Riley Walz misses the old internet—even though most of Web 2.0’s golden years happened when he was still quite young. When he was still in high school, he was behind a gambit to get a fake congressperson verified on Twitter. It was covered by CNN. Earlier this fall, he gained internet infamy as the creator of Bop Spotter, a website connected to a phones in San Francisco’s Mission District that posts Shazam results for all the music played nearby.
A couple weeks ago, Walz caught the internet’s attention, and admiration, again when he revealed IMG_0001, a website that randomly pulls up YouTube clips from the thousands of them that were sent to the video-sharing service from the early iphoness models’ “Send to YouTube” feature.
Walz’s projects, and the ones he has cooking, seem honed to tap into internet culture’s almost insatiable thirst for nostalgia of itself. Although he’s a 22-year-old tech-smart San Franciscan now, his ideas seem to come from the mind of a young hopeful who came to the city to code in 2008, back when single-serving sites like d-e-f-i-n-i-t-e-l-y.com and amiawesome.com ruled the land. Each opens like a portal into another era when people just wanted to make something fun, and when “win the internet” didn’t sound like a euphemism for doxxing a VTuber.
Walz understands that he was still in grade school during the early Web 2.0 halcyon days, but he also knows just how much nostalgia there is for it. As someone who was covering tech before he was making it, I wanted to ask him what he thought—and whether his throwback ideas actually represent the future. Here’s what he had to say.
Angela Watercutter: I’m curious about your background. I’ve seen you referred to as a technologist, but what do you prefer as your job description or role?
Riley Walz: Just engineer is fine.
Are you independent or do you work at a tech company?
I have my own company with a friend. We’re super small.
First, tell me about IMG_0001. Where did that idea come from? It was at least somewhat inspired by a blog about the old “Send to YouTube” feature, right?
Yeah, a friend sent that blog post into a group chat, and I read it and I was like, “Oh, this is super, super cool. And I was just going down a rabbit hole where I was searching random IMG numerical combinations on YouTube for close to an hour. I thought it'd be cool if I could get all of them and get even more random with it, because yeah, when you search on YouTube, you’re not getting the full picture, because it's showing the ones that are more popular, or had more views. I thought it'd be cool to get the ones that are zero views that people hadn't seen before, the videos that are one view. It's crazy to be able to think, “I'm supposedly the second person in the world to ever see this video.”
I never thought of it that way, but yeah.
So then I was playing around with the YouTube API, and I found a way to be able to search for lots of videos and found more than 5 million. I was like, yeah, I'll just throw this a new website. This took maybe four or five hours total from when I saw the blog post. The website was pretty much done over the course of a couple days.
Did you go public right away?
I was showing it to my friends. They were all just mesmerized. “Oh, this is really cool.” I have a lot of small projects like this where I start them over the course of the weekend and just put them out there and see what happens. I guess this one really resonated with people, which is super cool.
“Send to YouTube” always seemed like a way for people to share videos with small groups of friends or family in the days before you could just send a video in a MMS. But did you find any that were magically like 500,000 views? Did you scrape those out?
There are a couple zero-view videos that I’ve seen, which is crazy. The way I did it is I searched for every combination of IMG_0000 to 9999. Then without the underscore but a space instead. Then I filtered. The site only shows videos that have less than 150 views and are between five seconds and 150 seconds in length. Just so there’s none that are super short and none that are super long. It also filters out videos posted after 2015.
Why that timeframe?
So it only shows videos that are about a decade or older. It kind of sets the scene: These videos, they’re a different era.
We’re in our Old Internet Era.
It's kind of weird now. If I just were to point a camera at my friends and start filming them, they'd be like, “What are you doing?” Or they’d act differently on camera. Back then, I was just 12 years old. I only really could appreciate it back then. But you could just put your camera up and people act very authentic and they're not worried about this going on the internet and thousands of people seeing them so they don't act differently. When I pull up a camera now to people, I might as well just be shepherding in a thousand people to go look at them instantly.
