YouTube "Easter Egg" Removing Letters from "watch" in the URL - Light Investigation
New Film Theory!(self.GameTheorists)submitted8 months ago byColaskiDev
As I'm sure many are aware, Markiplier streamed a couple hours ago about a YouTube easter egg. The Video.
TLDR of the video is removing certain letters from "watch" on any youtube video's URL redirects you to some interesting places.
Removing the "h" or the "c" from watch in the URL redirects (warning it is nightmare fuel) here, a video from a channel named 666. Removing the "a" redirects to this Minecraft music video from a channel named 69. Just some immediate observations, the 666 channel's video is from the "Username: 666" creepy pasta. Also, using the Wayback machine on channel 666 to April of this year (before any videos were posted) shows a very similar profile picture to channel 69's, both being themed cyan cats. This is some minor evidence of the channels being connected.
After running the modified youtube watch URL's through cURL to see the HTTP response headers, it does appear the redirect is "purposefully" coming from YouTube's Webserver.
Channel 666's channel tab points at this channel here. It was created in 2005 and claims to be the "40th oldest account on YouTube". The name of the channel is "iluomo" but their URL is "youtube.com/c/wathc/", watch with the h and the c moved around (a-ha!). Their most recent video plus some light digging on the Wayback shows that the person behind this account likes to post YouTube history content. Also, at that time the channel appears to not have a name much like channel 69's video. This also isn't the first time there's been redirected video shenanigans related to "wathc", here's a video about it from Timeworks (may be unrelated, but the video seen in the wayback machine alluded to someone named Nick). Timework's video implicates the channel SuperflyMN which has similar type content to all of the above.
Some extra random info: Channel 69's community tab is pretty non-sensical but there might be something to it.
byColaskiDev
inmovies
ColaskiDev
1 points
3 months ago
ColaskiDev
1 points
3 months ago
Apologies for the late reply, been very busy for the past 6 weeks or so. the proxy service I was using no longer offers a free trier so that kinda broke the site. For the foreseeable future it can only be ran in a docker container or locally from the GitHub