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Riley Walz’s hobby is creating projects that use technology to bring out humanity.

A software engineer by trade, Walz, 22, has created projects such as <a href="https://walzr.com/bop-spotter" target=_blank>Bop Spotter</a>, in which a phone linked to the Shazam app and mounted in a public area of his home city of San Francisco <a href="https://www.npr.org/2024/10/04/nx-s1-5135714/an-old-phone-in-a-plastic-box-captures-the-cultural-vibes-of-a-san-francisco-neighborhood" target=_blank>captured the city’s musical story</a>.

Walz’s newest bit of inspiration came after he read <a href="https://ben-mini.github.io/2024/img-0416" target=_blank>a blog post</a> that noted that millions of YouTube videos were uploaded with a similar default name: “IMG_XXXX,” where the X’s were different combinations of numbers. The videos with this naming format were overwhelmingly candid, old and had few views.

In about 12 hours total, Walz said, he coded a website that takes millions of these unedited, raw videos from more than nine years ago<b> </b>and serves them to viewers at random.

The resulting project, titled <a href="https://walzr.com/IMG_0001" target=_blank>IMG_0001</a> and hosted on his personal website, plays out like a glimpse into different worlds: Hit play and your first video may show teenagers practicing a dance in a high school hallway. That wraps up, and it rolls into footage of a dog frolicking in a snowy backyard. Hit “next” and you get a toddler drumming on a piece of playground equipment.

Viewers were gripped by the videos’ unfiltered nature, a contrast to the heavily produced and camera-aware content found on TikTok and YouTube today. Writer Ryan Broderick <a href="https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-internet-s-most-vocal-freaks" target=_blank>wrote in his newsletter Garbage Day</a> that the project is “beautiful, haunting, funny, and sort of magical. Like staring into a security camera of the past.” Mashable’s Tim Marcin <a href="https://mashable.com/article/candid-youtube-video-random-generator" target=_blank>called it</a> “the kind of authenticity that’s all too rare online these days.”

The website has more than 280,000 views and millions of video plays, Walz said — meaning plenty of viewers are sticking around to watch many of the videos.

“It’s cool to me that you can make websites fairly quickly and just share them out and lots people can see them,” Walz said in a phone interview with The Washington Post.

Most of the videos have the “IMG_XXXX” naming convention because they were uploaded via an “upload to YouTube” option that used to be a default on iPhones. Christian Sandvig, a digital media professor at the University of Michigan, said the button could have started as an effort from the company to amass as much content as possible, in hopes that something would be viable to attract users.

YouTube was the premier platform for easy video sharing, and its earliest videos tend to have low resolution and poor audio. Early videos often seemed to be uploaded without a second thought. Sandvig said IMG_0001 feels like peeking into how people authentically live.

“This lets you view videos people truly didn’t really care about,” he told The Post. “The people who made the video might not even remember that they shared them.”

Kevin Zheng, a researcher at the University of Michigan, co-founded <a href="http://tubestats.org/" target=_blank>TubeStats.org</a>, a website that tracks YouTube content statistics. With his collaborators, he published <a href="https://journalqd.org/article/view/4066/3766" target=_blank>an academic article</a> that tried to quantify the percentage of YouTube videos with small audiences.

The paper found that there is “another” YouTube apart from the most popular accounts and videos — one where people “store video or share content with a small audience (from classroom assignments to video greetings for friends to simulcast religious services)” — and that this part of YouTube is more common than the ones that aim for virality.

Sandvig said social media is in a period of nostalgia, and social media users value genuine content — or content that is perceived to be genuine.

“It’s a stylistic choice,” he said. “People are going to great lengths to make themselves appear casual and unprofessional. Authenticity is the genre that they would like to break into.”

Karen North, a communications professor at the University of Southern California, said it’s no surprise IMG_0001 is drawing a following. People are fascinated with nostalgic home movies, she said — even if they belong to someone they do not know.

“People love authenticity, and there’s nothing more authentic than that,” she told The Post. “Psychologically, people are voyeuristic, and we feel that we have a personal connection with people.”

North, an expert on safety and privacy online, compared it to digital people-watching.

People who post on social media are typically very aware that they are compromising their privacy to be a part of an online community, she said, “but they mostly aren’t thinking about it as they’re doing it, because they’re more focused on the activity itself, rather than the potential future consequences.”

The appetite for certain online content can be predicted, often by economics and other world events. North suggests that may be a reason Walz’s website is receiving a lot of traffic.

“We’re going through very difficult times right now,” she said. “And every time society goes through a difficult time, people look back on the simplicity of earlier days.”

Walz, the IMG_0001 creator, said he has a list of project ideas he is constantly trying to chip away at. Every Sunday afternoon, while his friends are knitting, playing guitar or reading nearby, he works on trying to bring his ideas to life.

Aside from IMG_0001 and Bop Spotter, he’s also created a <a href="https://fastfoodindex.walzr.com/" target=_blank>fast-food price tracker</a> and a <a href="https://walzr.com/waffle-house-index" target=_blank>visualization of the Waffle House index</a>, which is used informally to <a href="https://www.accuweather.com/en/accuweather-ready/what-is-the-waffle-house-index/667995" target=_blank>track the severity of extreme weather</a>.

“There isn’t really much of a deliberate pattern. But I guess, looking back, all the projects have to do with visualizing data in some unique way,” he said.

Walz created his website by toying around with YouTube’s automated programming interface and scraping it so he could write the script to collect the videos.

“I was able to find a way to search YouTube very quickly and kind of get around the bot detection — which is like a puzzle in the first place, and that’s kind of fun to work through,” he said.

He wrote a script to search for all videos with “IMG_0001,” “IMG_0002,” “IMG_0003,” etc. — forming a simple for-loop where the number increased by one every time. After leaving a script to run on his laptop for about six hours, Walz was able to grab about 6 million videos, including links and information about views, duration and publish date.

He spent a few hours designing a retro, VCR-inspired website that filtered the videos to show only those that met his criteria: posted before 2015, with fewer than 150 views each and durations shorter than 150 seconds.

Walz said he’s not doing anything to capitalize off this or his other projects, and he debated even sharing the website publicly. But his favorite part has been seeing the positive response on social media. It was only after he saw how much his friends enjoyed the video player that he took it public.

“I wasn’t hounding them to watch it; they just did it because they wanted to,” he said. “I thought if they were interested, lots of people online probably will be, too.”

University of Florida, BS in Journalism

Jiselle Lee

washpost

At IMG_0001, you can watch YouTube’s old, unseen home videos at random

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