Yeah, also people aren’t always thinking “Will this go viral?” Back then it was just people goofing off.
It's just a very pure type of video. It's almost like these videos are kind of extinct now. They won't really be produced this way ever again if it is just really, really cool to see them, like a time machine.
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Right, and it’s a reminder that the original YouTube video, “Me at the zoo,” was just a short clip of a guy talking about elephants. No one was thinking of brand deals. There was no MrBeast. We also have different concerns about privacy.
Yeah, you’re not going to do something that’s too weird. The videos on [IMG_0001] are so authentic. People are dancing. Every video, there’s something interesting about it. When I was making it, I thought that one in 10 videos would be interesting, but every video, there's a story.
What did you find?
There was one, a 10-second video. You could tell it was this boy's prom, and he was with his girlfriend, maybe. And his mom was taking pictures of him, and he came up to his mom and was like, “Mom, chill with the pictures.” And it's like a 10-second story, but you could tell exactly what's happening.
A lot of these videos, they're very short and it just gets right to the point.
They’re almost like Vines in that way. Back when we couldn’t record for hours or upload for hours. Everything had to be quick. It was also back when sending videos from your phones to YouTube was the only way to share your niece’s birthday or whatever.
It's cool too because [when I shared the site on] Twitter, a lot of people were tweeting me. It was some video they found that was funny or cool or sad or interesting or whatever it might be. So it's been cool looking through those.
Did you have a fave?
There was one, I’m assuming it was a video of a girl and her boyfriend and they were exiting a Target or at a store and she waved her hand in front of the door sensor like a wizard, like a Harry Potter moment. The guy is laughing behind the camera. It had two views. Every video is like that in some way.
Reminds me of how we used to think that sharing stuff online would help people understand their commonalities. Obviously, that’s different now. That’s a gentle way of putting it, I guess. Do you feel like your work is trying to call back to those long-ago internet days? Is that intentional?
It never really started as that. Each project is something that I'm like, “Oh yeah, it'd be cool to just do that.” Even if no one looked at this website, it would still be worth it for me to make for myself. I dunno, a lot of people have been calling this art or me an artist, and I'm like, I don't really like labels like that. I feel like I'm just a guy who knows something about technology who just wants to see something cool, and I just share it with people to see what they think. And yeah, it's weird that it's happened now twice in the past few months where something has spread around.
What kind of feedback do you get?
People will reply on Twitter, or email me, that they feel something. One of my friends texted me yesterday and was like, “Yeah, I was actually having a really, really bad day, but I looked at the site, I was watching it for an hour, and just felt really, really good at the end of it.” I wouldn’t have guessed that would be a possibility.
Totally.
I just remembered somebody on Twitter retweeted my tweet [about IMG_0001] and said the perfect thing: “This is the perfect intersection of the type of thing that makes the internet special and worthwhile but also if I think too hard about [it], I’m gonna have a depressive episode.” That tweet has like two or three times more likes than mine.
Yeah, there’s a lot of crap online right now, and when you find something that brings you joy it can feel like the Holy Grail.
I think nostalgia in any form is really, really cool. And yeah, it just feels like a unique time. The internet where things are now very corporate and it's very one-to-many instead of many-to-many, and it kind of makes the world feel a little smaller when you're like, “Everyone that's on the site is able to watch a video that only has five views.” I hadn't even thought about that until now. But yeah, it is really cool to kind of see that happen.
Do you see big surges in traffic when your sites go viral?
The server itself is totally fine because it's all pretty light pages to serve. But yeah, I think the Bop Spotter site had 300,000 visitors the week that it took off. This one I think is 190,000 so far.
Tell me how Bop Spotter came about.
I use Shazam all the time. When I hear a song out in person and listen to it later I feel the way I felt when I first heard it. I remember who I was with and where I was, and I just like it a lot.
I was like, “It'd be cool to do Auto Shazam, but for one locations, 24/7, 365, and just see the trends that emerged and what kind of songs they hear.” Over time, it kind of feels like surveillance a little bit, but it's super innocuous. It's just songs.
