Hey, OP here! This is my first ever HN post- I appreciate the warm reception.
A couple hours after posting this on my site, I found this incredible vid of a woman telling her partner she’s pregnant. Incredibly heartfelt, and only 16 views https://youtu.be/refKFdcojlE?si=l-PssLVYmmOPjjjA
It was posted over 10 years ago. I wonder if the family even knows that this video still exists.
I was going to explain the way i saw it, but i erased it and decided it's probably best not to give my thoughts in case he or someone in his life came across the comments out of respect.
/r/DeepIntoYouTube addict here. There are a lot of patterns like this you can use to find bizarre YouTube videos with next to no views, based upon the default numbering scheme of various cameras. Just one example: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=MVI_7812.MOV .. and yes, you can rattle through thousands of numbers for just that one.
I love the rawness of this. I've noticed I tend towards a feeling of everyone else in the world being so alien, living some totally different incomprehensible life from mine. (Or more than I'm the alien, and everyone else is living a normal, enviable life.) Seeing little snapshots like these, most of them seemingly just for memory's sake, makes me feel a little more human. Hard to get on any social media, where there's also some curation going on.
> I've noticed I tend towards a feeling of everyone else in the world being so alien, living some totally different incomprehensible life from mine. (Or more than I'm the alien, and everyone else is living a normal, enviable life.)
Same.
> Seeing little snapshots like these, most of them seemingly just for memory's sake, makes me feel a little more human.
For me these videos only highlight the previously mentioned state of affairs.
Twitter used to have an app, Periscope. You could start a livestream any time, anywhere. And viewers could fine live streams on a world map.
For a few months, it was possible to feel the incredible simultaneity and richness of human lives. Someone biking, another person cooking. Day in one place, night in another place.
It was ahead of its time. And too expensive for Twitter to keep running for too long. But it was a precursor to today's Snapschat's map view and Instagram live streams.
And before that, there was Bambuser which was very similar to Periscope but launched some 8 years earlier. It never gained the popularity of Periscope, likely at least partly due to its Nordic rather than Bay Area roots - but, oh boy, was it fun!
At any time of the day you could go to the website and watch normal people around the globe doing random stuff. And chat with them!There weren't any real influencers at the time (at least not on the platform) and monetization wasn't possible, so people's motivations for live streaming stuff was not to make money but rather the joy of sharing a moment or just experiencing new cool technology. It got a bit less joyful when the Arabic Spring started and the platform got used by many in very dire situations but it remained incredibly interesting to follow.
The company still exists, though they stopped offering free-to-use consumer services long ago.
> YouTube automatically removes harmful or violent content, so what remains exists in a unique, almost paradoxical state: forbidden, yet harmless.
What exactly is forbidden, by who? I don't get the use of that word there.
Also, anyone who doesn't know the "before" and "after" search operators is missing out on some excellent nostalgia-trawling similar to what is described here.
"cat before:2007" -> 2005 to 2007, the OG cat videos
"skateboard before:2010" -> yes
"assange interview before:2016" -> then filter for longer videos
"parkour after:2009 before:2015" -> parkour videos from 2009 to 2015
Hey! My intention with this sentence is to say that although the content is publicly available, the viewer may feel like they're still "not allowed" to be watching it.
Others in the comments articulated this better than me:
> I understand that these videos were made public, but still this kinda feels like violating people’s privacy. They most likely never intended for us all to watch their personal videos a decade later.
I tried to distill it in a couple words in the blog, bc I didn't want to harp on it. In retrospect, I could've explained it better.
Thanks for this, a few months ago I was trying to find an old video but it was impossible to find with regular queries, there's just too much SEO garbage recently added to YouTube.
From my notes. Maybe it's useful to someone. Not comprehensive as there are other brands and other iterations I'm sure. Many dpreview.com sample galleries show original filenames. Some forums list filenames, youtube descriptions can list model names, pdf manuals and manufacturer websites sometimes list the names. There isn't really a good list of these that I know of.
What annoys me is that when a video is split into multiple files (because of sd card limitations etc), it increases the first number, giving you files that sort really weird. So I film GX010001.mp4, then after 8 minutes it starts a new file GX020001.mp4, GX030001.mp4 etc., and then later that day when I make a new clip, it has GX010002.mp4. This breaks sorting by filename. Can sort by creationdate, but for the chaptered videos they often share the same original datetime as well, making it quite confusing when dealing with loads of gopro videos. (I just published some tooling I've written for creating street view content from gopros, so felt all the quirks lately https://github.com/Matsemann/matsemanns-streetview-tools/ the gopro max starts with GS btw)
Yeah it’s infuriating. I’m using this tool mp4-merge them which afaik preserves almost pretty much all metadata / tracks. What I do in a bash script is: Find all groups of mp4 files that share same last 4 digits, pass those to mp4_merge, do a ‘touch -r’ to update timestamp of merged file to first file in batch. Has been working great so far.
