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Show HN: A personal YouTube frontend based on yt-dlp

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319 points modmodmod | 6 comments | 15 Mar 25 15:45 UTC | HN request time: 0.901s | source | bottom
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greggyb ◴[15 Mar 25 18:17 UTC] No.43374252[source]▶
A question for the author or anyone else who has experience in similar solutions.

Is there any good solution for discovering new content? Much of the time, I want to stick to my subscriptions, but I do enjoy content surfaced by the algorithm at least once weekly, sometimes more often. My concern in taking my viewing off-platform is twofold: 1) going to YouTube will prompt me with all the stuff I've already watched off platform, and 2) any changes to my viewing habits won't be reflected in algorithmic suggestions.

Am I making any bad assumptions or missing anything that would be useful?

As an example, I usually get conference presentations surfaced for me, but I don't track conferences to know when I should go looking for presentations. YouTube is good at surfacing these for me.

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1. tmpz22 ◴[15 Mar 25 18:26 UTC] No.43374312[source]▶
I view Discovery as a social problem where the content you want is almost always clustered between a relatively small number of creators, regions, etc.

Technically it then becomes less of an indexing everything problem and more of a find a few cornerstone creators, say Khan academy, and occasionally branching out.

So to answer your question I don’t thing the cost/benefit for automating discovery is much better then spending 20 minutes and finding enough cornerstones to fill you for 100+ hours of content. Or similarly finding a social group like an rss feed, say in ios development it would be fatbobman, and sourcing it from there.

Time to source content isn’t the bottleneck worthy of software solutions, yet for monetization reasons discovery is the vice grip of social media and made to be the most important thing.

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2. siavosh ◴[15 Mar 25 19:03 UTC] No.43374501[source]▶
There’s a lot of truth to this but one of the most powerful elements of a discovery algorithm is finding things you completely did not look for, ie Christopher Columbus and the western continents. Like your cornerstones are iOS and recipe videos but you discover the right dance video and it changes your whole life.
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3. Unearned5161 ◴[15 Mar 25 19:48 UTC] No.43374776[source]▶
I owe many interests in my life to the little recommendation tab next to a currently playing video on youtube
4. tmpz22 ◴[15 Mar 25 21:47 UTC] No.43375369[source]▶
> you discover the right dance video and it changes your whole life

You're going to have to explain this one, how would a dance video change my life? Being exposed to something new that becomes profoundly life changing seems like a romanticized notion and not a realistic one especially within a monetized environment.

We're exposed to new stuff everyday, just because .0001% is truly impactful doesn't justify watching 100_000 short reels of ads, even if Google and Facebook REALLY want us to.

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5. triyambakam ◴[16 Mar 25 00:08 UTC] No.43376036[source]▶
I.e., that is (remember is and i)

E.g., for example (remember example and e)

6. siavosh ◴[16 Mar 25 02:30 UTC] No.43376565{3}[source]▶
Well I’m sure there others who will agree that something small and completely unexpected has had a profound influence in their lives. The simplest example is something so novel and interesting opens you into a deep rabbit hole that changes your career and or who you meet, befriend or marry. The lack of a good recommendation algorithm is exactly the problem where these content platforms is you feel like you have to watch 100k videos to have a chance at such an encounter.