Show HN: YouTube Decade – The most-viewed videos posted 10 years ago | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: YouTube Decade – The most-viewed videos posted 10 years ago

youtubedecade.netlify.com

168 pointsbennettfeely38 comments

Woah. Great idea, so many interesting things to explore. I'm surprised there's no comment yet about the video titled "The most dangerous Barack Obama video ever!!!". It's such an obvious precursor for what the internet would be come. I was genuinely shocked that it had 10,000,000+ views.

Preserved in a screenshot:

https://i.imgur.com/mnerRgk.jpg

Also in that screenshot is a video from the UKF Dubstep channel.

23.4M views. Is that the number of views now or the number of views ten years ago?

Probably now, I doubt they could get that kind of historical data.

Unreal. Front page: 6.9M people[1] watched a video of a small dog trying to mate with a cat. The cat wasn't interested but showed surprising forbearance.

[1] OK, yes, I know, it's 6.9M views, and probably some people watched it multiple, so it's probably 2 - 3M people, but that's still a lot of people watching a dog mating with a cat.

I thought YT counted multiple viewings from the same person as a single view. Or it would be too easy to game. I at least imagine there would be a time cutoff before it considered counting a new view from the same person.

There are videos with billions of views, I doubt that much fraction of the planet saw them.

I imagine it would horrible performance-wise. You would need to store list of browser fingerprints and check it on every view.

I think youtube does a bit of checking on views. The view counter is not real, IIRC the delay is due to asynchronous processing, youtube has time to do stuff in some cases. That's why a lot of videos are stuck at 320 views, that's the supposed limit above which the counting goes async and you get lots of vid with false views.

No, if a single person watches more than once it is counted as multiple views. For the video creator, you can see a metric called "Unique Viewers" and see your "Average Views per Viewer" number which helps you see if people are watching multiple times.

All that being said, I do think there is some detention of fake views, especially if they come from the uploader themselves.

Spider cat. I watched the Simpson movie with my first girl friend. She hated it, I loved it. Heck, am I getting old...

Same for me!

First girlfriend. Opposite opinions of the movie.

We broke up soon after.

I did the same.Wanted to watch it so bad..Fell asleep 15 min into the movie...

This is neat, I tried to make a video series a while ago where I compared and contrasted what was in the front page of YouTube 10 years ago. This would have been super helpful for that. But I was shocked with how much of the stuff from back then on that site is just gone.

Me and a mate have a playlist of stuff to watch when we get together and drink beers. I keep meaning to track/archive it because give it a month and there'll be 2 or 3 out of ~20 videos deleted. The decay is immense.

Are you familiar with youtube-dl? It can download an entire public playlist - ignoring videos previously downloaded - and easy to run it on a schedule.

What is happening at youtube? Do they delete old content? Only storing a single copy for old content and the disks are dying?

I made a video using YouTube's own Audio tracks thing and put a classical piano tuner from its library. It still got a copy right claim and someone makes money every view.

How? The track is from YouTube. It was written more than two hundred years ago. In any case, a claim against YouTube's own tracks should be auto rejected and the violater banned. Instead...

Why?

Performance copyright applies to classical music as much as for everything else. You're free to play, record and distribute copies of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 as the copyright to the composition has expired, but you're not free to redistribute recordings of someone else performing Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 without the explicit permission from the author(s) of that performance.

Sorry but that makes no sense to me. I didn't upload a video with a sound track. I added the sound track with YouTube's tool.

The track I used is from YouTube's library. YouTube knows it because I used it. There should be no confusion about who the performer is and nobody should be able to claim the video.

have you rebutted the claim? and if so what was the response?

also we have a whole other thread on the HN front page about this RN

The realpolitik answer is that this is where the barbed wire ended up in the war between copyright holders and internet companies. It's a situation that satisfies nobody, but both sides get to continue making money. Justice has very little to do with it.

Sometimes, sometimes the accounts get deleted for one reason or another. Lot of the old channels seem to be taken over by boots too. One of my very old videos seemed to have gotten corrupted even.

Nice work! Would be great if you could navigate one day forward and backward.

That's on the high priority list of things to do when I get a chance.

https://youtubedecade.netlify.com/data/2019_8_24.json

https://youtubedecade.netlify.com/data/2019_8_26.json

This is why it's called Hacker News I suppose :)

Press F12, type e.g.: loadVideoList(2019, 8, 25).

Wrapping this in a calendar widget and injecting through GreaseMonkey script is left as an exercise for the reader.

Similarly, https://favrd.it has been posting the top tweets of 2009 (as compiled by Favrd, RIP)

This just makes me deeply miss YouTube Time Machine.

Kudos to the creator for the responsible advertising strategy. The "hey -- you're using an ad blocker" message was thoughtful and non-guilt-tripping. Ads are clearly delineated as such, and the actual ads aren't spammy (carbon). Online advertising needs an overhaul and this is a step in the right direction.

There was a fun similar thing for Reddit on https://www.reddit.com/r/TenYearsAgoOnReddit/ (and https://www.reddit.com/r/FiveYearsAgoOnReddit/), sadly it stopped posting ~9 months ago.

Is it possible to use the search API to create something like this for HN?

Create a bookmarklet of this:

    let d = new Date()
    d.setFullYear(d.getFullYear() - 10)
    location.href = `https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=${d.getFullYear()}-${d.getMonth() + 1}-${d.getDate()}`

This will break on February 29 :)

Unless it's ten years past a leap year!

If it's Feb 29 then you know for sure it isn't 10 years past a leap year, since they are every four years.

Ah, yes, I am an idiot. Oops.

There's another one called /r/vintageviral. It's not as strict but tracks well-known 9+ year old videos.

The old-school YouTube iOS icon for the favicon is a great touch!

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