It'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.<p>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.
I love wondering if and how this kind "Wild West frontier" in technology and communication will ever come again.<p>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.<p>Or interstellar colony ships traveling for decades between the stars, and then practically cut off from Earth at whatever new exoplanet we land on.<p>There are lots of "eras of creativity" still to come, if we survive that long.