10 YouTube Secrets and Easter Eggs To Try RIGHT NOW

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 is that 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 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. so just a cool little feature that you probably never even knew is there before.

 

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, it's so bizarre but also hilarious. It went completely viral, As you see on the page. When it went viral YouTube employees 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 is 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.

 

So 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 just on the page generally just type out awesome and it will actually change the progress bar to flash a bunch of different colors. 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 with this.

 

Next 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's for which I'll explain later, 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 a hundred sixty-three thousand plus 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 and lighting up, another one is instead of having a red square block it's a red outline of Rick Astley “never gonna 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 some relatively recent videos that were uploaded a couple months ago, 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 reading this. So yeah definitely a strange YouTube channel. 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.

 

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 and picture a 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 and picture feature but it only works on YouTube itself, whereas this extension allows you to go on any website and still watch.

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. 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.

 

The 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 just says check back later, but maybe depending on when you're reading 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 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 saying 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.

 

Finally number ten this is another one having to do with experimental features that you might not know about and it is you could actually opt in to use the beta version of YouTube apps on your phone both iOS and Android with Android it's really easy. 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 to reinstall it so then you'll have the beta version on your phone.

Thank you so much for reading, Bye!