glitchy's old site

Following in the footsteps of Unplayed, I made Unwatched to learn more about Javascript and APIs.

A few friends and I used to play a game where we would seek out the strangest, most hidden videos we could by searching random terms, and go down a rabbit-hole of exploring the unseen side of YouTube, and the purpose of this project was to replicate that feeling of finding a hidden gem.

Unwatched was built to find videos on YouTube with zero views, videos that literally hadn't been seen by anyone (except maybe the uploader).

The result however, was much less exciting than anticipated. The videos mainly comprised used car advertisements, forgotten university lectures, and automatically generated music videos.

Maintaining this project was difficult, always having to figure out novel algorithms to find unseen videos, searching a variety of words and random strings of letters, since the YouTube API doesn't provide any way of sorting ascendingly by views. Instead, I'd write an algorithm to fetch hundreds of different video results, and manually filter them out, only keeping the unwatched ones. Extremely inefficient and not guaranteed to find anything.

the nail in the coffin came in 2020, when YouTube decided to update their API usage terms. They now charge for usage of their API, something I can't justify paying out of pocket, especially with how many API calls are necessary to find viewless videos.

Unwatched was taken offline in September 2020