alt Hacker NewsIt's worth noting that while these videos may have been unintentional, this was also an era when youtube was still inventing itself. Sure, there was real content creation, but the structures of sponsors and ad revenue that can be a real income today weren't there. Let's plays were just starting to dominate the platform, and people were still figuring out how to make money off of that.
As a result, there was a lot of this type of content: barely edited, poorly performed, honest moments of real life, amateurish creations of any kind, be that digital animation, music, acting, etc. I feel these IMG_xxxx videos reflect some of the vibe of the era. Now, sharing videos with people is easy enough in group chats, and youtube content feels so manufactured that people feel it's less appropriate to share this sort of thing via youtube.
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Yeah, the _reason_ this was in the iPhone is that YouTube was a normal and reasonable (if unusual - because sharing videos online was unusual) way to share videos with friends and family. And people cared way less about privacy back then.
I love wondering if and how this kind of "Wild West frontier" in technology and communication and social interaction will ever come again:
Say we colonize Mars. Streaming anything from Earth takes hours (well 3-22 light minutes). Martians may invent their own planetary social network and share their own weird Martian memes for a while.
Or interstellar colony ships traveling for decades between the stars, and then practically cut off from Earth at whatever new exoplanet we land on.
There will definitely be lots of "golden eras of creativity" still to come, if we survive that long.
One might say that early Youtube was mainly thought of as a video pastebin that allowed (JS-assisted) hotlink-embedding into other pages. Youtube was to video as image-hosting sites like Imgur were to images. Which was important, in both cases, because not just video but even (HQ) images were hard to host yourself at the time, and also hard to send to other people without hosting them somewhere.
With both video and image-sharing sites, you didn't really expect the site itself to function as a social network that was worth "browsing." Rather, you expected the "front page view" to be an upload view; and from there, to take your uploaded assets and embed them onto a page to put them into proper context. And it's these webpages-that-contextualize-image/video-assets that you'd share links to, on forums and on early social bookmarking platforms (Fark, StumbleUpon, etc.)