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YouTube was launched as a dating site
- Edmond 7y agonews to me:)
- toxicFork 7y agoIt's very interesting to scrub through the history of the first year, you can see how they changed so much in that time
- dlhavema 7y agoI never knew this. It gives a little more meaning to the domain name, but even in it's current form, the domain name still works, just less literally.
- shaanvp 7y ago1) Did anyone here use it? I'm curious what the UX was... Browse short video profiles of people and then message the ones you like? 2) Does anyone know what caused the shift from Video Dating to just Video?
- random42 7y ago> I'm curious what the UX was ... Check the link, it shows quite well.
- quickthrower2 7y agoTo me it looks like some generic "PHP Script" dating site. I.e. you buy a licence for I dunno $30 and install it on your shared hosting, ... , profit.
- salsadip 7y agohttps://www.cnet.com/news/youtube-started-as-an-online-dating-site/ https://www.cnet.com/news/youtube-started-as-an-online-datin... 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.
- ronilan 7y agoThis wayback machine is from April 28, 2005. Me at the Zoo[1] is from April 23, 2005. 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”? [1] https://youtu.be/jNQXAC9IVRw https://youtu.be/jNQXAC9IVRw
- mkagenius 7y ago> [1] https://youtu.be/jNQXAC9IVRw https://youtu.be/jNQXAC9IVRw Wow, the level of spammy comments on that one is perpetual.
- Thorrez 7y agoThe comments on that video default to sorted by new. You can change it to sorted by top. The uploader chooses the default sort, but the default for the default is top.
- est31 7y agoSo that's why he talks about the long trunks of the elephants in that video.
- cowsandmilk 7y agoThe founder of the site seeded content, that isn’t users uploading...
- ronilan 7y agoFounders do that? That’s so seedy!
- jxramos 7y agowow a whopping 18 seconds and 72,954,314 views!
- computator 7y ago
- wenbin 7y agoIt was supposed to be "Hot or Not" with videos.
- wenbin 7y ago“Hot or not” directly or indirectly inspired the launch of Facebook and YouTube. Amazing! If you want to learn more about “hot or not”: https://youtu.be/uagKWIEffq8 https://youtu.be/uagKWIEffq8
- ronreiter 7y agoI HAVE AN IDEA: TINDER BUT WITH VIDEOS
- creatornator 7y agoTinder already lets you upload short gifs of yourself
- adtac 7y agoyeah, but sound
- sincerely 7y agoI'm pretty sure that's what Interlace is
- elliekelly 7y agoReading the original Terms of Use & Privacy Policy linked in the capture gave me a chuckle. It seems someone tried to find + replace div tags with p tags as the documents repeatedly refer to "inpiduals."
- rainyMammoth 7y agothat's a nice little one. Funny to see those websites from back in the days when HTML was still hand made and handcrafted
- reaperducer 7y agoFunny to see those websites from back in the days when HTML was still hand made and handcrafted 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.
- vecplane 7y agoI would predict Apple falls into this category.
- sacheendra 7y agoLooking a the source code of their website, they seems to use react for at least part of it.
- dmitriid 7y agoWhatever they use, Apple's product pages are definitely handcrafted. Especially around the time of big releases. The use of a framework/library does not preclude handcrafting.
- 7y ago
- nyx_ 7y agoI didn't realize The Wayback Machine had so much YouTube content from the early days. Really interesting going back and seeing what was on the front page on some random day in 2006. 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.
- johnchristopher 7y agoI was thinking about that today. I was fiddling with mastodon and a VPS then started thinking about microblogging and youtube content evolutions over the years and came to the conclusion that people share stuff through messaging now and I like that. I ditched the mastodon idea.
- marssaxman 7y agoIt 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.
