Unfavorable Semicircle is the name of a series of channels on YouTube which garnered attention for the high volume and unusual nature of the videos it publishes.
Contents
Origins
On 30 March 2015, a YouTube account was created with the title UnfavorableSemicircle. It is unknown if any videos were posted before the 5th of April when 1247 videos were posted, all silent. The channel continued to post videos at incredible rate all titled with the Sagittarius symbol and a random six digit number. Until early February, Unfavorable Semicircle was uploading videos at a rate of just over one every 10 minutes. But since February 5 2016, that rate skyrocketed, increasing to almost three videos each minute.
Attention and disappearance
There is no indication that the YouTube channel made any efforts to attract attention, but due to the volume of uploads and strange nature of the videos, observers started to take notice. Reddit threads brought attention to the phenomenon. Blog and media attention followed, including articles on Atlas Obscura and the BBC. Unfavorable Semicircle was going viral. Then, at approximately 15:40 EST, on February 25, 2016 the Unfavorable Semicircle YouTube account was suspended by YouTube for Terms of service violations.
Investigation
After going viral, a small community came together on Reddit to investigate the channel. On the 21st of February 2016 Reddit user its_safer_indoors registered the domain unfavorablesemicircle.com providing a database of all videos and a dedicated wiki.
Speculation as to what the channel might be for includes: an Alternate reality game, the work of a highly focused individual, a test of the YouTube platform itself (similar to Webdriver Torso, although that theory is unlikely as Google themselves suspended the account) an online numbers station, and outsider art.
The meaning of the videos and the intent of their creator(s) remains unclear. One key discovery was that many of them contain individual frames that can be assembled into larger pictures. These composites, however, are equally mysterious. The audio in the videos range from distorted carnival music to barely-comprehensible speech to what might be encoded binary audio.
New accounts and channels
On the 15th of March 2016 garbled text was discovered on the Google+ page linked with the terminated YouTube account. This was decoded to be source of a Twitter account and also contained a link to a new YouTube account. Both these accounts are named Unfavorable Semi. Since then, there have been several "copycat" channels re-posting the videos but these remain the only "official" accounts.
This was the beginning of the "modern era" of UFSC, and a huge amount of data continues to be posted, although there are few solid conclusions to be made as to the underlying reasons. On YouTube and Twitter, there have been many series of videos (some with over thirty thousand videos apiece) which often alternate with one-off unique videos.