k video only DASH video, mp4_dash
269 mp4 108x144 30 │ ~ 1.43MiB 164k m3u8 │ avc1.4D400B 164k video only
278 webm 108x144 30 │ ~846.56KiB 95k dash │ vp9 95k video only DASH video, webm_dash
133 mp4 180x240 30 │ ~ 2.11MiB 242k dash │ avc1.4d400c 242k video only DASH video, mp4_dash
229 mp4 180x240 30 │ ~ 2.65MiB 305k m3u8 │ avc1.4D400C 305k video only
242 webm 180x240 30 │ ~ 1.92MiB 220k dash │ vp9 220k video only DASH video, webm_dash
134-dash mp4 270x360 30 │ 3.32MiB 459k dash │ avc1.4d4014 459k video only DASH video, mp4_dash
230 mp4 270x360 30 │ ~ 5.07MiB 583k m3u8 │ avc1.4D4014 583k video only
134 mp4 270x360 30 │ 3.32MiB 380k https │ avc1.4D4014 380k video only 240p, mp4_dash
243 webm 270x360 30 │ ~ 3.53MiB 406k dash │ vp9 406k video only DASH video, webm_dash
135 mp4 360x480 30 │ ~ 10.05MiB 1155k dash │ avc1.4d400b 1155k video only DASH video, mp4_dash
231 mp4 360x480 30 │ ~ 11.43MiB 1313k m3u8 │ avc1.4D400B 1313k video only
244 webm 360x480 30 │ ~ 6.55MiB 753k dash │ vp9 753k video only DASH video, webm_dash
yt-dlp -f 233 -o "%(id)s.%(format_id)s.%(ext)s" "https://youtube.com/watch?v=a28_aXgrgXE"
yt-dlp -f 234 -o "%(id)s.%(format_id)s.%(ext)s" "https://youtube.com/watch?v=a28_aXgrgXE"
yt-dlp -f 139-dash -o "%(id)s.%(format_id)s.%(ext)s" "https://youtube.com/watch?v=a28_aXgrgXE"
yt-dlp -f 139 -o "%(id)s.%(format_id)s.%(ext)s" "https://youtube.com/watch?v=a28_aXgrgXE"
yt-dlp -f 140-dash -o "%(id)s.%(format_id)s.%(ext)s" "https://youtube.com/watch?v=a28_aXgrgXE"
yt-dlp -f 251 -o "%(id)s.%(format_id)s.%(ext)s" "https://youtube.com/watch?v=a28_aXgrgXE"
yt-dlp -f 140 -o "%(id)s.%(format_id)s.%(ext)s" "https://youtube.com/watch?v=a28_aXgrgXE"
This gives me files containing each of the audio formats that were available from YouTube.
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 437246 Oct 9 2013 a28_aXgrgXE.139-dash.m4a
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 437246 Oct 9 2013 a28_aXgrgXE.139.m4a
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 713133 Oct 9 2013 a28_aXgrgXE.140-dash.m4a
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 872935 Oct 9 2013 a28_aXgrgXE.140.m4a
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 441481 Oct 9 2013 a28_aXgrgXE.233.mp4
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 881428 Oct 9 2013 a28_aXgrgXE.234.mp4
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 711273 Jul 22 2019 a28_aXgrgXE.251.webm
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.
This is so raw and human, I love it.
10/10 I saw something real online
The back to back viewing of things going on everywhere around the world, seeing what is important to people moment by moment really makes you appreciate how big the world really is, a reminder that my perspective is quite narrow.
IMG_0416 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42102506 - Nov 2024 (324 comments)
YouTube videos that have almost zero previous views
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20432772 - Jul 2019 (239 comments)
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13413225 - Jan 2017 (140 comments)
I watched a blurry video of a family at the zoo, a father tickling his toddler (who is having an absolute blast), a middle school play rehearsal, some guy's high school class presentation in south africa (I think?), a random indie country band at a bar, lots of terrible dancing... all joyful, no agendas.
There was a thread yesterday about Facebook's little red book and a lot of nostalgia from folks who were there at the time about the optimism across builders then. This was the kind of content that drove that feeling.
Depending on the user, it must be either the coolest thing ever or the creepiest thing ever, with little in between. Kudos to anyone that takes the opportunity and uses it as a reason to kickstart a YouTube career or something.
Regardless, it's always interesting to see, since:
1. It shows you just how big YouTube is, and how few of the videos posted there get any attention at all. The fact there's a huge percentage of the platform viewed by no one is just mind boggling to me.
2. It illustrates how little marketing skill correlates to video editing skill, since there are interesting videos going ignored due to their creator's inability to add a good title or thumbnail or metadata, or which were uploaded on a whim without any of that stuff being taken into account.
YouTube wasn’t always tied so strongly to a Google account, and overall fewer people had Google accounts in the first place.
They still have a page to recover a pre-Google account. It used to be a clearly outdated page with old graphics, now they made it a bit "better".
It's here: https://www.youtube.com/gaia_link
I'm not aware of anything else that has persisted since then. Old email accounts, forums, games - everything is gone now and inaccessible for me.
This is not even getting into the investment companies that buy artist catalogues wholesale, and therefore have a major interest in keeping old songs in constant rotation for the decades to come.
Saying any of it is a meritocracy is pure ignorance.
These videos are wonderful, great execution on the project.
No idea's original, there's nothing new under the sun
It's never what you do, but how it's done What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.I was working on a similar idea a couple of years ago but got hung up on the scraping step after realising google api restrictions were too onerous.
I was trying to come up with a way that would have the videos scraped by the user and then randomised, entirely client side.
