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YouTube is one of the biggest and most visited websites in the world right now, but people are in disbelief after realizing what it originally began as back in 2005.
Created all the way back in February 2024 by former PayPal employees Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, the video-sharing platform has undergone a dramatic evolution and fundamentally revolutionized how people watch and create videos on the internet.
YouTube remains to this day the second most visited website in the world, sitting behind only Google, its parent company, with 71,973,289,021 views in September 2024 according to Semrush.
While the platform has fundamentally changed since "Me at the zoo" was uploaded by founder Jawed Karim in April 2005 - with YouTubers now facing lengthy prison sentences, influencing election results, and even being accused of having a 'creepy' smile - it's initial origins might still shock you.
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In a post on the r/youtube subreddit, one user has used the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to reveal and perhaps remind others on social media that YouTube used to be a dating site.
The site, which coincidentally began on Valentine's Day in 2005, can be shown as having a completely different interface to the one that we know now.
Importantly, we can see a section just below the username and password entry that details the dating element, asking visitors to the site to fill in their gender, who they're 'seeking', and the age range of their desired connections.
We can also see tabs for 'Favorites', 'Messages', 'Videos', and 'My Profile' at the top which are far more reminiscent of a dating platform than the video sharing site we know today.
The earliest entry on the Wayback Machine shows this on April 28, 2005, but on April 29, just the next day, we can see that the gender, preference, and age range selection has now disappeared.
It isn't until June 14, 2005, that we see the more traditional YouTube homepage, featuring none of the dating site-like aspects that were present in the site's earliest form.
Unsurprisingly, the social media reaction to this has been that of disbelief, with many unaware and in shock that this was YouTube's original purpose.
One commenter refuses to believe that dating would be a part of the site, stating that "knowing the web back then, that part of the page is probably a banner ad for some dating site, not for YouTube itself," but they are indeed incorrect.
Another remarks that this reminded then of "back when Hey Apple was the funniest video on YouTube" - although we'd still have to wait half a decade before the Annoying Orange would make their video debut.
"YouTube back then was an entirely different place," says one commenter, and it makes you wonder how many websites we use now will rapidly change in 10 to 20 years time.
