YouTube was launched as a dating site
web.archive.org
web.archive.org
Here's a little more info. They changed it to a general purpose video site after 5 days after nobody uploaded any videos although they offered 20 USD to each woman for uploading a self-introduction video.
So technically speaking, someone did upload something. And 5 days is actually really 5 days...
Which brings the question - what is the second oldest YouTube video still on the site? Who is the “also ran”?
Wow, the level of spammy comments on that one is perpetual.
73m views / 15 years = 5.2m views/year
=$5.2k/year - $52k/year.
Turn off Adblock and see if an ad plays.
Then putting them on cards on their search engine, triggering a gazillion unsuccessful antitrust lawsuits, only to see they all still aren‘t used.
Then shelving half of them 5 years later and killing all the content forever.
Looking at what people were uploading and what people were watching leaves me feeling a bit wistful. It seems like it was a more authentic place before the money caught up with it.
Isn't that the way it always goes? I wish there were some way of permanently locking Wall Street out of the picture so we could actually have some nice things.
There will always be a large number of lower effort mods, it is easy to retexture or cut parts of existing armors then building new ones from scratch.
The main issue I see with some modding communities is the big egos of some people that leads to terms of use like "don't share this, this mod should not be shared on as different website" , it will make it kind of illegal then when the specified website will no longer exists to archive and move the mods or to create mod packs.
But obviously it depends on what games you're interested in seeing mods and fan projects of. The vast majority of the Mario/Zelda/Sonic/Metroid/Mega Man fan game and game mod/hack scene is basically entirely new games built on the original series' engine.
Some of the stuff you see there is crazy, arguably on par with many of the more well funded open source software found online. Like that project which adds online multiplayer to Super Mario 64, the mods which add MP3 music to SNES games, a Metroid mod which remade Metroid Fusion in Super Metroid with all the original content and an even smarter version of the SA-X hunting you down. Or perhaps Wiimmfi, which basically replaced all of Nintendo's online services for the DS and Wii, then significantly expanded on them with extra features and modes.
It's kind of insane how technically advanced much of this stuff can be, given it's all made by hobbyists in their free time with no hope of ever getting paid.
It's out there, but a lot of people generally consider the free/libre stuff "lower quality," which is often a fair accusation.
And then Red Hat[0] happened, and it all went to hell, like everything else Wall Street touches.
0: et many al, but they're the most visible culprits due to things like wayland and systemd.
The reality is that Hacker News is a generally high quality technical forum and that's the reason a lot of people are here.
That's a pretty good question though?
Its youtube videos with zero or very few views.
By the way, if a lobsters user is reading this, I would love an invite :)
(was: Provide me with a way to contact you and I will.)
[removed email]
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[at]<removed>
One of its continued strengths is the number of useful or deep articles in tech combined with a high number of people in the community that write them. The audience is pretty passive. We have some people who steadily have good insights and submissions on specific topics. Then, there are some that show up out of nowhere with whopper comments you won't find in other places. They avoid high-traffic/noise sites like HN. So, you only see them on places like that. So, I read both the orange and red sites. :)
As always, hope u got 10bux...
"Best of the Web" since 1999
A broad set of interests are represented there, not just programming or technology focused. The submission quality is high, and it is well moderated.
MetaFilter has always had a pretty strong community. The addition of a $5 membership fee, similar to SomethingAwful, seems to have helped filter out the riff raff.
There's also an "ask" section, and ones for projects and music. Overall, it's a good community for general discussion of things happening on and offline.
https://beta.washingtonpost.com/national/puerto-rico-has-tur...
Tildes is a nice place as well.
signal: noise is a thing.
And while we're at it, I also want to get rid of the advertising that came chasing after these people.
We can't pretend that Google, Youtube, etc could have continued indefinitely in their original forms without ever having to become profitable, or having to make any compromises.
Your mailbox? Likely stuffed with junk.
Your inbox? Likely stuffed with junk, or if it's not, make sure to check your spambox in case someone real is trying to contact you.
Your phone? Nobody answers calls because they're mostly telemarketers.
SMS? Yeah that's spammed to hell too.
