I read this article when it was new and I've shared it with a bunch of people because it it unbelievably fascinating to me.
There's something borderline "voyeuristic" (for want of a better term) about it. There are all these videos that are public, I'm allowed to watch them, but they were clearly not meant for me to watch. It's like when you see a family photo at a Goodwill or something.
It's definitely worth trying out if you get bored; it's a proper time capsule. There's absolutely nothing cynical about it; these videos weren't made for profit, they weren't made to sell you something. They're candid videos of people as they were in ~2010.
There are also creepy videos. I just searched for IMG_ date of my birthday and there is a video of someone recording a dead pig. Nice way to start my day
Sorry you saw that. I have tried a bunch of numbers and everything I saw was pretty innocuous, but I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that there’s gross or disturbing stuff.
> There are all these videos that are public, I'm allowed to watch them, but they were clearly not meant for me to watch.
I disagree. I think most people probably intended them to be public and thought it would be cool if people watched – that was the attitude back then. In the early stages of web 2.0 people who were online would share everything and anything. Social media was public by default and no one really had a problem with it.
It was in the years that followed the launch of the iphone and the mass-adoption of the internet that various incidents caused companies and people to realise they needed to be more careful about what was shared publicly online.
I think the appeal of these videos is that they're authentic and highlight something we've lost today, not that they're "voyeuristic".
Most videos people watch on YouTube today have high production value, even most TikTok creators which show up on the "For You" page are professional content creators. Additionally, this was back in an era where people didn't really care about their public/online persona, and act as such.
It's not just a time capsule... It an alternative reality where people are not overly self-conscious about their image and where the internet is full of real people sharing real and rather mediocre things that are happening in their life, rather than curated moments to serve the advertisement interests of corporations. And it's an alternative reality which existed just 15-20 years ago. These people are not that dissimilar from us, but live in a completely different, far more authentic world.
Yeah that's weird, its like a time capsule seeing all the fashion.
I just tried random numbers and it showed many videos that would only send to your family
On the one hand, this absolutely is a time capsule. It's hard to get something this real and authentic. It is a legitimate snapshot of 2009 - 2012 and probably has no like anywhere else in the world.
On the other hand, do these folks even know? Would they be okay with it?
I suspect Google might close this if it gets enough eyeballs.
I think Archive Team should archive these. It's a fleeting glimpse at a disappearing world, where smartphones were brand new. We won't be able to recover it if it's lost.
I recently stumbled upon a small channel called KVN AUST, who's been making videos about what he calls "YouTube's Recycle Bin". It's about this and SO many other search terms (over a hundred), that turn up videos that have been public for over a decade often without a single view. It's so fascinating to see the random things people have uploaded.
It's stupid that my YT front page is simply empty, because "Your watch history is off", when it could simply be filled with a random selection of videos.
It's worth noting that while these videos may have been unintentional, this was also an era when youtube was still inventing itself. Sure, there was real content creation, but the structures of sponsors and ad revenue that can be a real income today weren't there. Let's plays were just starting to dominate the platform, and people were still figuring out how to make money off of that.
As a result, there was a lot of this type of content: barely edited, poorly performed, honest moments of real life, amateurish creations of any kind, be that digital animation, music, acting, etc. I feel these IMG_xxxx videos reflect some of the vibe of the era. Now, sharing videos with people is easy enough in group chats, and youtube content feels so manufactured that people feel it's less appropriate to share this sort of thing via youtube.
Yeah, the _reason_ this was in the iPhone is that YouTube was a normal and reasonable (if unusual - because sharing videos online was unusual) way to share videos with friends and family. And people cared way less about privacy back then.
I love wondering if and how this kind of "Wild West frontier" in technology and communication and social interaction will ever come again:
Say we colonize Mars. Streaming anything from Earth takes hours (well 3-22 light minutes). Martians may invent their own planetary social network and share their own weird Martian memes for a while.
Or interstellar colony ships traveling for decades between the stars, and then practically cut off from Earth at whatever new exoplanet we land on.
There will definitely be lots of "golden eras of creativity" still to come, if we survive that long.
Mars' gravity is only 38% of Earth so I think quite a few would be crazy feats of strength or odd trajectories of objects. At least they would be if I were making them.