- CM30 7y agoUnfortunately, it seems the only way to have a field where Wall Street/commercial entities aren't involved is to have one where it's illegal to make money off said field. For instance, game mods/fan works tend to be a lot like web development or content creation from the early days of the internet, since it's literally illegal to run a business that creates and sells them. One of the reasons I follow the progress of said scenes a lot, because they're some of the few communities I know of where wealth isn't really an advantage.
- chasontherobot 7y agoSo, a few really cool things but 95% weird porn?
- 7y ago
- reaperducer 7y agoAnother video service built on dating? Comcast's video-on-demand service. 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.
- stallmanite 7y agoBack when I had Comcast that was some of the most entertaining stuff to be found on their on-demand service. I had totally forgotten about that thanks for the trip down memory lane.
- chiefalchemist 7y agoI think one of the biggest bobbles of modern (social-centric) tech history was Google not morphing YT into a more social platform. They had the name recognition. They had the users. All they lacked was some basic functionality to compete for social attention. Instead they went for G+. The rest, as they say, is history.
- sasnfbi1234 7y agoThey basically tried this with the google + integration . But that was its own mess also
- Avamander 7y agoIf they had not disrupted any users with the integration and turn people off of G+ they could have pulled it off. I guess they'll try again in 15 years.
- dredmorbius 7y agoI'm starting to suspect social may have burned over. At least in pesent incarnations.
- MagnumOpus 7y ago"Burned over" in the sense of zero growth - everyone who wants a FaceSnapGram account has one. 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...
- dredmorbius 7y agoWhat was staggering is that Vic tried to drag YT down wih G+. Both sides' users rejected that.
- mysticlabs 7y agoThose social features existed on LiveVideo.com which was an early YouTube competitor. https://techpost.io/why-you-cant-compete-with-google-the-deplatforming-of-livevideo-com/ https://techpost.io/why-you-cant-compete-with-google-the-dep...
- RocketSyntax 7y agothis is still a great idea... even with clips, dating apps are so static. body language, tonality.
- fortran77 7y agoI think there would be a market for a "verified weight / height / photo" dating site. Maybe have kiosks set up where people can go get a photo taken, on a scale, with a height gauge behind them from standard angles (front / side) -- to avoid the infamous "myspace angles" that people use.
- creatornator 7y agoIf the first action in a relationship is one of distrust, it doesn't feel right...
- TeMPOraL 7y agoInteractions on dating sites happen prior to a relationship. Also, I think dating sites are a bit "a market for lemons".
- TheDong 7y agoI don't think that's necessarily true. To be a market for lemons, in the original sense, it's required that goods are objectively better or worse to all buyers, and it's required that sellers know the value of their goods to buyers. 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.
- skunkworker 7y agoI remember some of these super early launches of websites. At the time YouTube launched I was using Google Video and I thought it was superior. I think I visited the Youtube site once while it had it’s dating drop down but left because there was no content to watch. The next 18 months were insane as YouTube grew then got bought by Google.
- kds3 7y agoAbout Us [0] on webarchive from the same date is still relevant: > 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.youtube.com/about.php https://web.archive.org/web/20050428171556/http://www.youtub...
- PunksATawnyFill 7y agoThat wasn't even true, was it?
- spullara 7y agoInteresting. By the time I looked at it while I was an EIR at Accel it was definitely not a dating site and that was early 2005. My assessment was more of a soft-porn / piracy site :)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jjirsa 7y agoI had a video site in the same era (https://web.archive.org/web/20050701082257/http://www.vobbo.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050701082257/http://www.vobbo....) and it was 100% soft porn and piracy, so much so that I shut it down because I couldn’t justify the time spent moderating content (and I was a one man show, didn’t want to get sued). 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).
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoThey have a lot of softcore porn and piracy now. Indeed I've seen some things on YouTube recently that look like pretty blatant porn, and weren't behind the age-wall.
- hellofunk 7y agoIt’s amazing how so many people don’t know this! I actually met my third wife on the original site, it was a different time.
- BubbleBoy420 7y agowhat number you on now?
