2026年天津（第一次） Passage D

On 23 April 2005, YouTube posted its first video. 20 years later, YouTube is the world’s number one streaming service, where users clock billions of hours of watching every day. That’s the vision of YouTube the company promotes — professional, entertaining and loud — but from one perspective, it’s all a facade.

Through another lens, the essence of YouTube is more like this video from 2020. Before I watched, it had only been seen twice. A man points the camera out of his bedroom window as the winter snow falls. “Here it is,” he says. “The falling snow.” A bird lands on a nearby fence. 19 minutes go by. Nothing happens. When we just focus on what’s popular, we miss how the vast majority of people actually use YouTube as uploaders, and overlook the role it plays in our society, says Ryan McGrady, a senior researcher.

This is not just the case with YouTube but with every major online video platform around the world. For example, if you spend some time dipping into the corners of Douyin and Kuaishou, two of China’s most popular online video apps, you could see a side of the Internet that sometimes feels lost, one full of pure, unvarnished (质朴的) self-expression. It’s an entire world that the algorithm(算法) won’t show you.

Most of these videos are poor produced, lack context or just meaninglessly show this and that. They exist because people need a digital attic to store their memories. It’s an Internet unshaped by the pressures of algorithms — a glimpse into a place where content doesn’t have to perform, where it can simply exist. And perhaps the most important thing about these videos is that if you watch enough of them, you can piece together a complete narrative of life, work, and society in a specific region and time period. This knowledge could be — and sometimes is — more valuable than a book or an online class.

“The Internet is deeply troubled, and we can’t ignore the way tech companies are exacerbating(使恶化) those problems,” McGrady says. “What makes me hopeful is that when you find a way to look at how people are really using the web, a lot of it still feels like the early Internet. It’s expression, communication, and connection. Fundamentally, it’s a place where regular people share themselves and do wonderful things.”