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

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

Some of the Alan Kay lectures are on hackertube

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

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

> Media, journalism & propaganda

Amen, we should label it correctly more often. Hard to miss it nowadays, I guess.

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.

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

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?

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 she shouldn't ), but this is just a reminder of much google has changed for the worse.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Interesting idea! Also funny that the fourth recommendation for me was a video with Andrej himself :D

It would be great to have an option to sort videos by upload date, so it's easier to discover recent content.

Really cool idea, you might consider bundling taps when you click a video so it auto-plays instead of opening up the native web browser for youtube. That would make it feel more like the official client. Could easily hide it behind a “buffering” screen.

Seeing Prejudice by Tim Minchin on the front page makes me very, very happy.

Love Tim Minchin <3

I can't find it on GitHub. Is it open source?

Really cool idea. I also realized recently that whenever I enter YT, I enter "nshittified wall of slop"...

What is a 50% thumbnail?

Nitpick, maybe adding the youtube dislike counter estimation for videos might be a nice touch (yes it's an estimate but it's pretty decent). Though on second thought, perhaps these videos don't need them.

I wonder how "spam and low grade content" is defined.

(I'll just put this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dv5Uk9UUx_M here)

Someone did something similar for the current front page: https://hn.video

There was also another one with a more youtube-like UI, which I can't find anymore.

Out of curiosity - was this created using claude code? Cli or gui? I am not even remotely getting that kind of thoroughness from claude with opus 5.5 or anything really. It seems to want to stop as soon as it thinks it figured things out and then the rest of the conversation is just itself saying that its previous claims were wrong.

Really having a bad time with LLMs lately.