Any time someone carves out a new space online, the same sort of thing happens. Pioneers create infrastructure. Early adopters rush to explore the new medium. New possibilities or new constraints spur creativity. Then, usually one of two things happens: the new space was a brief fad, and it dies away; or the masses arrive and it undergoes an eternal September, standardization, commercialization, enshittification, drama… in other words, becomes integrated into the wider net. Those fed up leave and begin to carve out a new space…
Some initiatives (like the Gemini Protocol) remain (for now) in a tenuous niche where mass adoption seems impossible and yet they also don’t seem to be going away.
I've always wondered what the people in these videos/making these videos think of this extra traffic from articles, sites and subreddits like this. Do they ever randomly go on YouTube, then freak out when they see a ton of notifications from people they don't know? Are there people involved here who see the popularity of some random clip, realise there's a business/channel opportunity involved and go all in with it?
What it's like seeing some random seemingly unlisted/unedited clip you posted suddenly get thousands or millions of views from random people online?
It's 19 years since the iPhone came out, that's almost two decades. 19 years before the iPhone was 1988. Things from 1988 definitely seemed dated in 2007. In fact I think style/aesthetics change is now getting slower and slower. Anything within the last 10 years looks like it could have been made today, since the image resolution / quality doesn't significantly change in such an obvious way. Throughout the 90s and 00s, it felt like things were constantly changing year to year. Totally different mindblowing graphics in games in each release, new OS features, digital cameras, cell phones (at all), then color screens on dumbphones, PDA, smartphone etc. etc., any Internet at all, then broadband etc. It subjectively felt much more rapid than today. The only exception is AI today, but even that is a different feel.
I think the tells of AI video are becoming more subtle, similar to language. It's no longer so much that the visuals are categorically impossible, such as mangled hands or impossible geometric arrangements of objects, but you can still see style and composition that is more frequent in AI video (but could be possible in a real video as well in principle).
Such as higher production quality, too beautiful people, a kind of stock photo sheen, etc. Of course if you use special LoRAs or prompts and input images, it's possible to leave the stock footage style, but most people don't bother with it, just like most people use stock ChatGPT in its default voice with its favorite trope-filled cadence etc.
iOS 7 really changed the game on the iOS aesthetic. We probably would've had more refined skeuomorphism had that re-design not been as aggressive as it was.
Of course not. It's actually way simpler: smartphones became taller and heavier and you no longer can use it with one hand anymore even if you are 2m tall man. So the main mode of interaction changed to a two-hand mode and one-hand is relegated for the doom scrolling, selfies and quick replies.
Hell, my Moto has a special one-handed mode!
>> Use one-handed mode
>> Want to use one thumb to navigate your phone? Turn on One-handed mode.
>> This mode is only available if you're using Gesture navigation.
Yeah in comparison OSX Mountain Lion or Windows 8 look basically the same as the modern desktop OSes, while mobile releases from that era look totally different. I suppose it had only been 5 years since the release of the iPhone so there was still a lot of experimentation
I read this article when it was new and I've shared it with a bunch of people because it it unbelievably fascinating to me.
There's something borderline "voyeuristic" (for want of a better term) about it. There are all these videos that are public, I'm allowed to watch them, but they were clearly not meant for me to watch. It's like when you see a family photo at a Goodwill or something.
It's definitely worth trying out if you get bored; it's a proper time capsule. There's absolutely nothing cynical about it; these videos weren't made for profit, they weren't made to sell you something. They're candid videos of people as they were in ~2010.
There are also creepy videos. I just searched for IMG_ date of my birthday and there is a video of someone recording a dead pig. Nice way to start my day
Sorry you saw that. I have tried a bunch of numbers and everything I saw was pretty innocuous, but I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that there’s gross or disturbing stuff.
> There are all these videos that are public, I'm allowed to watch them, but they were clearly not meant for me to watch.
I disagree. I think most people probably intended them to be public and thought it would be cool if people watched – that was the attitude back then. In the early stages of web 2.0 people who were online would share everything and anything. Social media was public by default and no one really had a problem with it.
It was in the years that followed the launch of the iphone and the mass-adoption of the internet that various incidents caused companies and people to realise they needed to be more careful about what was shared publicly online.
I think the appeal of these videos is that they're authentic and highlight something we've lost today, not that they're "voyeuristic".
Most videos people watch on YouTube today have high production value, even most TikTok creators which show up on the "For You" page are professional content creators. Additionally, this was back in an era where people didn't really care about their public/online persona, and act as such.
It's not just a time capsule... It an alternative reality where people are not overly self-conscious about their image and where the internet is full of real people sharing real and rather mediocre things that are happening in their life, rather than curated moments to serve the advertisement interests of corporations. And it's an alternative reality which existed just 15-20 years ago. These people are not that dissimilar from us, but live in a completely different, far more authentic world.
Yeah that's weird, its like a time capsule seeing all the fashion. I just tried random numbers and it showed many videos that would only send to your family
Should archive team get on this?
On the one hand, this absolutely is a time capsule. It's hard to get something this real and authentic. It is a legitimate snapshot of 2009 - 2012 and probably has no like anywhere else in the world.
On the other hand, do these folks even know? Would they be okay with it?
I suspect Google might close this if it gets enough eyeballs.
I think Archive Team should archive these. It's a fleeting glimpse at a disappearing world, where smartphones were brand new. We won't be able to recover it if it's lost.
I recently stumbled upon a small channel called KVN AUST, who's been making videos about what he calls "YouTube's Recycle Bin". It's about this and SO many other search terms (over a hundred), that turn up videos that have been public for over a decade often without a single view. It's so fascinating to see the random things people have uploaded.
It's stupid that my YT front page is simply empty, because "Your watch history is off", when it could simply be filled with a random selection of videos.
Stupid for us, but I bet people enable it just to get the empty page to go away.
It's worth noting that while these videos may have been unintentional, this was also an era when youtube was still inventing itself. Sure, there was real content creation, but the structures of sponsors and ad revenue that can be a real income today weren't there. Let's plays were just starting to dominate the platform, and people were still figuring out how to make money off of that.
As a result, there was a lot of this type of content: barely edited, poorly performed, honest moments of real life, amateurish creations of any kind, be that digital animation, music, acting, etc. I feel these IMG_xxxx videos reflect some of the vibe of the era. Now, sharing videos with people is easy enough in group chats, and youtube content feels so manufactured that people feel it's less appropriate to share this sort of thing via youtube.
Yeah, the _reason_ this was in the iPhone is that YouTube was a normal and reasonable (if unusual - because sharing videos online was unusual) way to share videos with friends and family. And people cared way less about privacy back then.
I love wondering if and how this kind of "Wild West frontier" in technology and communication and social interaction will ever come again:
Say we colonize Mars. Streaming anything from Earth takes hours (well 3-22 light minutes). Martians may invent their own planetary social network and share their own weird Martian memes for a while.
Or interstellar colony ships traveling for decades between the stars, and then practically cut off from Earth at whatever new exoplanet we land on.
There will definitely be lots of "golden eras of creativity" still to come, if we survive that long.
Mars' gravity is only 38% of Earth so I think quite a few would be crazy feats of strength or odd trajectories of objects. At least they would be if I were making them.
I would like, subscribe and hit the bell icon
I bet I could throw a football a quarter mile... ;)
Any time someone carves out a new space online, the same sort of thing happens. Pioneers create infrastructure. Early adopters rush to explore the new medium. New possibilities or new constraints spur creativity. Then, usually one of two things happens: the new space was a brief fad, and it dies away; or the masses arrive and it undergoes an eternal September, standardization, commercialization, enshittification, drama… in other words, becomes integrated into the wider net. Those fed up leave and begin to carve out a new space…
Some initiatives (like the Gemini Protocol) remain (for now) in a tenuous niche where mass adoption seems impossible and yet they also don’t seem to be going away.
Previously...
IMG_0416 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42102506 - Nov 2024 (324 comments)
Then, one month later, IMG_0001 (based on IMG_0416) followed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42314547
If you haven't seen http://astronaut.io/ its this but in a great form factor.
I wrote this article, and this is like the 4th time it's blown up on HN https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fv...
I've always wondered what the people in these videos/making these videos think of this extra traffic from articles, sites and subreddits like this. Do they ever randomly go on YouTube, then freak out when they see a ton of notifications from people they don't know? Are there people involved here who see the popularity of some random clip, realise there's a business/channel opportunity involved and go all in with it?
What it's like seeing some random seemingly unlisted/unedited clip you posted suddenly get thousands or millions of views from random people online?
