Surreal. I was on YouTube several times a day every day throughout 2006. YouTube used to actually be relatively static and unchanging, the top videos in the afternoon might have been roughly the same as in the morning.

I’m not just recognizing individual videos, I’m recognizing entire pages, down to video placements in the sorting order, seeing videos I actually clicked on and watched, maybe even gave one of like 51 star ratings to.

For some reason, it never occurred to me to look at YouTube in the Wayback Machine. On my phone right now, I can’t load any of the videos anyway for lack of a browser plug-in which around that time was basically Macromedia Flash 8 or something. Actually Macromedia might not have even been acquired by Adobe yet, or else the acquisition had just been recently announced. Either way it was Macromedia up until Adobe Flash 9.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to play any of the videos on a laptop, but I bookmarked a few familiar looking pages to try later.