What Is The 'Unfavorable Semicircle?' The YouTube Mystery Explained

On March 30th, 2015, YouTube was changed forever, as the channel Unfavorable Semicircle was created. Though this channel would remain under the radar for a little while, once discovered it would set off a full-scale investigation into its utter lunacy, which would culminate in its destruction. But what exactly was this channel, and was there even a point to it?

What Is Unfavorable Semicircle?

A YouTube channel that, starting on April 5th, 2015, would go on to submit over 40,000 videos to the website before its termination by YouTube staff for 'spamming.' The videos themselves would be named innocuous things, such as Brother1 and Brother 2, or a string of 6-digits, usually accompanied by the Sagittarius symbol.

It didn't take long before people began to notice this channel with a high upload number, with entire hours being spent with a new upload taking place every ten seconds, and started to investigate.

The Research

Most of the videos, which now only exist as archived copies of the originals, were unintelligible. There was usually some sort of audio disturbance, or no audio at all, and the visuals present would range from a single dot on a background that would periodically move around, to a stationary static that would last a few seconds.

This is because the videos themselves also varied greatly in length, with some uploads being multiple minutes to several hours in length, and others being mere seconds, tantalizing online detectives who were convinced there was some manner of riddle attached.

The Findings

While going through the videos before the take-down, it was discovered that several of them had strange qualities to them. It would appear as though many of the videos would show a duration of time, such as 4:20, but upon reaching that time the video would continue on, playing bonus footage like the hidden track on a CD.

Other videos, such as the infamous "Lock," would actually cause browsers and video-playing apps to freeze and malfunction. Spectrometers were used in conjunction with motion tracking to create pictures of the distorted audio and of the small movements that the dots would make on the multi-hour-long videos, creating some results that the community found quite interesting, but ultimately could not decipher.

The Ban Hammer

In February of 2016, close to a year after the creation and video uploading of Unfavorable Semicircle, it had gotten too big, causing mainstream sources like the BBC to take notice and increase the visibility of the channel. While unknown if this actually caused it, YouTube staff quickly took the channel and all videos down on February 15th, 2016, shortly after it was reported by the BBC.

This led to a conclusion without any real answers coming from it, as there were far too many videos uploaded to properly back them all up. It is widely feared by the community at the time that anything remaining would only have partial clues to whatever the true intent of the channel was. This left a lot of online detectives to scratch their heads at what remained, and try to spread the word to others.

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