Walls? Covered in billboards, in a tacky Red Queen race that nobody actually wins.
Public space? Nobody talks to each other in part because people who appear friendly are often trying to sell you something.
"A compellingly written and highly original study of the practices of the early-adopter video blogging community. This essential study will change the ways in which we think about past, present and future online creative communities and digital platforms."
http://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/tod-27-videoblog...
Surreal. I was on YouTube several times a day every day throughout 2006. YouTube used to actually be relatively static and unchanging, the top videos in the afternoon might have been roughly the same as in the morning.
I’m not just recognizing individual videos, I’m recognizing entire pages, down to video placements in the sorting order, seeing videos I actually clicked on and watched, maybe even gave one of like 51 star ratings to.
For some reason, it never occurred to me to look at YouTube in the Wayback Machine. On my phone right now, I can’t load any of the videos anyway for lack of a browser plug-in which around that time was basically Macromedia Flash 8 or something. Actually Macromedia might not have even been acquired by Adobe yet, or else the acquisition had just been recently announced. Either way it was Macromedia up until Adobe Flash 9.
I don’t know if I’ll be able to play any of the videos on a laptop, but I bookmarked a few familiar looking pages to try later.
https://web.archive.org/web/20061208100700/http://www.youtub...
Grab the 'v' parameter and paste it into a modern youtube video URL:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2W-14qlnQWI
and watch Converse Hands Man in modern youtube glory.
You might be surprised which giant corporations have given up on all the framework hype and language tribalism and actually allow their web devs to build sites by hand with care.
I'm thinking of one particular multi-billion dollar company, but there are a number of others.
Sometimes sanity wins.
The use of a framework/library does not preclude handcrafting.
But it certainly is a gray area.
But if a program generates something, and then just directly serves the result, it is certainly not hand-crafted.
The distinction comes down to whether the final result is something a human signed off on and took responsibility for, or whether it’s just the result of blind rule-following.
In this specific case, the hand crafted HTML that I've come across in my lifetime is usually absolute garbage. I can normally see how the developer who wrote it thinks they're being clever or nifty, and dare I say it "clean", but it usually falls short and causes more harm than good.
So imagine we as an industry organically build tools to address this. 10 years later it's pretty good, but like 5 major websites still handcraft things because they have complicated user experiences with a broad user base.
We then get dork heads who see this, believe they're part of the exception, despite not having anything remotely close to the userbase or requirements of these websites, refuse to understand why certain things are the way they are, and think they're above these processes and frameworks despite not having invested any real time or effort into the skills necessary to justify not using these frameworks or fabricated HTML.
And the worst part is it's just HTML. And we still get it wrong.
TL;DR Programmers think they're better than they really are. Use the frameworks.
I've never yet see anyone argue that the reason tools took over the writing of HTML is because hand-written HTML wasn't good enough.
The one where I don't value bespoke development just because it's bespoke?
The universe where I have to actually quantify what's good and what isn't?
The worst kind of comments related to this discussion are always the ones that are insufferably offended that they can't out perform decades of experience and knowledge without doing anything.
>I've never yet see anyone argue that the reason tools took over the writing of HTML is because hand-written HTML wasn't good enough.
Check who you're listening to? It's a fairly common argument.
I'm not insufferably offended by what you think I can or can't do (I couldn't care less) I just honestly can't fathom, after 20 years of looking at HTML produced by hand and by tools, how anyone could think the tools produce better markup if you're actually talking about inherent quality of the end result. Cheaper and faster, maybe, with a lower learning curve, sure, but better? I don't buy it.
But I was actually thinking of a different company. I'd forgotten about Apple.
(Another fun one, braeburncapital.com used to work as apple.com for a bit—I think even longer than next.com.)
The word "vanilla" is used here as an adjective to describe something that is "lacking distinction: plain, ordinary, or conventional" [0].
As such, the joke is that Vanilla JS is being presented as some amazing new framework, but it isn't anything more than regular JS that you would write. In a sense, it's the anti-JS framework, requiring no additional scripts or dependencies.
