When you're watching YouTube videos that are more than 15 years old, there are often some key markers within those videos that you've stumbled into what many might call the "early social internet." Whether it's the default aspect ratio, video quality, or the content of the video itself, some videos literally serve as a time capsule depicting what it was like to be in an online community in the late 2000s or early 2010s. Today's Vlogbrothers video is the perfect example of this, depicting a format we just don't see very often anymore.
Welcome -- or welcome back -- to Vlogbrothers Rewatch! This is an ongoing series of articles in which I chaotically document my questionable journey through rewatching every Vlogbrothers video on the long-running YouTube channel. Using this playlist, I'm going through these videos chronologically, one per day, starting from the very beginning. This is partially for fun, but also an experiment to see how returning to early YouTube videos shifts our thinking about how the social internet has -- and hasn't -- changed over time.
Today's video is a compilation of video submissions from channel viewers all edited together into one larger piece all connected by a theme. This is not something that happens on the internet as often as it used to, probably for many reasons.
In the case of the Green brothers and their shared channel specifically, it likely got to a point where there were (a) too many Nerdfighters and (b) far fewer free hours in the day to edit together video submissions of this volume. There's usually no such thing as too many Nerdfighters, except for when every Nerdfighter is invited to submit a video -- well, I guess that's what the Project for Awesome is for, right?
There are some parts of the early internet that just won't ever be the same, but we can look back on them and appreciate what they've since led to -- especially all the good things that have sprouted from these early "secret projects."