HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN (karpathy.bearblog.dev)

It makes me yearn for what we lost. I remember when the Internet was all like this page, and it was bloody wonderful. I hope we get to a point where hosting becomes functionally free, and the brain rotting advertisement spam becomes a thing of the past.

the recommendation system is so sad, its stealing good content from all of us. they just churn the same click back crap

I'll definitely be taking a look, but it seems that the videos are still hosted on Youtube?

The main issue with Youtube are the ad rolls. The video content itself can be great. But I wouldn't wish those ads on my worst enemy. It's mind poison. Straight poison into your consciousness. AI generated ads for every conceivable image and status vulnerability. And they now do this weird thing where the ad is delivered as a pop song. Like a Taylor Swift engineered pop song for a Korean face mask. The song is 10 mins long about how this woman was happily married then divorced then saw her husband with a woman half his age and how that made her feel and how her self worth was tied to her marriage and her looks but also she's not just that but also somehow the solution is a Korean face mask. It was really traumatizing for me. You can see how much it infected my mind. It's poison.

Same feeling. For me the trap was mostly titles and thumbnails, A/B tested to trap my time.

I made myself a thing that tries to answer the title + thumbnail from the transcript, and shows me the answer if there is a good one. Never launched it, but it's at youtldr.com if you want to try.

Opinions are my own.

One of the positive effects of the recent AI wave is that it shows more folks are warming up to the idea of paying a subscription for tech. Perhaps, the next generation will grow up with tech that doesn't rely on addiction to earn ads money. The downside is that the gap between "folks who can afford tech" and "folks who cannot" might grow even more.

Really? I quickly found some awful horrific racist material on "HackerTube". No thanks.

Shameless self-promotion: https://github.com/andunieee/cathode (gtk4 desktop app) can give you a non-bait interface to YouTube that works.

Now this project gives me some ideas of things to implement:

- pick the thumbnail from the middle of the video

- allow curated subscriptions, i.e. I subscribe to some curated list made by someone (in this case it could be the database of videos Karpathy has gathered from HN, but there could be others)

At some point I was almost implementing DeArrow support, but using it for a while I don't think it is too great, often the alternative titles people give are unreliable, and honestly I don't know how they exist without being spammed or trolled to death. I do have SponsorBlock support though (I feel like SponsorBlock would work better if it allowed high-quality AI bots to submit blocks though).

It’s true, we are just optimizing for engagement, which is a first-order (and our best current) approximation of happiness. I’m hopeful that as the attention economy evolves, we will evolve objective metrics that more accurately reflect the long-term health and happiness of users.

YouTube mobile app has a "your custom feed" where you supply English language prompts and get a relevant custom feed. My go-to has been "new and unseen science & technology videos predominantly from people I follow but occasionally interspersed with others' you think I might like in a similar vein"

Exactly what I also felt "refreshing" !

I have the same experience, and I don't think it's just us.

I suspect what's going on is we're experiencing the long-term effects of AI recommendation algorithms getting plugged into everything. I'm not anti-AI. I think neural nets are incredibly powerful tools and I really like using them as an aide for my coding work. But they clearly do only a first or second level of pattern matching(asterisk), and I think that has a fundamental impact on their overall usefulness and desirability.

I can't explain this any better than Melanie Mitchell in her "AI for Thinking Humans," so I'd generally recommend that book to really understand the issues. But one way of thinking about it is that the AI keys in on patterns that are indeed there in its training data, but very often don't pick up on the same patterns as a human or treat patterns "not in the same way" as a person would. So you get the uncanny valley effect where the recommendations share some features of things you like and find interesting, but often miss the "soul" of the thing.

