How to buck the algorithm, find hidden YouTube videos, and make the internet fun again

The second you start watching a video on YouTube, the site begins building an algorithm of your likes. While the goal of that is to show you content you want to see, it means you’ll miss out on so much.

A new tool lets you see YouTube without the algorithm, and it feels like an entirely different internet. 

The tool works on a basic premise: from 2009 to 2012, iPhones had a “Send to YouTube” button built into the Photos app. Unless you changed the file name, the video title would be the default “IMG_XXXX” file name. This tool searches for videos with that name from those years and shows them at random.

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Since people often used YouTube as a storage service or a way to easily share long videos, most of these videos were never meant to be shared with the world. Still, viewing them is calming. It’s like a time capsule to a less-serious internet. Nobody is trying to go viral, the videos aren’t polished, nothing is sponsored, and there’s no clickbait. It’s simply videos of moments that people thought were worth saving.

You can avoid your current algorithm by watching YouTube in a private browser, but you’re still going to start by seeing content that’s popular and build a new algorithm from there. This is something totally different. 

Anti-algorithm YouTube may just be my favorite

When I fired up the generator, I was greeted by IMG_0001, a video from 2009 with zero views of a baby in a stroller. The video showed smiling parents waving at the camera and a closeup of the child’s face. That baby would be at least 16 by now.

The next video, IMG_0116.MOV, was a 15-view, 28-second shot that put me in the passenger seat on a road trip with a couple of young guys. I couldn’t identify the language they were speaking, the music on the radio, or the landscape passing by, but the video made me smile as I thought about my own trips years ago.  

I couldn’t stop watching.

I eventually found my way to videos of soccer games, kittens, school concerts, people showing off their aquariums, trips to the zoo, more friends on road trips, waving people at historic landmarks, and so on. 

My favorite was a man who was proudly showing off an immense diorama of soldiers in a battle. I can’t name the war, but I saw French and British flags. There were hundreds of horse-mounted troops, dozens of cannons, trees, smoke, and even flying dirt. It was clear he had put a lot of time into this display. I was viewer number seven.

The highest-viewed video I saw had 102 views.

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Because these videos have a default file name as the title, there’s no way you’d find them in a search, and because they’ve gone a decade with only a handful of views at best, YouTube probably won’t recommend them. 

The numbers behind this are interesting and show you just how big YouTube is. The median video on the site has 41 views, and a video with more than 130 views is among the top 33% of the site’s content. This means well over half of YouTube is videos with only around 100 views or less.

Turns out, there’s a lot of YouTube to explore. If you want to try it out for yourself, head here.