What about the device you used? The one that’s hanging up in the Mission District listening?
I just bought stuff on Amazon. It was like a hundred dollars’ worth of parts, like a box and an old phones and a microphones and some plants and brackets and whatever. So everything came in and I just put it together one weekend.
What is the phones doing?
There were some technical challenges because it's not actually using the Shazam app. It's like this old androids phones that runs a script where it's in airplane mode for most of the time, but then every 10 minutes it will connect to nearby public Wi-Fi and then upload the last 10 minutes of audio to my server. Then on my server, it will chop the 10-minute audio file into 10-second clips, and then pass each clip to Shazam’s API, and then if it finds a match, it adds it to the database, which adds to the site.
How’d you install it?
So it was a Saturday morning, maybe 11 am, and I went there with a friend. We hoisted a ladder up a pole in the Mission. It took a half hour. I was wearing a yellow safety vest. No one really questions anything that's going on if you have a safety vest and a ladder. And yeah, it's still up today. I saw the box went down a few days ago. I'll go and fix that. I'm pretty sure the box is still there, but I think the androids phones just crashed or something. I’ve got to restart it and maybe figure out what the problem is with that.
I was going to ask if anyone has found it yet. Does anyone know where it is?
I haven't shared the locations online or even a picture of what the box looks like, just because I don't want anyone to get too—for the city to have a very easy time finding it if they want to take it down. I feel like by now though, it's pretty obvious where it is. Just think about the most chaotic place in the Mission, where it could be, it's there, which a lot of locals probably can guess. I think almost every SF publication covered it. So at this point, if the mayor's office wanted to take it down, they definitely could, but it's still up, so that's a good sign.
As a former resident, I’d say it’s near the 24th Street BART station, but that’s just me.
Close, but not there. But somewhere that’s sort of like that.
Another random question based on something I saw on your site. Were you the one who created that fake profile for someone named Andrew Walz who was allegedly running for Congress in 2020 but didn’t exist—then had his account verified by Twitter?
When I was in high school, yeah. Do you remember that? That's funny.
I remember because I remember everyone kind of laughing about it. What happened after that?
That's pretty much it. The account got suspended. It was a weird story because it was a week before Covid happened. Somehow I got hold of a reporter at CNN. I had no idea how to talk to the press or anything. They actually came with a camera crew to my high school in upstate New York and interviewed me in a classroom, and it was such a surreal experience. And then once they heard the story, Twitter just suspended the account. But yeah, that was before you could pay for a check mark, so it was much harder to get a blue badge at that point.
I just have to ask, you’re not related to Tim Walz, right?
My dad is Tim Walz, but not that Tim Walz.
Ha! So, do you know what your next site is going to be?
I want to actually set up a script that scrapes the list app for the Citi Bikes, and every minute will track where each bike is in the system. So I want to make a website that’s like Citi Bike Shocker, where you can enter a bike’s ID number and see where it’s been. So, like, it started the morning in Brooklyn, then someone took it across the bridge into Tribeca and then it went uptown to Columbia or something. It’d be cool to have states on which specific bike in the system has been the farthest, which one hasn’t been used in the longest time. But yeah, that’s the idea.
Please send that to me when it’s up. I need the serotonin.
Will do.
Loose Threads:
“Sure, who cares anymore,” or some variation on that theme, is creeping up online. Basically, it’s people posting stuff that seems a little odd, with the resignation of someone who understands that everything is a little odd right now. For example, have you heard about Cinnamon Toast Crunch bacon?
The Nosferatu movie is getting its own special popcorn bucket. It’s not quite as intense as Dune: Part Two’s sandworm or the Deadpool & Wolverine one. It’s just a coffin. A coffin full of popcorn.
Speaking of Dune, here’s “Bene Gesserit” set to the tune of “Bennie and the Jets.” Good luck getting this earworm out.
