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It's so refreshing browsing this compared to YouTube, it feels like I don't have to constantly be on high alert at being baited into some trap. Makes you wonder what kind of internet could be possible if all these tech giants weren't just optimizing for engagement and addiction.
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"
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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).

> can give you a non-bait interface to YouTube that works

Is there something like this for Twitter?

Very interesting. Does it have dark mode?
> pick the thumbnail from the middle of the video

Sounds like you may be interested in DeArrow: https://dearrow.ajay.app

SponsorBlock is related too: https://sponsor.ajay.app

So basically how YouTube worked in 2005? :)
Can I search with your app for ONLY the latest uploaded videos and filter for content length?

Will it display whatever bullshit recommendations YouTube feeds?

Really looking for an option to only have "current stuff" - YT constantly recommends me stuff from 3 years ago which I already watched, even with my highly curated account.

Global search is provided by YouTube, so I can't guarantee anything.

I could add some local filters if necessary, but doesn't YouTube already provide its own filters based on when the video was published? Cathode exposes these.

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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.
But we didn't lose it - it's right here, and if this one goes down you can make your own with 2 hours of an Opus 5.5 subscription. Honestly, I whipped up something similar to this the other day for Arxiv papers.
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Watching youtube with Firefox + ublock origins still gives you an experience free of the peppering of insufferable ad breaks
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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.

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Fantastic domain. I hope you get whatever you want out of it.
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{"deleted":true,"id":50320643,"parent":50320462,"time":1793483820,"type":"comment"}
the recommendation system is so sad, its stealing good content from all of us. they just churn the same click back crap
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.
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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.

No, what will happen is they'll have a subscription and then also ads.
Let's be realistic. Most of the videos on hackertube.org wouldn't exist if it weren't for the enormous sums of money YouTube pays their creators because of...ads.

I would also be more impressed with it if they created their own video processing and serving stack.

This is verifiably not true. The majority of the value I get from youtube aren't even by monetized videos.
This is just outright wrong.

The vast majority of all yt content makers do NOT pay the bills with ad rev but sponsors.

These platforms are sucking every penny they can from everyone at every step because number must go up. That is what they are suppose to do being public.

A private company like steam with a sub pay model where creators still can do sponsorship videos throwing out the attention algos would be a better product and still be plenty profitable.

Not all companies should be public and often the best are not.

I (and millions of other people) literally had a netflix streaming subscription for 15 years (up until I cancelled it last year after 4 or 5 price hikes). The desire and ability to pay for stuff has always been there - but at the same time, there's a reason youtube has youtube content and netflix has netflix content.
> The desire and ability to pay for stuff has always been there - but at the same time, there's a reason youtube has youtube content and netflix has netflix content.

Funny thing is: I can subscribe to Netflix for one month a year, and watch everything that I want to watch within a week or two ... which is to say there isn't much there that interests me. With YouTube, I can typically find an hour or two of content to watch per week.

I'm not claiming that YouTube is better. It's simply a case of different people having different interests. While YouTube is almost certainly a poor option for higher budget productions, it seems to work out for lower budget productions where the producers are willing to seek out their own revenue streams.

Netflix was easy, switching to it meant saving money for all the TV addicts.

Compare it to the widespread refusal to pay for Youtube Premium even as ads get worse there.

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{"deleted":true,"id":50323229,"parent":50321092,"time":1793515305,"type":"comment"}
Businesses will seek out more than one revenue source for the same product. For example: newspapers and magazines had advertising, even though the customer paid for the product. Cable television had advertising, even though people paid for cable (and cable companies paid for the channels).

It isn't going to stop data collection either. If anything, it will improve the quality of the data collected.

Why would you be posting other people's opinions?
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.

Pssst, Firefox and UBlock origin still solve that even for youtube.
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Thank you for giving me a glimpse. Reading half through your comment made me realize I never saw YouTube ads since the AI cancer, naturally, I wondered what it feels like.
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Really? I quickly found some awful horrific racist material on "HackerTube". No thanks.
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