youtube has been doing this thing recently where it recommends me the occasional obscure video with like 20 or 100 views. always in precisely the third video of the second row for some reason. I wish I could get it to do that consistently because I kinda like it. Or I like knowing it's there. Do I like it?
Back in the old days of YouTube there used to be an actual page that just showed the most recently uploaded videos. Like you were just putting your hand in the stream of stuff flowing in and seeing what came out. This was kinda part of the initial appeal of YouTube, really? That you were getting people's videos from everywhere.1
Anyway YouTube removed this eventually, maybe it was resource intensive or maybe it just wasn't used very much. It wasn't particularly practical, anyway. I didn't use it much. I did like knowing that I could, if I wanted to. Nowadays, the intended use is that if you want to find something on youtube you have to get pointed to it from somewhere else, or it is recommended to you based on your past viewing through opaque and terrifying means, or it has to be Trending (through even more opaque and terrifying means). There was something kind of sad about this, at least to me at the time - another barrier between you and the people around the world uploading their random little videos to the internet.
The obscure videos I've been getting lately aren't entirely free of the algorithm. There's been a few low-view-count YouTube Music uploads and an adorable MS Paint animation but it's mostly been tiny game streams, I guess because I watch people playing games sometimes. Which are also their own kind of interesting - right now I've just found the 905th daily episode of somebody playing this one horror video game around 30 minutes at a time to 100-200 viewers.
I guess this is what the long tail of game streaming looks like? An endless sea of people playing stuff and randomly chatting to their friends and maybe the occasional outside viewer who found it somehow? Is this person disappointed that they only have a couple hundred subscribers and is waiting for their big break to the big leagues, or are they just kicking back and having some fun on the internet? I don't know. I'm not going to ask. They leave the haunted underground chamber and tell their viewers that their housing situation is getting better. I don't know what their housing situation is. I don't know anything about them.
Actually you can still see obscure youtube cruft, just not through official channels. Astronaut.io searches videos from the last week with default file names like "DSC 8625". Petittube keeps quiet about it's exact methodology, and I did notice a few repetitions, but it does have the benefit of not having a mandatory distracting space video in the background, so let's go with that one. And yes, there's still something interesting about looking at random youtube trash! There's an interesting mix of foreign languages, marketing, lessons, and family home videos. Some family is playing with teddy bears. An estate agent shows off a hideous office space. Someone plays a mobile game for 20 seconds. There are millions of people out there and they are uploading an endless variety of things to the internet for someone.
But I guess it might be better that this isn't native to youtube anymore? This is the 2020s internet and we know that everything can be ruined. Maybe a Recent Videos feed would just encourage people to fill it with spam, or post some awful shit to troll people before it got moderated away, if it ever did. And how often do I really want to look at random youtube videos, anyway? Writing this I wasn't sure if PetitTube was still up until I checked, because I haven't looked at it in years. Maybe I just like the idea that I could.
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An early internet memory, circa 2006-7: one of the guys on Diggnation discussing how cool he thought this new "YouTube" website was, saying he's been watching nothing but random people's home videos and finds it utterly fascinating. Diggnation was the official podcast of Digg, which is a website people used for a bit before they all moved to Reddit. The video podcast was downloaded to my computer using an RSS feed and an application named Democracy Player, which could use RSS and Bittorrent to create a truly democratic replacement for television or whatever Cory Doctorow was saying about it on BoingBoing at the time.

