About ViralWorld

Start on the front page and keep going. Every record has Previous, Share and Next under it, so one thing leads to the next without a search box in between, and ViralWorld keeps track of what you have already seen so Next does not hand it back to you.

Or arrive somewhere specific: what is going around now, the funniest things on the internet, its biggest memes, its animals, the videos everybody knows, or the history of the most-watched thing on it. And if you only half remember something, describe it — that is what the search here is built for.

Under each one is the part a player cannot tell you: where it came from, who made it, when it happened, and what it turned into.

A viral video is rarely one file. It is an original upload, a hundred re-uploads, a dozen remembered names and a few outright imitations. ViralWorld records the Moment once and attaches every place it appeared to that single record.

That is why searching for what you half remember works better here than searching for a title: the name you remember is usually not the name the file was given.

On the platform it was published to, and nowhere else. Nothing is downloaded, re-hosted or copied here. Every player on this site is the source platform's own, loaded only when you press play, and every record links back to where it came from.

Attribution is not permission, and this site does not claim otherwise. Naming a creator or a platform is a statement about where something came from — it is not a licence, and it is not a claim that anyone approved of being indexed.

Finding out who first published something is genuinely hard. Re-uploads outnumber originals, upload dates get rewritten, accounts are deleted, and the copy that went viral is frequently not the copy that came first.

So this index separates two claims that look alike: "the original" and "the earliest copy we currently know of". Where only the second is supportable, that is what the page says. It will keep saying so until evidence changes it. How dates, origins and sources are decided.

Records whose media has disappeared are kept. What a thing was, when it happened, what people called it and what it turned into outlives any one file — and an archive that deleted its own entry every time somebody else deleted a video would not be an archive.

It sometimes will be. These are the things worth telling us about, and each is handled differently:

• The player is dead. The source has gone and this site has not noticed yet.
• The attribution is wrong. The wrong creator, or an account that uploaded a copy being described as the person who made it.
• Privacy. A private person, a location, or an identification that should not be here.
• You made this and want it out. A creator or a rights holder asking this index to stop pointing at their work.
• It is harmful or illegal.
• A fact is wrong. A date, a name, a claim about what happened.

A person reads every one of these and records what was decided, including when nothing is done and why. Privacy, rights-holder and harm reports are treated as urgent. There is no comment section and there will not be one — this is an index, not a forum, and a public complaint box about other people's videos is a different product with different problems.