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This was a chat room feature that YouTube used to have. Unfortunately, when I performed a Web search, I could not find much evidence of its existence besides a short article from 4 May 2007 giving some basic information about it and a short YouTube video concerning Streams, which was uploaded on 2 October 2008. Apparently, if the short article is any indication, Streams existed as early as May 2007, but I only discovered it much later; between the second half of 2008 and early 2009 is the best estimate I can give.
I remember that one day, while I was logged on to my YouTube account and using the site, I noticed a new Streams button in the Connect with [username]
box (which was below the channel description box), so I clicked on it and was brought to what was pretty much a chat room that played the same YouTube video simultaneously to all the current participants. Each user in the Stream could line up a new video to be played to everybody else, and every YouTube user got their own Stream. I am aware that YouTube has had live streaming for quite some time, but Streams was not live streaming: the videos must already have been uploaded to YouTube first before they could be played back in the Stream.
At the time, I used my YouTube account primarily for trolling, and so soon after I discovered Streams, inevitably I took to trolling them. I would go into random strangers' Streams and use an auto-typer to flood the chat; I remember very clearly that two pieces of text I used to spam were the lyrics of the theme song of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (a reference to an old 4chan meme) and the English-translated lyrics of the national anthem of the Soviet Union. As for videos, I would usually line up Spengbab videos for playing, particularly dandy spengbab
, Spengbab.
, and spongebab
; various speeches by Hitler; or other shocking and disturbing videos I happened to find. Of course, I ended up getting kicked from the Streams pretty quickly, but when that happened, I immediately moved on to another one—after all, there were more Streams than I could ever troll in any reasonable amount of time.
YouTube eventually removed Streams later on in (I believe) 2009, after (I suppose) most folks became bored with it and stopped using it, so this method of trolling is now a thing of the past. It was fun while it lasted, though.
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This page last modified on 27 March 2021.