This YouTube Video Has 3,500,000 Likes but Only 301 Views
“Easily one of the best Easter eggs on the platform!” says a comment under the video
Some things fascinate you because they look other-worldly.
And then some things fascinate you because of simply not being in their usual state. You are so used to seeing them in a way that when they change, they leave you in awe.
The latter is what happened to me a couple of minutes ago. I could so not hold myself from jotting it down. And sharing it with y’all.
It’s all about a YouTube video that has more likes than views. To be precise, exponentially more likes than views. And no, there’s no bug; it’s intentional.
You might have encountered a temporary view/like count parity, and that too resolves within a couple of hours.
Unlike any other case, this one video has a view count of 301 for over a decade!
The unique reason
This is hands down the second most creative Easter Egg on YouTube. After Tom Scott’s real-time view update in the title, obviously!
So the video I’m talking about is on “Why the view count freezes at 301.”
Got something? Exactly!
This video explains why (in older days) the YouTube view count would freeze for some time once it reached 301.
According to the video description, they finally fixed this glitch in 2015. RIP, the exceptional one.
But because Ted Hamilton from Numberphile, the channel, solved this whole mystery of olden times, YouTube (or maybe an intern at Youtube, who knows?) did something exceptional to make this piece immortal and the glitch hard to forget.
They capped the view count at 301.
So, no matter how many views this video gets, the view count will remain at 301. Forever.
Now that’s called keeping history interesting and alive.
Had YouTube not done the magic, we’d have never known there was a time when 301 views was a milestone. The railway station where your video train took a halt for some time before proceeding any further.
Here’s another cool YouTube Easter egg that I was talking about earlier in the article.
The title of this Tom Scott video updates the view count in near real-time. That’s so cool!
For those of you who don’t know, 1 crore = 10 million.
So, yes, this piece of code by Tom is still working after 3 years.
Do you know of any other Easter eggs on YouTube? Because, quite frankly, it’s meticulously hard to find one compared to other Google products like Search. If you do, let me know in the comments below.