HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN

sc970

How many tokens (or $) does something like this take to make?

liquicity

Nice idea will watch though some - I made something similar but for food vids (filters over YouTube chefs - such as only vids with ingredients) https://mealplannr.io/discover

privacyishuman

I like this a lot. I was just thinking about a site where you could share your YouTube cookies and then use anybody's curated algorithm because you can curate it quite fast in signed out mode. Could you block all the trackers from loading from https://www.youtube-nocookie.com on your side?

farrelle25

What a great idea. Does anyone know of a way of 'getting' / downloading all those URLs (maybe with the video title)..? I'm afraid of the site disappearing.

mentalgear

Appreciate the effort, yet I think there is a place this is needed even more: > It was Friday night at 11pm, I was tired, I went to YouTube to watch something and realized that I was looking at an enshittified wall of slop. Please do the same thing on Social Media: Facebook, 'X', reddit, instagram, etc . Maybe find a 'hacker signal' that identifies quality content across those platforms and have them aggregated for the public so we don't have to spend time in the fascist network prisons. The greatest trick - if it even can be pulled - would be setting it up in a way that it can't be sued out of existence by the angry platform overlords - if you can do this, then you are truly a genius, sir. Free the people.

vfclists

Where is the source, so I can roll my own specialized video site?

jumploops

I’m always surprised how bad YouTube’s recommendation algorithm seems to be. Maybe it’s because I don’t watch enough videos, but it’s sort of like Amazon, in that it will suggest the exact same content/topic. I rarely use TikTok, only to view links people send me (similar to YouTube), but the recommended content is miles ahead, making it much more difficult to close compared to YT.

morphle

Some of the Alan Kay lectures are on hackertube

gosen

Nice idea, thanks Andrej! When will you add HackerTube Shorts? (kidding :D)

jahala

This is great, would love filters for duration and sort by upload date

sejje

> Media, journalism & propaganda Amen, we should label it correctly more often. Hard to miss it nowadays, I guess.

gpugreg

How do the categories work? I'd download the video transcripts and embed the text (maybe summarized first). This way you could support custom categories via embedding similarity.

mixtureoftakes

I wish there was a way to sort by recency, if i'm mainly interested in finding obscure gems from like last 6 to 12 months of ai and tech updates

cromka

I pay for YT premium but noticed the quality of recommendations is subpar yet I still end up wasting time watching it. So I decided I need to limit my feed to my subscribed videos only, which YT app makes annoyingly difficult. How does HN handle this? I suppose downloading videos for consuming outside YT own app works, but what's the best solution for this, especially with Apple TV as a player?

iugtmkbdfil834

I currently use downloaded and curated youtube videos on my local server ( mostly for my kid so that I don't have to deal with youtube autoplay or her clicking something kid would ), but this is just a reminder of much google has changed for the worse.

reorder9695

I find it amazing how close the front page of this is to what I actually watch/want to watch on YouTube. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but it feels like an unpersonalised feed (besides being based on Hacker News) shouldn't have a significantly better hitrate for me than YouTube's "personalised" feed.

GodelNumbering

This is such a good use of tech! Although I have heard in the past that youtube is quick to ban any use of its content on a third party site. I hope I am wrong and this stays.

beaconflint

Recency sort needs a pick between comment date and upload date, since a 2012 talk linked last month is exactly the gem you'd want.

zahrevsky

Do you plan to update the site with new videos and comments?

twalichiewicz

Interesting project, but have you considered publishing the curated videos as automatically maintained playlists (organized by topic, popularity, or recency) on a YouTube channel? To me the most valuable part of this is the curation pipeline. I'd love to have access to those recommendations without needing to adopt an entirely separate viewing experience.