Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a feature that allowed users to directly upload videos to YouTube from their Photos app. Many users uploaded videos without changing the default filename format (IMG_XXXX) that iPhones assigned to photos and videos.
Riley Walz created a bot that found 5 million of these IMG_XXXX videos on YouTube, uncovering a collection of candid, unedited moments from that specific period.
This website presents these videos in random order. Most of them have between 0 and 30 views. The collection includes school recitals, babies, birthday parties, home music performances, pets, and high school sporting events, mixed in with oddities, like this kid jumping on a couch covered in white powder then knocking the phone out of the videographer's hand. Clicking the "next" button feels like pulling the lever on a slot machine – it's addictive. (It's similar to astronaut.io, which I wrote about in 2017.)
I feel lucky to have been the first person ever to have viewed this stop-motion animation of an animal farm:
