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Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)

261 points david927 | 1 comments | 23 Feb 25 23:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.209s | source

What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
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aantix ◴[24 Feb 25 16:53 UTC] No.43161756[source]▶
A new YouTube app/player, for my kids.

It allows us to control the algorithm. It’s all LLM translating to YouTube search queries under the hood.

Visually it looks the same.

The suggested videos come from predefined buckets on topics they love.

E.g. 33% fun math, 33% DIY engineering, 33% creative activities.

Video recommendations that have a banned word in the title/desc don't get displayed e.g. MrBeast, anything with Minecraft in it, never gets surfaced.

For anyone interested in using it, send me an email.

I'll put you on my list. And you can contribute ideas to our community Google Doc.

jim.jones1@gmail.com

replies(1): >>43215555 #
1. conductr ◴[01 Mar 25 03:36 UTC] No.43215555[source]▶
My kid is still too young for YT and I’m not sure what age group you’re targeting but there’s a huge mass of people that do not like YT for the early years. And try to avoid it for as long as possible. I think this is a niche to tap into if you are interested in monetizing this as a better experience for these types of parents. This could be the toddler to 10+ just whenever parent decides to allow it but wants to do it in a controlled way. I don’t know if I’m in the minority, because I’m kind of in a bubble (fancy private school environment), but a lot of the other parents I know are YT-free homes and even iPad free but that’s at age 6 right now. I’m hoping to stay away from it for at least a few more years with my son. Anywho.

I’d definitely use an app that gave the kid recommendations and some discover-ablilty that the YT algorithm provides (probably with some more pre-filtering) except just as tiles/gifs previews and they had to “request access” to any video to play. Or have some redefined categories as you mentioned. Then once a video was allowed, it would appear as available in the app via yt-dlp or similar.

This does 2 main things I prefer as a parent. I get control over the content. It removes the instant feedback /random access loop of on-demand streaming. For some things it might even be good to control how many times they can watch it , or if they have to ask permission again, etc. Not sure if you could bolt on / use as a base but this kind of customizations for stacher would be perfect.