Internet Freakshow

Unfavorable Semicircle

Internet Freakshow - Unfavorable Semicircle

Unfavorable Semicircle

Unfavorable Semicircle is a YouTube channel that was created March of 2015, but video uploads did not begin until April 5th. While many YouTube channels are low traffic or have videos that are not immediately apparent as to their purpose, this channel was substantially different.

Every title on the channel began with a sagittarius emoji, followed by 6 random digits.

Videos were uploaded in large quantities, way too many videos to be produced and uploaded by hand. It was immediately apparent that this channel either relied on several individuals producing and uploading videos, or some sort of automated robot that created and uploaded videos. There’s not really a great way to tell a difference in this context, but the random 6-digit titles are a clue to me that these were created by some automated system and not individuals.

These videos are unique to say the least. Some of these videos were only a few seconds long, but the longest video posted to the channel was a staggering 11 hours long. Some videos were very pixelated images, others were just single colored dots in a field of brown colors. Some videos were totally silent, containing no audio track at all. Others contained distorted noises or ambient sounds.

One of the more prominent videos on the Unfavorable Semicircle channel was one labeled, “Lock”. This video is sort of difficult to explain, but basically it consisted of flashing colors with occassional breaks in the flashing to just a plain black screen. On some of the flashing colors, there were small dots, sort of like the “floaters” you see if you close your eyes and press on your eyelids.

This video was deciphered. Basically if you take every frame in the video and the color it presents, but instead of showing them sequentially, you turned each frame into a pixel and lined them up, you’d eventually end up with a photo of a lock. This photo, though, was not a crystal-clear image of a lock. It was very pixelated, and mostly black and white.

In fact it barely even resembles an image of a lock. Of course if you know the title and know what you’re looking at, you could see how it could be a lock. But to me it looks kind of like a drawing by MC Escher, kind of grainy and gritty.

Users have tried to find the source image of a lock but have come up empty from what I can tell.

So this video was successfully decoded, and this decoding could be a clue as to how to decipher other videos. Unfortunately, however, using this approach does not work universally. And this approach can’t really be automated to test for other videos, because while it is a simple task to turn each frame into a pixel and line them up, it becomes a lot more complicated to figure out where the line breaks are and where to start a new row to reveal the image. And the quantity of videos in this channel only complicates things further. So while this was a promising lead, not much else came from this effort.

So what is this channel exactly?

The obvious one is that it is an ARG, or an Alternate Reality Game. This seems to be the default answer to anything weird or mysterious on the internet. If you don’t know what it is, just call it an ARG and move on with your life. It is a convenient way to explain away strange things on the internet, but I think if this were an ARG it’d be more obvious and more solvable. It would seem whoever made this made it way too complex that no one can figure out how to escape the YouTube portion of the game.

The other prevailing theory is that it is an art project. Again, maybe a little too convenient and sort of a lazy explanation. It’s possible, but it’s also a completely unsatisfying answer.

Is this an automated test of some sort?

It didn’t take long for internet detectives to start trying to reveal what this mysterious YouTube channel was, comparing it to another mysterious channel with obvious similarities called Webdriver Torso. Like Unfavorable Semicircle, Webdriver Torso also uploads many, many videos of varying length. The videos are also not traditional videos, instead they feature just 2 boxes. One red, one blue, and they move around the screen.

And just like Unfavorable Semicircle, Webdriver Torso appeared on YouTube with very little fanfare and no obvious description as to what it was or the purpose it served. Webdriver Torso, however, was eventually solved. It turns out that Webdriver Torso was a YouTube channel created by YouTube itself, and it was used for internal and public tests. It served to test video upload speeds, and conversion to and from many different video types that were uploaded to YouTube. It was basically a playground for Google to test out features and wasn’t ever supposed to be made public, but once it got popular, Google had to fess up. They have now taken full credit and ownership of Webdriver Torso. In fact, if you Google the term, the Google logo itself turns into the familiar red and blue blocks seen in many of the videos.

So this has turned into a long explanation, but the short answer is that yes, of course this channel could be a testing channel of some sort. We do have to rule out Google being behind it though, as they suspended the channel in February of 2016.

Please stay tuned to hear other explanations of what this channel could be after this word from our sponsors.

So if it’s not Google running these tests, who could it be? Maybe a nefarious group out to “beat” YouTube’s copyright flagging algorithm? A lot of people have probably experienced uploading a video to YouTube, only to be automatically flagged for copyright infringment due to a song playing in the background or something. And I’m sure most of us have seen videos on YouTube taken from our favorite movies or TV shows, but the frame is flipped or stretched or otherwise modified to avoid being flagged by YouTube. What if this channel was made to test YouTube’s content algorithms with the eventual goal being to bypass copyrights or move videos to the top of people’s playlists?

A few people have floated the theory that these videos served as some sort of internet numbers station. The videos contained

With the suspension of the YouTube channel and with all other leads dying out, it seems unlikely this mystery will ever be solved. Most internet sleuths have moved on to something else by now. There is still a Discord channel devoted to it, however when I popped in, it did not seem very active.

An unsatisfying end to this Freakshow, to be sure, but part of the internet is letting some things remain a mystery and enjoying the weirdness for what it is.