- mothsonasloth 7y agoWhere did you meet your fourth wife?
- astura 7y agoAnd Hulu was originally launched as someone's personal homepage. https://web.archive.org/web/19991023065011/https://www.hulu.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/19991023065011/https://www.hulu.... Wonder how much they sold the domain for.
- cm2187 7y agoAnd OVH as a scrappy web hosting company stored in a closet [1]... wait, it still is. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/19991127081047/http://ovh.fr/ https://web.archive.org/web/19991127081047/http://ovh.fr/
- ehsankia 7y agoAnd steam.com still refuses to sell the domain even if they haven't had a server for years now: https://web.archive.org/web/20161022104434/http://www.steam.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20161022104434/http://www.steam....
- Vinnl 7y agoI recently came across https://gail.com/ https://gail.com/
- ehsankia 7y agoAt least, that was a birthday present and it's her first name. The whole gmail typo stuff is hilarious though, that's for sharing.
- overcast 7y agoSo foolish. Not even putting crappy ads on there, yet paying to renew it yearly. What could the logic possibly be? Valve probably wouldn't even entertain it at this point.
- avodonosov 7y agoThe tabs and some other ui elements have round corners, as it was customary in that days. Everyone wanted and insisted to have this, despite it was very inconvenient to build with pieces of images and tables.
- _bxg1 7y agoAnd now it's trivial to do with CSS but largely out of fashion. Sigh.
- avodonosov 7y agoBTW, for human eye it's _probably_ more harmonious, I don't mind seeing it today when it's trivial technically. But indeed, out of fashion, which is another demonstration of the lack of free thought in that area. Sigh indeed.
- rocky1138 7y agoIt also launched during a time when most people watched video on a tube, hence the name. This may not be immediately obvious to people born after ~2005.
- quickthrower2 7y agoEven in 2005 people were chucking out their Cathode Ray Tube televisions in favour of flatscreens.
- endgame 7y agoUnless they played Smash.
- userbinator 7y agoIt's interesting to see the generational shift --- ask someone why (often adult) video streaming sites are sometimes called "tube sites" and all of them will mention YouTube, but only the older ones will mention the CRT etymology; younger people may be reminded more of "the Internet is a series of tubes" instead.
- rhabarba 7y agoAnd it still works!
- osrec 7y agoInteresting - I think the world was not ready for a video dating site back then. This could probably work quite well now (thanks to the change in peoples' attitude towards creating online video content, brought about by YouTube itself)!
- throwaway66666 7y ago> http://www.youtube.com/index.php http://www.youtube.com/index.php I didn't know youtube's first version was written in php.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoInteresting to see major sites with CSS issues like that, with the country code ("GB" for me, in the UK) added the width on the logo box isn't wide enough. #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?
- PunksATawnyFill 7y agoWay back is right. This site is still using Flash. Fail
- nullrouten 7y agoSome YouTubers went on to try launching dating sites again after the Google acquisition.
- Descartes1 7y agoIt was also made possible entirely by Macromedia Flash. (Purchased by Adobe the same year).
- jgalt212 7y ago> I like the way the world looks from a bicycle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqLtOjENz-Q&start=123 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqLtOjENz-Q&start=123
- rkagerer 7y agoOne of the comments says the video makes around $5.9k-93.7k per year. Fact or fiction?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Ballas 7y agoThe name was also supposed to be "YourTube"
- michael86 7y agoYou may want to check out this 2006 talk by Jawed Karim. https://youtu.be/7oJdD2oUHXc https://youtu.be/7oJdD2oUHXc This was shortly after Google acquired them.
- ElectronShak 7y agoThis was great. Thanks for sharing!
- omarhaneef 7y agoWait... what is it now? Oh no, I have to go take down a few videos...
- retpirato 7y agothey changed their minds after 5 days? I guess it worked out for them in long run, but they couldn't really expect much after that short of a time.