No matter how often you go on
YouTube, chances are, you don't know everything about it, obviously. So today we're 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. So I've got 10 of them. And why don't we just get started? This first one is probably
going to blow your mind.. It's a secret button that you have
never seen before, even though it's been there the whole time, and
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's actually an accessibility feature. And the reason behind it is
it's helpful to people who only navigate YouTube via the keyboard. So 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 mouse. But 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 the 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. So just a cool little feature that you
probably never even knew was there before. Okay 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's a video
posted by Adult Swim back in 2014. It's possibly the strangest 11
minute video you could possibly imagine if you've never seen it, I highly recommend it, it's so
bizarre, but also hilarious. It went completely viral. Anyways, you see on this page,
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's used in the video. So 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. This isn't 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
froze the view counter at 301. And no one really knew why that was
obviously it was to verify views after a certain point, but that's
what the video was explaining, and sure enough, YouTube as an Easter
egg permanently froze the view count on this video to be 301 forever. So 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. Okay, moving on. We have another Easter egg and to do
this one, on any video watch page, all you have to do is type out the word "awesome". Don't 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. Now, in this case, I'm going to slow
down the playback of this screen capture. So you can see the colors, but
I don't know if this is like a trigger warning thing for anybody. It shouldn't cause I'm
going to slow it down. But if you are sensitive to light
fluctuations or whatever, don't 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. Okay. 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. Now this YouTube channel used to
be a complete mystery, but we have since figured out what it's for
which I'll explain in a second. But if you go and look at it, it's
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 163,000+ subscribers from people who were
just interested and subscribed to it. And what's 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 lighting up. Another one is instead of having a red
square block, it's a red outline of Rick Astley, never gonna give you up. And the third different
video is a paid access video. That is the Aqua Teen Hunger
Force, dubbed in Spanish. And the only way to watch this video is
to buy it using a French payment account. You can't 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. So 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 don't 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's any more recently uploaded depending
on when you're watching this. So 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. Okay, moving on. This is one, I would still consider a
secret and it is the Picture-in-Picture chrome extension by Google. This is an official Chrome extension
for YouTube that adds a picture in picture feature, though really this
has not been promoted by Google at all. You just kind of have to know about it. And basically it allows you to create a
picture-in-picture little pop-up box of any video on YouTube that you're watching. And then you can keep watching it while
you browse around the web on any website. Now, YouTube does have a basic
built-in picture in picture feature, but it only works on YouTube itself. Whereas this extension allows you to
go on any website and still watch. I have mentioned this extension before,
specifically in one of my recent videos talking about 10 cool Chrome extensions. So if you want to check that out, I'll
put the link popping up right here. So definitely recommend that. But anyway, let's keep going. Next up. We have a little Easter egg having to
do with the robots.txt file on YouTube. If you're not familiar, most websites
have a robots.txt file, where if you just go to the main domain slash
robots.txt, this is a text file that lists out directories on the website
that it does not want search engines to index. And as a side note, these aren't
like secret directories or anything. It's not like to prevent Google from
finding any secret info on these pages. It's mostly just to prevent
the search engine from using up resources, scouring random, useless
pages with nothing important on it. Anyway, the real easter egg here is at
the top, obviously, where you can see it says created in the distant future, the year 2000, after the robotic uprising
of the mid 90s wiped out all humans. So just a funny little thing. All right. I think we're up to number eight,
so we got a few more, and this next one is a hidden page on YouTube
that allows you to opt in and test out experimental YouTube features. So to get to it, you
go to youtube.com/new. And this basically replaces the old
"YouTube Test Tube" it was called where there was a little link kind of at the
bottom of the YouTube page that would take you to be able to test out new features,
whereas that link does no longer exist. The only way to get to it now, as
far as I know is to just know this URL, and then it'll tell you on
here, you can try out experimental features if there are any available. Now at the moment, when I'm looking
at this, there are none available. It just says check back later. But maybe depending on when you're
watching, you can opt into some. And also at the bottom notice, there
is a link to be able to participate in some user research studies by Google. So that'll take you to a page where it
tells you more and allows you to sign up. I've done a few of these over the
years, but don't expect these to come very often, I'm talking maybe once
a year, I'll get invited to one of these things and they basically just
kind of show you a feature, ask your thoughts about something or whatever. But still, if you're interested in kind of
sharing your thoughts on some new features that they might want to ask you about,
this is a good way to sign up for that. All right. So moving on this next one also has to
do with experimental features, but not the kind you opt in for, but rather the
kind that YouTube just kind of imposes on a select group of people cause it,
and experiment, and basically observes how people act with these new features. To determine whether or not they should
implement it to a larger group of people. But what you might not have known
is YouTube actually publishes a list of most of the experiments
they're running on their YouTube Help form in a certain post on there. So if you do see some weird feature
that you're not sure if anyone else has, you're like, "this is new" and
then no one else seems to know about it. You can actually check on this forum
post to see if there is an experiment going on, that describes what you're
seeing, and then you can know, oh, it's an experiment they're doing. And then you can know. You can submit feedback and they'll
definitely be looking at that feedback because you're part of the experiment. So I will put a link to this post in the
description, so you can see for yourself and maybe bookmark it or something. And the important thing to know is
they don't really usually tell you that you're doing an experiment. You just kind of have to know whether
by noticing something different or looking at this page and then seeing that, "oh, wow I didn't even notice
that was different", but now you know. Okay. Finally, number 10, this is another
one having to do with experimental features that you might not know about. And it is you can actually opt in to
use the beta version of YouTube apps on your phone, both iOS and Android. With Android, it's really easy. I'll put a link to the help page
in the description describing how to opt in and opt out. But basically you go to the
opt-in page, you just click join. And then on your Android phone, you just
check for an app update for YouTube and it will replace the regular version with
the beta version and just re-install it. So then you'll have the
beta version on your phone. Now for iOS, it's a little bit
different though, because apple does beta apps a little bit differently. So with this, if you're using an
iPhone or iOS device, you go to the site previewapps.withgoogle.com. And this is Google's site for
getting beta versions of all Google apps, including YouTube. So even though it's not google.com. "withgoogle" is still
a Google owned domain. So you basically click get access and
then you select what kind of device you're using and you can select multiple,
and which beta apps you want to test. And you can select one of the YouTube
ones, but unlike on Android where it just replaces the app on your phone with iOS it actually uses Apple's TestFlight
app, which is a way to separately test other versions of apps. And the page will talk about
this before you download it. So basically you install the test
flight app and then whatever apps you have signed up to beta test will show
up in this app and then you run it from there, not from the home screen. So you don't have to completely
replace the regular app on your phone with the beta one. You'll just access the beta one, if you
want through the test flight launcher. So I think that's kind of nice. It just keeps it a little bit separate
if you don't want to use the beta the whole time, but anyway, yeah, I'm sure
you did not know about all ten of these secrets. If I missed one, definitely let us know
down in the comments and also check in the comments too, because maybe someone
found one that I didn't even talk about. If you want to keep watching the
next video I'd recommend is that one I mentioned before talking
about 10 cool Chrome extensions. So if you like the picture in
picture YouTube extension, definitely watch this video where I talk
about even more cool extensions. I'll put that link right
here you can just click on. So thanks for watching guys. Be sure to subscribe and I'll
see you in the next video.
