The Classic YouTube Experience
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Teachers have sold YouTube was like crack for me as a kid, and pardon the vulgarity of that expression, but it was because it was essentially TV, which I
1:00 would already get glued to for hours at a time. But now I could look for whatever I wanted, whenever I—and I mean that went for Google, too. At the time, I think I found YouTube just Googling for something and then clicking the first link that came up. That something was time travel, which I loved as a kid, and this is one of the first videos I watched of it and re-watched, partly because I thought it was real, and it wasn't. Clearly, it was just two guys in their garage with After Effects overlays, but of course I didn't know any better. I mean, I didn't even know what After Effects was.
And because I was so into it, when I saw there were related videos to it, it was over. I mean, video after video of tutorials, of parodies, of animations, until I get to a guy talking into his 240p webcam about what was technically time travel to visit Venice to do this. And that was really cool to me as a kid, because there was a network here—a network of people, people that posted videos that they wanted to post, and that would, by virtue of the title and tags, be related to other videos. And so there was this incredibly organic experience where if you clicked through the related videos
2:02 enough, you'd inevitably find people like yourself, or at least you'd find videos that were obscure in some sense or another. And so there was this sense that it felt like you were uncovering some rarity that almost nobody else had seen.
And I don't think you can really do that anymore. YouTube doesn't recommend videos that way anymore. Most of the videos that get recommended now or from people that are already established, and yeah, the quality is definitely higher. I wouldn't recommend going back. You couldn't find this video anymore, or this one, or this one—they're buried. And unless you remember the details of these videos like I do, you really won't be able to find them, because the path that I took to find them I can never take again. They don't exist any. And if you watched YouTube as a kid, the paths you took to find the videos you watched, they don't exist either.
But once I started to use the website regularly, I found out that there wasn't just a network on here, but a
3:02 culture and really it was the culture of the users here that let the pardon my french creme de la creme rise to the top of the recommendations lists and like any kid one of the first things I looked up was spongebob because it was 2007 if you didn't watch Spongebob you were the square pun intended and so what I thought at the time would be spongebob clips turned out to be spongebob hemp pants or spongebob in China replete with references to the Communist Party which I didn't even understand until I rewatched the video to write the script related video and I found about more crabs and the spring breeze fat and ugly Squidward and at first it was all very mystical to me people didn't talk about any of this at school my parents didn't know about it in fact I got in trouble for watching this edit of pretty patties because of the cursing and references to STDs and my family was Catholic so you could see how that was unbiblical and yet there were these people out here people I didn't even know who weren't associated with the production of SpongeBob SquarePants in any way who were editing it and remix it and animating with it doing all of these things that I could do too and that was
4:06 incredible because it wasn't just spongebob it was icarly was tracking Josh king of the hill The Incredibles Paula Deen it was my day-to-day entertainment remixed by this whole group of people like me out there and I could do that too and I did of course you can't find those videos anymore because they've long since been deleted and I don't have the original files but it was something that I was a part of something a lot of people Accardo something that's still a part of culture on youtube to this day which is still satirizing popular culture right now just as it did back then and the sense that it was one aggregate group of people also came from the fact that they were making the same types of edits the same sound effects the same intro the same jokes which are now memes in this US culture it really was the same shared sense of action and reaction to something we all were poking fun at and when I wanted to do that YouTube had me covered there too because there were people like me who needed
5:06 help like me doing the same things I needed help with and the people with the know-how made tutorials about the things I wanted to learn and I'd watched so many that you know by 2010 I remember I could invariably count on one of three things holding true this song is gonna be in the background or this one or this one the guy didn't have any vocal cords or unregistered hypercam to was in the forehead and these are all memes now but they didn't just come out of nowhere if you were on YouTube back in the day you were probably a kid like me you didn't know how to buy hypercam you know what PayPal was I mean I didn't even know what a CVV was until I was 17 and if you did you weren't gonna spend any money on in any way you were gonna use another tutorial to figure out how to get what you needed for free it could have been on club penguin or lockers or Photoshop it didn't matter if you were using your grandparents and if you didn't have
6:07 copyrighted music you kind of had to use your 0-9 sound system because that's all YouTube would let you use every part of those videos was a part of just being a clueless kid not knowing any better and it was awesome not really because the videos were usually 240p and the guy was usually typing unbearably slow but it didn't matter because where else were you gonna go Yahoo Answers Ask Jeeves come on well that's actually not entirely true because if you happen to click on any of the videos from people like Theo Jo without realizing it you'd end up deleting system32 thinking it would speed up your computer or you spam thousands of lines of text in the RAM because you unwittingly created a virus which slowed down your computer's at the time I didn't have any reason to distrust him I thought he was just another guy putting out helpful videos out there for people like me and the second part was true the videos were for people like me but in hopes I destroy my computer which was kind of sadistic come to think of it but I didn't know that until I deleted system32 of course and we had to get on a new computer but well
7:08 what can you do that was until I started watching ashens and again it was because I wanted to make videos so I searched for video camera reviews on YouTube and his video was one of the first to come up [Music] hello and unlike other reviewers while he fulfilled the need he reviewed the video of course that was his job he was a personality he made me want to come back for more the flip video on the other hand comes in one of those poncey Apple style boxes that opens like a fiendish Chinese puddle there were jokes in there intentional attempts to make the audience engaged with him I've stalled my hair like mr. Spock's dad and I'm going to read a nursery rhyme in a badly lit room and it helped he was a cheeky Brit but it worked it's what led me to watch Twitter and 287 and his game console reviews and from there I mean there is no turning back I found speedrun videos and ROM haxon minecraft in GTA SA Bigfoot cheat codes and Tobuscus and pewdiepie at that point my memories of the site bleed together
8:08 because YouTube stopped being this isolated location for me to look up humorous videos of spongebob or compilations of Lowell XD videos but this living body of entertainment where people put out pictures and videos together with the intent that they would be appreciated for them and that they would gather people unto themselves as though audiences before them people who'd consistently tuned in to LIKE comment and subscribe something they had to remind you of in every video and I could list off a bunch more names of other people I'd watch but at that point they weren't any different from the youtubers of today they just weren't as polished or creative or funny at all but I didn't really care back then I don't think a lot of people did they didn't know any better especially going by the view counts and there were classic viral videos too but as far as I'm concerned they weren't part of my classic YouTube experience but just part of being online in general at the time people reference charlie bit me in that groundhog and that afro ninja guy - on a bombs world and in the chats I was in they were part of the classic internet
9:09 experience of the time, and that was something completely different altogether. It wasn't YouTube, which again was also something entirely—it was a network, a culture of people like me, of personalities, of a body of entertainment. To me, that was the classic YouTube experience.
This is Mr. Amazing. Thanks for watching.
Part of I did in this video was give what's called a phenomenological account of YouTube, talking about my real human experiences with the site instead of giving some kind of banal historical or critical analysis. If you're interested more on what that means in the philosophy behind the way I made this video and videos like it, I definitely recommend you check out Audible, the sponsor for this video, since they offer a great introduction to phenomenology through a brief survey of the works of Martin Heidegger, one of the guys who define the philosophy as we know it today. It's not that long, about an hour and a half, and it's definitely worth reading if you're interested in
10:11 expanding the way you think.
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