In my notes the Sony section was listed Sony / Nikon, but there was non-Nikon pattern in there and I removed the Nikon label to reduce inconsistency. Then I didn't update the Nikon section to include the other pattern. :) Should be fixed now. If you notice anything else, let me know!
Very heartwarming. I have an "android named" video uploaded to YouTube a few years ago, and because there is copyrighted background music going on (which I didn't realize at the time) YouTube is threatening to delete it. I don't know if they will or not, not sure when they put the "will delete" tag on it.
My late wife is in it. She died recently. I didn't know that video was still up there until I read your post. And now my heart breaks.
If you remember the account details to log in to the account which uploaded that video, you can go to https://studio.youtube.com, click "Content", and under the 3-dot menu for each video you can click "Download" to get Youtube's copy of your video.
YouTube now has a new feature to replace copyrighted background soundtracks with free ones automatically, using some AI magic to edit the movie while preserving views, links, likes, etc.
Very nice feature, though I haven’t used it myself to say if it works as labeled. It should be an option now when you get a violation warning.
In about 2007 or so my brother and I used to find super obscure blogs with no comments, read them and then write detailed responses to the author and share it with our friends. We always kept it positive, and said encouraging things. Most of the time the posts had been written in the 90s or early 2000s. We just did it knowing that probably one or two people would get notified of a new comment and maybe feel happy that someone read their post.
Readit News
A couple hours after posting this on my site, I found this incredible vid of a woman telling her partner she’s pregnant. Incredibly heartfelt, and only 16 views https://youtu.be/refKFdcojlE?si=l-PssLVYmmOPjjjA
It was posted over 10 years ago. I wonder if the family even knows that this video still exists.
That kid will be 10 soon.
Same.
> Seeing little snapshots like these, most of them seemingly just for memory's sake, makes me feel a little more human.
For me these videos only highlight the previously mentioned state of affairs.
For a few months, it was possible to feel the incredible simultaneity and richness of human lives. Someone biking, another person cooking. Day in one place, night in another place.
It was ahead of its time. And too expensive for Twitter to keep running for too long. But it was a precursor to today's Snapschat's map view and Instagram live streams.
At any time of the day you could go to the website and watch normal people around the globe doing random stuff. And chat with them!There weren't any real influencers at the time (at least not on the platform) and monetization wasn't possible, so people's motivations for live streaming stuff was not to make money but rather the joy of sharing a moment or just experiencing new cool technology. It got a bit less joyful when the Arabic Spring started and the platform got used by many in very dire situations but it remained incredibly interesting to follow.
The company still exists, though they stopped offering free-to-use consumer services long ago.
Dead Comment
What exactly is forbidden, by who? I don't get the use of that word there.
Also, anyone who doesn't know the "before" and "after" search operators is missing out on some excellent nostalgia-trawling similar to what is described here.
Others in the comments articulated this better than me: > I understand that these videos were made public, but still this kinda feels like violating people’s privacy. They most likely never intended for us all to watch their personal videos a decade later.
I tried to distill it in a couple words in the blog, bc I didn't want to harp on it. In retrospect, I could've explained it better.
It was discovered recently with Flux that using just IMG_1234.jpg as a prompt gives you a very casual photo like images.
https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1fxkt3p/co...
https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1fxdm1n/i_...
What annoys me is that when a video is split into multiple files (because of sd card limitations etc), it increases the first number, giving you files that sort really weird. So I film GX010001.mp4, then after 8 minutes it starts a new file GX020001.mp4, GX030001.mp4 etc., and then later that day when I make a new clip, it has GX010002.mp4. This breaks sorting by filename. Can sort by creationdate, but for the chaptered videos they often share the same original datetime as well, making it quite confusing when dealing with loads of gopro videos. (I just published some tooling I've written for creating street view content from gopros, so felt all the quirks lately https://github.com/Matsemann/matsemanns-streetview-tools/ the gopro max starts with GS btw)
https://github.com/gyroflow/mp4-merge
Deleted Comment
My late wife is in it. She died recently. I didn't know that video was still up there until I read your post. And now my heart breaks.
Hoping that helps. Otherwise, you might try something like https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp.
Very nice feature, though I haven’t used it myself to say if it works as labeled. It should be an option now when you get a violation warning.
Ever get a good response back?
I have been surprised a time or two ending up in a conversation with someone who took the time same as I did. Just because we could.
But still, plenty of blog posts from early 2000s to comment on in 2007, especially on the likes of LiveJournal or Blogger.
I wonder what keywords or tricks I might use to find such blogs in the current days.