personally, i'd divide youtube into three eras:
old youtube from its inception in 2005 to around 2009, before the vevo partnership. during this time, youtube was the most wild and chaotic, under-moderated. videos almost never got taken down, and you could post pretty much anything as long as you sufficiently flew under the radar. if your video disappeared from old youtube, it was because some narc reported it, and you can probably just re-upload it in a couple of days without issue.
this was also when moderation was pretty straightforward and it was essentially just "no porn, no uploading an entire fucking movie". short clips were generally okay.
golden youtube from 2009 to 2016/17-ish. "golden" not because i personally think it was the best time to be using the site, but because it was the best era to Be A Youtuber, which was now a thing that one could be. it was the time when youtube was a maker of money for the people uploading to it, and the corporations it partnered with. youtube itself was losing comical amounts of money, but whatever, google could eat that cost like it was nothing.
these are the days of your favourite let's plays (mostly unedited safe perhaps cutting out a ton of tedium or adding a facecam), of ambitious animations and indie films and creative projects. they're also the days of copyright strikes, DMCAs, and general corporate kowtowing, especially as the era progressed.
in my opinion, i'd say this golden era was already well into its decline by about mid 2016, but the introduction of the polymer redesign in 2017 is a useful temporal landmark for most people, and it was also the time a lot of folk reduced their youtube usage, either as viewers or as uploaders.
polymer era from 2017's introduction of the polymer redesign to now. again, partly just a convenient marker, but also coincides with the end of that golden era of creativity. this is when the copyright strikes started getting really bad, not just for things that make some amount of sense but for increasingly nonsensical shit, up to and including videos that contain absolutely nothing owned by the company sending the strike. automatic audio and video recognition is in frequent use, and is terrible, and uploaders can lose their entire account because youtube doesn't care to investigate these automated mistakes.
your favourite youtuber has gotten increasingly more corporate. they don't swear, they use juvenile language, they avoid saying certain harmless words to such a point that it's uncomfortably obvious that they are avoiding those words. their videos are so over-edited that they're exhausting and irritating to watch, reminding you of those times you discover an american gameshow on telly and turn it off after two minutes because it feels like a parody of itself. annoying sponsorships interrupt videos, necessitating the use of sponsorblock, which doesn't work half the time because a real viewer has to submit the sections to block.
community-contributed subtitles are gone, and thus deaf and HoH viewers are clustered around the few uploaders who now add subtitles manually, or pay others to do so. automatic subtitles are so bad it's often better to watch a video without them.
the golden era is over. making money from youtube is harder and requires compromising one's own personality and creativity. youtube has finally decided it wants to make money from you, and so far it still isn't, but it's determined.
so, personally i'd say "old youtube" does not extend into 2014, and my answers to these questions reflect that.
- What was the first YouTube video you ever watched?i can't be certain exactly, but the first youtube video i remember watching was a spirited away AMV to some intolerable pop song. i'm pretty certain i'd watched videos on youtube before this, but it's the earliest one i remember seeing. i'd say this was 2006. while this video was not my introduction to youtube, it was my introduction to anime.
the video was linked to in a chatroom i frequented (remember when every forum had its own javascript chatroom all running from the exact same plugin with the exact same notification beeps?) and the discussion around it confused me at the time. someone said "i think anime is beautiful". i remember exactly who it was and i remember this precise line. at the time, i assumed "anime" and "AMV" were synonymous, that perhaps one was a typo or bastardisation of the other. i held this assumption for some months until discovering the anime channel on satellite tv, running from midnight until four in the morning, and finally learned that anime was its own thing.
through this channel, i discovered the western benchmark for anime: cowboy bebop, bleach, naruto, fullmetal alchemist...and wolf's rain. no-one seems to remember wolf's rain. of those listed, it is by far my favourite anime.
What niche/community are you the most fond of/nostalgic for?on old youtube specifically? sorry, none. not even on youtube overall, across any era. the only thing about youtube i can say i truly miss comes down to a specific youtuber i used to watch a lot, and who still uploads but in the tiresomely corporate way. i miss his golden-era-style videos, when it was just a facecam and a game and subtitles i could read and he would forget to edit out a pee break because he edited his videos that little. and that's not even nostalgia, it's a different kind of sadness.
my youtube-related nostalgia all comes down to stuff that wasn't actually on youtube. the people i talked to about certain videos, the sharing of links, the discovery of certain musicians i am still very fond of.
in which case, there is something i miss:
wingedzephyrher channel now is just a few videos of live sessions, and she's left youtube entirely.
back in the day, wingedzephyr had every single one of emilie autumn's songs uploaded, with meticulously-timed lyrics in a pretty, gothic font that was still quite readable. the background-image of each video was carefully chosen from emilie autumn's many press photos and model shots to best match the theme of the song.
as lyric videos go, wingedzephyr's were one of the best in general. they were also the only ones available for this particular musician, and in fact were typically the only videos on youtube of her songs at all.
it was through wingedzephyr's videos that i and a friend discovered emilie autumn together. it was through her videos that i continued to introduce others to emilie autumn. they were the single most convenient way of sharing music. i maintain that youtube still is the most convenient way of sharing music, if you're lucky enough to find a non-vevo video uploaded in 2011 that's just the audio and nothing else.
about four years ago, youtube sent a ton of automatic copyright strikes to wingedzephyr, and all the lyric videos disappeared.
emilie autumn herself has been aware of wingedzephyr's videos for a long time. she has always approved of them, knowing that they're one of the primary ways new listeners discover her. this attitude hasn't changed. neither she nor her record label sent the strikes. it was done by an entirely automatic system that had her entire discography on file and discovered that these videos matched it.
emilie autumn herself, copyright holder of the audio in these videos, had no power to stop or reverse the copyright strikes concerning her own music.
What is your favorite old YouTube video?i don't know if i have one. if i do, or did, i can't remember it and certainly wouldn't be able to find it now.
Any particularly fond memories?remember that chatroom i mentioned in which AMVs and anime were discussed side-by-side and i believed them the same?
i'm fairly certain that chatroom was how i discovered youtube.
this was way before browsers had tabs, when netscape was still a valid browser but IE had become default for windows users because it came with the OS.
there was at least one user in the chatroom who used it to open new browser windows. they would send a message containing nothing but a link and then click that link in their own message to open a new window. at the time, i didn't question it, but now i wonder why they found that easier than just clicking the link wherever they had originally found it. browser bookmarks at the time could be very easily opened in a new window, so what the fuck were they doing?
anyway.
through their novel behaviour, i discovered youtube. discovered whatever random videos they wanted to open in a new window, which were usually songs (AMV sometimes, but not always, included) that they could listen to while they browsed. fairly standard pop songs, nothing adventurous, but still it was how i found the site. at the time, the recommendations system wasn't perfectly fine-tuned for turning you into a neo-nazi as it is today, and actually was barely tuned at all and seemed pretty random.
random-ish recommendations suited me fine, as it's how i discovered a lot of interesting things, new (to me) music, the most bizarre and incoherent youtube poops, anything.
and because of this one user for whom the chatroom was apparently the only way to open new browser windows, chat often turned to discussing whatever they had linked, and recommendations found, and a strange culture formed around this user's behaviour which we all just accepted as normal. it also therefore caused us to dump whatever interesting youtube videos we found in the chat, spawning more incoherent recommendation finds.
like i said, i don't really have any nostalgia for youtube itself, but i do have nostalgia for that chatroom.
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