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.
With both video and image-sharing sites, you didn't really expect the site itself to function as a social network that was worth "browsing." Rather, you expected the "front page view" to be an upload view; and from there, to take your uploaded assets and embed them onto a page to put them into proper context. And it's these webpages-that-contextualize-image/video-assets that you'd share links to, on forums and on early social bookmarking platforms (Fark, StumbleUpon, etc.)
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.
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.
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.
IMG_0416 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42102506 - Nov 2024 (324 comments)
What it's like seeing some random seemingly unlisted/unedited clip you posted suddenly get thousands or millions of views from random people online?
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.
What?? Not even close
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.
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).
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.
Being able to detect the middle-point of a fat finger wasn't a 1.0 feature
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:
115.2 mm 58.6 mm 9.3 mm 137 g
130.7 mm 68.9 mm 8.99 mm 145 g
146.7 mm 71.5 mm 7.4 mm 162 g
163.0 × 77.6 × 8.25 mm 227 g
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.
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.
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.