A good example of this is I recently watched the movie "X-Men" (2000). I then got a bunch of superhero movie recommendations. On the surface, this makes total sense. I watched a superhero movie, I get more superhero movies. But the reason I like that movie is it portrays racism/nationalism in a way that isn't totally stereotyped while still being PG-rated and easy to watch, without the seriousness of something like "American History X" (it was also a Patrick Stewart tribute). It's very unlikely that an AI can make that level of inference. I actually would enjoy watching more movies like that (as opposed to your point about wanting variety and something more exploratory), but what are the odds it's going to recommend some vague theme like that instead of "more superheroes"?

I also agree with your point that the underlying assumption we all want "more of the same" is a big thing that makes the modern internet feel more narrow. So you put those 2 together and it feels like we're being put into a narrow Skinner box that approximates aspects of things we like, but is really more of a confined environment designed to extract our time and attention while only fulfilling the shallowest, barest minimum of our wants and desires.

Youtube feeds work the other way around it appears. Content seeks you. Things promoters think you may click on haunt you. There are videos I see are there in the feed and I don't click on because I am not interested and they linger there, trying to dupe me to click on. Absolutely disgusting.

I think many experiencing the same thing but we're way too small drop of a drop in the bucket that it doesn't even resolve in all of their measurements and A/B tests. The vast majority of the "gradient signal" is from normies and their patterns, desires and tastes are different. Basically I think we see a massive deterioration of quality because we are a rounding error.

I found the "new to you" tab on YouTube, which worked well once or twice. After those initial uses though, I couldn't get good results again

I just want to be the one in control of that feed that is curated towards myself. An AI that is local and learns about my likes and dislikes and does not share that info with third parties for their benefit. There is a vast sea of content and a small fraction of it is of interests to me and/or might be helpful to me even if I am not consciously seeking it at any given moment. I should be able to look at its rules, see how it evolves and tinker / reason with it the way I would with a personal assistant or life coach. And I would like to use that to filter out content that is a waste of brain cycles. And to find people, ideas, experiences that I might click with based on its global knowledge of the mindscape.

YouTube has a "new to you" feature which changes your homepage with different videos than your main recommendations.

> It's 100% pure nerd content

well some might use it to listen to Rick Astley's Music

It is also quite ironic that nerds of the 21st century who built social media and a hyper-connected world are simultaneously repulsed by it.

Hopefully your dad yon spend much time here on this specific one. There is a disturbing amount of Joe Rogan recommended videos the VCs here love.

Also Karpathy is probably getting a take down notice by this next Monday, around 10 to 11 AM Pacific Daylight Time (PDT)...

Or also you can use the chrome extension

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/dearrow-better-titl...

The creator of this extension is the same as the creator of SponsorBlock. It's more of a crowdsourced.

I am not sure the personalize algorithm is based on what you want to watch, but what will keep you watching. That’s a measurable KPI.

I like the idea of playlists, might even work to ask Claude to make a few. Did you have in mind the ability to create and publish them on the site somehow?

Has anyone tried to download? The download links are slightly broken (but they work if you try differently).

Seconded! (please)

Yeah, this is the first thing I looked for and when I couldn’t find it I easily decided it’s something I would never come back to. Add this feature and it’s something I would come to frequently

added a few minutes ago!

plus one when in programming mode; i have playlists on YT; but this helps to focus... and mostly I find HN has very interesting things that spawn a ton of thoughts...

people like us don't have that much time...

Well, build your own in 2.1hrs (or 2 minutes if you have access to the source)

Yeah, worth checking the TOSes:

https://developers.google.com/youtube/terms/developer-polici...

https://developers.google.com/youtube/terms/developer-polici...

Understandable: creators often update their video metadata (title, description etc.) or make public videos back to private or unlisted, and it is in their own right to do this.

Third parties that copy data will cache stale versions even when the creator doesn't want to share them anymore. Seems fair that YouTube doesn't condone this.

Ah, I like this idea. I also had a different thought of accessing YouTube content in the sense I wanted to know all the tech live streams happening today on a particular topic.

The Algorithm is what YouTube sells. This is only a static collection of videos with YouTube embeds.

Great stuff in there! Thanks for sharing.