I absolutely love to watch random stuff but not random stuff that youtube wants me to watch. This feels like a hole in the matrix.
See also: https://walzr.com/IMG_0001/
Wonderful. I love that you can just let it play and it will continue with the next video. This is really magical to me. Thanks for sharing.
WOW simply lovely
there used to be https://default-filename-tv.neocities.org/ but it got taken down :/
It’s wild how antique the iPhone interface design looks. It’s not THAT old.
It's 19 years since the iPhone came out, that's almost two decades. 19 years before the iPhone was 1988. Things from 1988 definitely seemed dated in 2007. In fact I think style/aesthetics change is now getting slower and slower. Anything within the last 10 years looks like it could have been made today, since the image resolution / quality doesn't significantly change in such an obvious way. Throughout the 90s and 00s, it felt like things were constantly changing year to year. Totally different mindblowing graphics in games in each release, new OS features, digital cameras, cell phones (at all), then color screens on dumbphones, PDA, smartphone etc. etc., any Internet at all, then broadband etc. It subjectively felt much more rapid than today. The only exception is AI today, but even that is a different feel.
The rate at which AI is accelerating seems the same as other big inventions.
Some examples:
- Tim invented the WWW in 1989, but I'd took until around 2000 (10 years) to go to the web we now know with Streaming and Social Media.
- The first big mobile success (Nokia 3310) was in 2000, the 'end-stage' phone (iPhone 5 or something) was also 10 years later.
- Google Deepdream was in 2016, to "Will Smith eating spaghetti" in 2023, to now AI generated video literally unrecognisable from real.
I think we will be seeing some 'end-stage' AI in the next 5 years too, where the rate of improvements will sharply drop.
Robotics will probably be next? First company that can create an all purpose robot.
My point was more about how dated something feels, how much it esthetically feels like a different dusty era.
>AI generated video literally unrecognisable from real.
What?? Not even close
You may be thinking of video you saw generated last month.
I think the tells of AI video are becoming more subtle, similar to language. It's no longer so much that the visuals are categorically impossible, such as mangled hands or impossible geometric arrangements of objects, but you can still see style and composition that is more frequent in AI video (but could be possible in a real video as well in principle).
Such as higher production quality, too beautiful people, a kind of stock photo sheen, etc. Of course if you use special LoRAs or prompts and input images, it's possible to leave the stock footage style, but most people don't bother with it, just like most people use stock ChatGPT in its default voice with its favorite trope-filled cadence etc.
It looked old when it was fresh already.
When it comes to iPhones, iPhone 4 and iOS 7 were the first ones that looked modern and pleasant (don't confuse aesthetics with UX though).
iOS 7 really changed the game on the iOS aesthetic. We probably would've had more refined skeuomorphism had that re-design not been as aggressive as it was.
It seems our fingers have gotten thinner, or more skillful at tapping at relatively tinier buttons now. Look at how huge those buttons are.
I am aware screen size has increased tremendously, even then I think the buttons were still quite huge compared to the size of today's tappable links.
The models detecting touch has become better and the touch grid has become both higher resolution and more reliable.
Being able to detect the middle-point of a fat finger wasn't a 1.0 feature
> It seems our fingers have gotten thinner
Of course not. It's actually way simpler: smartphones became taller and heavier and you no longer can use it with one hand anymore even if you are 2m tall man. So the main mode of interaction changed to a two-hand mode and one-hand is relegated for the doom scrolling, selfies and quick replies.
Hell, my Moto has a special one-handed mode!
>> Use one-handed mode
>> Want to use one thumb to navigate your phone? Turn on One-handed mode.
>> This mode is only available if you're using Gesture navigation.
https://en-us.support.motorola.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1...
Trivia game: try to guess to which smartphone these dimensions belongs to:
Just curious: why your otherwise neatly formatted table uses a different format for the last row?
This question should be addressed to Wikipedia from where I copied the data.
As an aside - I am a slightly under 2m tall man and I still use my phone with one hand. I still use a 7” tablet with one hand as well.
Yeah in comparison OSX Mountain Lion or Windows 8 look basically the same as the modern desktop OSes, while mobile releases from that era look totally different. I suppose it had only been 5 years since the release of the iPhone so there was still a lot of experimentation
It looks better with actual buttons that are easy to read and tap.
this is outstanding.
lol