current.tube was a website that displayed a realtime feed of videos being uploaded to YouTube in the form of bottles falling in an ocean. YouTube has hundreds of hours of video uploaded every minute and relies on it’s proprietary “black box” algorithm to serve up the content most likely to keep you engaged (regardless of the consequences). Unless you're creating content which caters to this ever evolving elusive algorithm, uploading a video these days can feel like you’re tossing it into a vast sea of content, hoping it washes up on someone’s shore... so we set out to create that shore, and it was beautiful... until the stream stopped.

current.tube exploited a bug in YouTube's search API which made it possible to get a raw stream of the latest videos being uploaded to the platform, a hack which allowed us to circumvent YouTube's algorithmic feed. Unfortunately that bug has since been patched. Here's some documentation of what it was like before our ocean was silenced.