Do you have web activity turned off or use a separate old style Youtube account? Mine is also bad but I think it's because of those for me.

I suspect they know perfectly well when they can't make money from someone, so they deliberately serve up boring crap to save on hosting costs.

I was thinking it would be good if there was something similar for kids. They seem to fall into a whirlpool of trash content.

Bad by what metric? They're interested in getting you to watch ads, they couldn't care less what you want.

For YouTube nerds I curate a list of channels. Size of list 3993 feeds: - https://github.com/rumca-js/awesome-database-top/blob/main/l...

From that list 731 are blocked in my rss feed. I do read and cache rest.

I sometimes check through website what new has entered the system. It is surprising to see something there new. It is so exiting to see something outside of my bubble.

YouTube algorithm has a lot to comb through, but I am too surprised how suggestion are bland, and unattractive. I am also surprised how difficult is to find new channels through YouTube search.

My YouTube feed is pretty good; it's full of technical discourse on topics that I enjoy learning about, ranging from electronics hacking to civil engineering. That's probably the result of a long number of years of continuous training:

Good video, with a positive combination of presentation quality and a topic I enjoy? Watch it -- maybe now or later, but it gets watched. Thumbs up. Maybe even subscribe. That's what I'm there for.

Mediocre video, whether due to content or presentation? Watch parts of it, but probably not with any sense of completeness. No rating.

Bad video, with content I don't enjoy or with off-putting presentation? Stop watching. Thumbs down, and/or back out to use three-dot menu and "Not interested"

Bad ragebait scaremongering video with emotionally-distressing title? No watching at all. Three-dot menu and "Don't recommend this channel."

---

I get a lot of good stuff. Some mediocre stuff. Very little bad stuff. Almost zero ragebait.

It works well enough that an unfiltered, logged-out view of YouTube is completely and utterly appalling by comparison. That place is fucking awful without training.

(And no ads, because ads have never been a thing for me on YouTube and I experience no compulsion to change that.)

>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've got years of history and it does the exact same thing for me. I watched one news video about the pope and now half of my feed is Catholic news channels.

I buy a mattress on Amazon and I get recommendations for... ten other mattresses? Like what's the logic here, I have an entire garage where I just keep stacking them up to the ceiling? Just show me something else. Is there a human being out there whose like "I bought a French press last week, what could I need this week, five more French Presses?"

I do not understand how these dystopian surveillance companies with their infinite data points are so bad even at this

> Buy a VPS, publish to it, buy a domain and link it, then keep paying for both in perpetuity.

I've always been put off by the continuing financial obligations personally. Like I'll invest a considerable amount for one time things easily, but year after year with constantly increasing costs? No fuckin way.

would love to see a write up on this too. my own tech experience has been all back end stuff and doing everything myself, so tying into "the way things are done online" aint so easy. and my patience for reading 3-4 books on it is close to zero.

I didn’t touch anything manually I only talked to Claude the whole project, except for YouTube API key, domain, its DNS record and VPS node boot.

His last video was ~1 year ago which by the standards of late career youtubers isn't that long ago.

Hbomberguy's last video was 3 years ago for instance.

I don’t like that he keeps renaming it. This is “Humans Need Not Apply” and it even has its own Wikipedia page under that name!

And yes it’s deeply true. I remember watching this at the time and it was one of the reasons I got into AI. (That, and watching Person of Interest).

I even kept re-linking it every year around Christmas, watching it on a yearly basis. And then …

> I wonder why he stopped making youtube videos.

I've listened to plenty of podcast episodes with CGP Grey and he wasn't secretive about the fact that he does not really enjoy work that much. He also maintained that once he quits he won't make any announcements, but rather just silently disappear.

I assume he has decided that he has enough money and retired.

He (or someone else) is still changing the old video titles and thumbnails to optimise views, though. This particular video used to be called Humans need not apply.

Yes this would be great. Otherwise it might contain videos with fake news, which were rebutted in the HN comments but you’d never know.