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You know, whenever I see stuff like this or the Deep Into YouTube subreddits, it always makes me wonder what it must be like for the person that posted the original video. There they are with a video they randomly threw online without any intention of it becoming popular, only to see their mostly abandoned channel blow up overnight as their random clips get thousands of views.

Depending on the user, it must be either the coolest thing ever or the creepiest thing ever, with little in between. Kudos to anyone that takes the opportunity and uses it as a reason to kickstart a YouTube career or something.

Regardless, it's always interesting to see, since:

1. It shows you just how big YouTube is, and how few of the videos posted there get any attention at all. The fact there's a huge percentage of the platform viewed by no one is just mind boggling to me.

2. It illustrates how little marketing skill correlates to video editing skill, since there are interesting videos going ignored due to their creator's inability to add a good title or thumbnail or metadata, or which were uploaded on a whim without any of that stuff being taken into account.

It feels too intimate, I had to close it. Cool concept though

A substantial amount (20% already back in 2014, I would imagine more now) of songs available on streaming never get streamed either. Kind of why that market has steered towards flat-fee upload distributors. 29 bucks a year is better than 10% of 0 bucks.

Seems to bizarre to me that the "zero streams" playlist isn't a feature actually.

Yeah, it seems like it could be a great feature for helping level the playing field a bit and discover some hidden gems that no one would have ever heard. But I imagine that at some point 'no streams' would have to turn into 'low streams' but that's fine.

I would imagine a sizable portion of these old (15+ years ago) accounts are abandoned. Forgotten password, email address tied to an ISP that only serves a region where the person no longer lives, that kind of thing.

YouTube wasn’t always tied so strongly to a Google account, and overall fewer people had Google accounts in the first place.

Most things with low popularity are rated appropriately. There are definitely some hidden gems, but most media that is created is simply bad.

This is a lazy take. The reason is that there is money involved in picking who is at the top of the playlists. It's no big secret the big record labels own large parts of the music streaming industry. They are simply getting their investment back. There is no incentive giving money to any small third parties in terms of promotion. Spotify doesn't even pay out for songs that get under 1000 streams per year anymore.

This is not even getting into the investment companies that buy artist catalogues wholesale, and therefore have a major interest in keeping old songs in constant rotation for the decades to come.

Saying any of it is a meritocracy is pure ignorance.

I don't think they're saying it's a meritocracy, I think they're uncontroversialy saying that a playlist of songs with up-till-now zero plays would be a huge amount of garbage, e.g. poorly made FL Studio/Garage Band experiments, not even interesting music just kinda bad music.

I wonder if that is actually tru. Because interestingly enough my youtube account is the only remaining link I have to the internet of the past. Created in 2006 and I'm still using it.

I'm not aware of anything else that has persisted since then. Old email accounts, forums, games - everything is gone now and inaccessible for me.