This is deliberate. Warren Buffet was vocally anti-dot-com boom (and bust) and their site continues to follow a minimalist philosophy to this day.
How would you avoid "inpiduals" (and similar mistakes) in other editors?
Since the “word” in question is “<div>”, I thought the \< was just an escape. I looked in various docs and the best I see in Tcl re_syntax(n) is \< and \> are synonyms for [[:<:]] and [[:>:]] respectively, which are constraints matching empty strings at the beginning and end of words, where a word a sequence of word characters... [a-zA-Z0-9_]
TIL, too...
In Vim I would do
:%s@\(</\?\)div@\1p@g
The term "creationists" was changed to "design proponents", but in one case the beginning and end of the original word "creationists" were accidentally retained, so that "creationists" became "cdesign proponentsists". ... the proof that intelligent design was creationism re-labeled played a significant part in the Kitzmiller trial, and "cdesign proponentsists" has been described as "the missing link between creationism and intelligent design."
Back when Comcast was promoting itself as having "The most on demand video! More than insert market competitor here!" it included in that "most" count each of the three-minute profile clips from its horribly lame video dating service.
Distilled, AT&T (for example) would offer six full-length movies on demand, while Comcast had 12 three-minute dating video clips, allowing it to claim "twice as much" on-demand content.
https://web.archive.org/web/19991023065011/https://www.hulu....
Wonder how much they sold the domain for.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/19991127081047/http://ovh.fr/
https://web.archive.org/web/20161022104434/http://www.steam....
> YouTube is the first online community site that allows members to post and share personal videos.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20050428171556/http://www.youtub...
Everyone wanted and insisted to have this, despite it was very inconvenient to build with pieces of images and tables.
Sigh indeed.
Instead they went for G+. The rest, as they say, is history.
Not burned out in terms of profit opportunities though - FB has $60bn revenue, capturing even 10% of that pie can justify an investment of thousands of person-years...
Both sides' users rejected that.
Should have tried to get funding, but had no idea what I was doing.
But yea, I totally believe YouTube spent a few years as soft porn and piracy (which they clearly tolerated for eyeballs).
2) Does anyone know what caused the shift from Video Dating to just Video?
Check the link, it shows quite well.
Also, I think dating sites are a bit "a market for lemons".
Put more concretely, because different people have different dating preferences, one person's lemon can be another person's peach.
In addition, a market for lemons usually requires a seller to be able to determine the value of goods while the buyer can't. On dating sites, both the user and the site itself are trying to "sell" that person to prospective matches. Neither of those parties has all that much better of a way to determine a person's match-ability, so there's not all that much asymmetry. I suppose the site does know a little more based on history, but I don't think that's necessarily enough.
I do think dating sites are pretty garbage, but I don't think it's due to the phenomenon described by "a market for lemons", but rather due to multiple other factors.
WRT. lemons, I was thinking primarily about the aspect that the most desirable people disappear from these sites first. Sure people have different dating preferences, but they're correlated, not uniformly random. I believe that, while there may not be a total order of people that's the same for everyone, there is some rough order that would be acceptable to most, and the closer to "best" end in that order a person is, the shorter they're likely to stay on a dating site.
That's a nice way of looking at the world, and of course it's true sometimes.
But...hasn't all the data coming out of dating sites kind of proved the opposite? Especially for men, something like the top 10-20% are getting basically all the matches and messages.
Well, the person posting their height/weight/photo knows whether it's accurate or not, whereas the person reading it doesn't; that's your asymmetry right there.
Are you saying that short people should lie about their height and hope they can convince someone who's met them to change their affectational preference? "Conversion therapy" doesn't work. If someone is only attracted to tall people, you can't change them.
Actor Bryan Cranston used to work in one of those agencies https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsEPGc72Iuk
Oh no, I have to go take down a few videos...
I didn't know youtube's first version was written in php.
#yt-masthead #logo-container { margin-right: 20px; }
is a hacky fix.
They appear to be using position:absolute to get cheap vertical alignment to put the GB at the top, but it removes from the flow and so gets overlaid. "vertical-align:top" works, it seems, so I'm curious why they've not used that instead?