I recall a thread years and years ago about a guy who found an abandoned digital camera in the woods, only to take it home and extract the photos from its SD card, and as everyone poured over them, they began noticing odd figures in the trees and so on.

That's the kind of fun group activity I love about these mysterious things

Got a link to those photos? Sounds like an interesting story, whether true or not.

The photos feel like a story being told. Meant to be in an almost serial way.

Yeah where's that link? That sounds fun.

You can actually do this with YouTube. By search for MOV001 etc.

Mental Outlaw did a video demonstrating this a while ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_Ho_KDPi_U

Good luck “searching” for anything on YouTube in 2024..

It's 2024 and need a search engine that doesn't suck

https://kagi.com is by far the best out there IMO.

Also:

- http://startpage.com

(Quite the story, that ...)

http://astronaut.io/ - YouTube videos that have almost zero previous views

2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20432772

2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13413225

I expected dumb gameplays and influencers. Somehow zero of those. Almost all the random samples have been immensely interesting.

There is a subreddit for Open Directories!

There's an even more fitting (inactive) subreddit for filename searches here: https://old.reddit.com/r/IMGXXXX/

Here's a list of prefixes to search for:

    IMG XXXX
    MVI XXXX
    MOV XXXX
    100 XXXX
    DSC XXXX
    SAM XXXX
    HDV XXXX
    102APPLE 
    IMG XXXX
    FILEXXXX
    GOPRXXXX

There's also the excellent http://astronaut.io, which I found via Hacker News. It automatically plays short segments from YouTube videos with those default filenames, inevitably surfacing a kind of gallery of the mundane: The unproduced, untargeted, mostly unwatched, everyday moments of real life.

The amount of (AI generated?) crypto spam is mind boggling. Most of the other videos seem to be amateur sport events, but the rest contains a few gems of random stranger's life :)

I let it scroll through about 30 and didn't see either of these. I saw a couple small church services, some random snippets of people walking throughout various areas, what seemed to be an interview for someone's school project and some videos of pets.

This reminds me of opendirectories subreddit. So many random stuff.

Back in the day, searching for "top secret", "highly confidential", "for private use only", etc, ... would return interesting results.

Distinguished seekers also searched: "NOFORN" "EYES ONLY"