No matter how often you go on YouTube chances are, you do not know everything about it obviously. Today in this tutorial, we are going to go over 10 different secrets and Easter Eggs related to YouTube. Some of them are just kind of curiosities others are actually sort of useful. I have got 10 of them and why do not we just get started this.
Why do YouTube views freeze at 301?
YouTube Skip Navigation Button
First one is probably going to blow your mind. It is a secret button that you have never seen before even though it has been there the whole time. It is the skip navigation button. To reveal this button all you have to do is press the Tab key a few times while on the YouTube homepage and then it will appear. Now this is not really a secret or an Easter egg. It is actually an accessibility feature and the reason behind it is it is helpful to people who only navigate YouTube via the keyboard.
You probably know when you press tab it cycles through different links across the page and then you can press ENTER to click that link instead of using a mass. If you were to go through every single possible link it would take forever so this skip navigation button is meant to be selected with just a couple tabs and then you press enter and then it skips to the actual video selection page. So if you are navigating YouTube using tabs this is a very easy way to actually do that and get to the videos right away instead of having to go through every single possible link on the site. Just a cool little feature that you probably never even knew is there before.
YouTube Unique Title Font
Next up we have an Easter egg and it is a Unique Title Font for one particular video which is called too many cooks you may have seen it. It is a video posted by Adult Swim back in 2014. It is possibly the strangest 11 minute video. You could possibly imagine if you have never seen it highly recommend it. It is so bizarre but also hilarious. It went completely viral. Anyway as you see on this page the YouTube employees I guess when it went viral they made it as a joke to change the title font to be the same font that is used in the video. You can actually see it to this day.
If you just go on that page you will see this unique font that does not appear anywhere else on the site at all.
Why do YouTube views freeze at 301?
This is not the only time that YouTube has added an Easter egg to a video page. Though another one has to do with the video called why do YouTube videos freeze at 301 by Numberphile, which was made several years ago back. When YouTube actually Freeze the view counter at 301? No one really knew why that was obviously.
Type Awesome word during Play YouTube Video
It was to verify views after a certain point but that are what the video is explaining and sure enough. YouTube as an Easter egg permanently froze the view count on this video to be 301 forever. Now even if you go to that video to this day even though the video obviously has a lot more than 301 views. They just kind of had it as an Easter egg to keep it at 301 to just show that on the video page.
Moving on we have another Easter egg. To do this one on any video watch page, all you have to do is type out the word “AWESOME”. Do not type it into a text box as a comment whatever just on the page generally just type out awesome and it will actually change the progress bar to flash a bunch of different colors.
Playback of this screen capture
Now in this case I am going to slow down the playback of this screen capture. You can see the colors but I do not know if this is like a trigger warning thing for anybody. It should not because I am going to slow it down. If you are sensitive to light fluctuations or whatever, do not do this Easter egg yourself but you can still see what it does in this case and then to stop it from doing this you type out awesome again and then it goes back to normal but still kind of cool. You can impress your friends or whatever.
YouTube Channel (Webdriver Torso)
Next up we have a secret related to YouTube having to do with one YouTube channel in particular possibly. The weirdest channel in existence called Webdriver Torso. This YouTube channel used to be a complete mystery but we have since figured out what it is for which.
I will explain in a second but if you go and look at it. It is clearly something extremely bizarre. Basically for years, this YouTube channel would upload strange 11 second videos with random red and blue shapes literally every few seconds for years and you can see that it has over 600,000 videos on this channel with over a hundred sixty-three thousand plus subscribers from people who were just interested and subscribed to it. What is also strange is you would think with a channel uploading this many videos that frequently that. It would be deleted for posting spam or something like that but it was not.
It was allowed to continue for years but it gets even weirder because every single one of the videos is literally just random red and blue shapes with random audio tones except for three videos. One of them is a short video of just the Eiffel Tower and lighting up another one is instead of having a red square block. It is a red outline of Rick Astley. Never going to give you up and the third different video is a paid access video that is the Aqua Teen Hunger Force dubbed in Spanish. The only way to watch this video is to buy it using a French payment account. You cannot pay for it anywhere else so clearly a lot of people were very confused what the heck this channel was for years and the reason. It’s on this list is because eventually it was discovered through some investigation that it was created by Google and YouTube themselves.
It turns out the purpose of these weird videos was to test video quality upload. It would automatically upload these random video files with these random shapes and then it would compare the original to the uploaded video quality and then do something with that information. We do not know but it was completely automated and every few seconds it would do a test. Now at this point, the channel is not uploading at that rate anymore obviously but there are at the time of this video being uploaded some relatively recent videos that were uploaded. You know a couple months ago or so every once in a while so you can go check for yourself to see maybe if there are any more recently uploaded depending on when you are watching this.
Yeah! definitely a strange YouTube channel maybe at some point I’ll make an entire video talking about it but I would consider this a secret for this video because for years YouTube did not acknowledge that this was an official channel at all. No one knew what the heck it was for but a lot of people knew about it and eventually Google did release a kind of cryptic statement that did confirm that it was an official channel.
Hopefully you enjoy this YouTube secret journey. Wait for 2nd part of this series YouTube Secrets and Easter Eggs to Try RIGHT NOW (PART 2).