I caught him several years ago (on my second attempt: he was supposed to perform at the Grand Ol’ Opry, and I drove 5 hours to see him, but he canceled) but he was clearly running on fumes. Definitely something I wish I’d understood when I was younger: find musical giants and see them live before they’re gone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xmRWj7gJEU
But it's presumably not the same one that you saw, since it doesn't show any signs of being an amateur or mobile device recording, and wouldn't have been crawled for the IMG_0001 site.
Speaking of the theme of that song, and since we were just talking about Borges here in in another thread, compare his story "The Secret Miracle"!
http://secondarylaresources.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/4/7/10473...
It might be a bit difficult for the highly technical HN crowd to grasp how little many people understand technology. Not changing the title is already a big clue. Since it was a feature built-in to a native app, people might have thought their videos would not be public or only shared with friends, and lots of them might not even have understood what they were doing at all.
It might have been "published" to YouTube, but was it really done so with informed consent?
This is unlikely to be a popular opinion here, but mass downloading of IMG_0001 videos is essentially trawling for private data by looking for an identifier of accidentally unsecured private data, akin to searching for "{ apiKey: " in github.
Public by default is just so bad.
Youtube playlists used to default to public and it's ridiculous to realize some personal playlist you've been accumulating is right there on your profile. I think they finally fixed it.
Facebook also bungled massively in this space where just commenting on some embarrassing Facebook group ended up broadcasting it to all of your friends' walls. And you had no way of knowing that until one of your friends told you that your question on "Foreskin restoration support group" showed up on their wall.
You're probably in the top 1% of product/UX designers if you spend just 10 seconds pondering the level of privacy the average user expects as they do things in an app.
With that said, I don't really find this metaphor to be applicable though. If these videos don't have sensitive content — and some may of course do — this is something deeply human, the ability to share experiences with others, which has been lacking in the last years with attention-grabbing social media.
There is endless amounts of coomer content on YouTube like
* Nude yoga
* Body painting
* Nude massages
* Transparent x haul / try on
Heck, that was a time before onlyfans etc, so the primary coomer stuff on Reddit etc was produced by exhibitionists vs people just milking simps
It's like if someone moved to America and said "Oh Thanksgiving? Never heard of it but I looked into it now, and it's a weird holiday based on whitewashing the murder of Native Americans". Technically it's true but you aren't a supporter of that or blind to that fact when you celebrate it with your family, and the insinuations about you from that are likely incorrect.
Got popular during the pandemic, though it predates it
All things in moderation.
There are few, if any, shuttering themselves away from regular social interactions due to an addiction to water or air.
The appearence of doing so because of a porn or more general book compulsion is more commonn.
They’re just what 14-28 year old boys are up to, sans filter algorithms. It’s the whole spectrum.
The internet truly can be a marvelous place.
Thank goodness
I think they consider it punishment for not letting them hold your data, but I find it nice to have to search to get anything.
The ones I see here are the complete opposite, they are so interesting, this might be a total coincidence or maybe the simpler interface changes my perception. You didn't curate them?
I can't help but feel like watching these videos is some kind of breach of privacy, I don't think all these videos were supposed to go to youtube. But then again, someone did press "upload to youtube" on these videos, so I'm torn.
Show HN: If YouTube had actual channels - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41247023 - Sep 2024 (532 comments)
A little off topic.. As I watch these, I have a overwhelming nostalgic feeling for those times. I almost never feel nostalgic for the past, but these videos evoke many personal memories from that time period.
I enjoyed the views counter with the low numbers. It made me feel like me and four other people have shared this moment. When the view counter was zero, that felt very special.
Also got some cute things like a dad giving a piggyback ride, some weightlifting, an amazing dance rehearsal - so very human.
Gives you similarly obscure videos, but without any context or links which makes it feel more ephemeral and random in my view. Have spent many hours down that rabbit hole, makes me feel like I'm watching the interdimensional cable from Rick and Morty
This has likely screwed up all manner of videos, since a vertical resolution doesn't equate to it being designed for a TikTok or Instagram style feed...
Legally compromising material? From watching a YouTube video? Also wouldn't you have this site in your browser history to prove it came from there? And the video has the same title which matches the format of all the videos on this site?
Hard to think of a scenario where this site can get you in trouble tbh
And then in the 5th video that got recommended to me, the language seemed familiar, and sure enough, it's hungarian. IMG 0397, with 18 views.
Now, it's just a simple CSS transform:
document.querySelector("#player").style.webkitTransform = "rotate(90deg)"
Found a video that had zero views, watched to completion, then hit back on next video to return to it. Video still had 0 views.
But honestly - another contender for the "Least informative title on HN" :-\
My take away is this: I took a video of my grandson's birthday party recently using my cellphone. I haven't uploaded or sent it to anyone yet. Has my cell carrier already captured the video without my knowing it? In the corporate world the only privacy that matters to them is their own, not ours.
I've read that digi-cams were making somewhat of a comeback, maybe that's good.
Would be cool if there was an easy way to obtain the link to the actual video and maybe show the original title, description and username.
I guess it did say random
Is that a known iPhone defect?
boxshadow: 0 0 200px rgba(0,0,0,0.9) inset
did it break?
On the contrary including a date in the filename could be perceived as user hostile because none of the multiple iso representations (or non iso) is universally used and understood by the general public.
Eg : 20241112, 1112024, 1211024, 131208, 081213 and so on...
You can't prevent collisions (multiples sources/counter reset/date reset, etc). So it's actually nice to have an unforgiving standard that will bite you if you make unfounded assumptions.