Astronaut.io is a website with a bizarre function: It scrapes YouTube, finds videos posted in the last week that have zero or close to zero views and undescriptive filenames like "DSC-1234," then shows you a stream of snippets from these videos.
It sounds dull. But it’s completely fascinating.
That’s because Astronaut’s picks are essentially the complete opposite of a Casey Neistat video. Neistat lenses extraordinary footage of curated events and painstakingly edits it into a narrative, garnering millions of views for his artful storytelling. But the unseen videos Astronaut presents are simply random, unedited human activities from all around the world that someone deemed worthy of recording and posting, yet has made no attempt to promote.
The result is an unfiltered and honest look at what human beings do, all day, every day. If an anthropologist clicked onto this website they might never click away.
Some things that I’ve witnessed in a single viewing:
A bunch of high school girls doing a synchronized dance in snow. A tractor idling in a barren field. Men on a beach preparing a hovercraft for launch. A women’s volleyball game. Asian co-workers in an office singing "Happy Birthday" to the birthday woman while clapping. A remote-controlled fighter jet. Someone unboxing a collection of basketball cards. A baby laughing. People dancing at an outdoor festival in what appears to be Africa. Someone failing at a slam dunk in slow motion. A cooking tutorial. A speech at a funeral. A comedy play in Russia. High school students in Vietnam singing karaoke. A tour of a house where all of the surfaces appear to be concrete. A protest march conducted in Arabic. Puppies on carpet.
To be fair, the videos we see do not accurately represent all of humanity, but just the folks that have access to recording technology and a means of uploading footage to the internet. But the global nature of the footage I’ve seen is truly impressive and does not appear dominated by any one region. And I can’t stop watching it.
Try it here.
(Credit where credit is due: The website is the brainchild of data wonks Andrew Wong and James Thompson.)
Via Kottke
via Core77
We’ve Stumbled Across the Most Fascinating Site on the Internet