Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasonkostempski | Hacker News Reader

One step closer to the only thing I ever wanted, an app that lets me whitelist the channels. Without having to create an account too. The list will be small enough to store locally and pass with every list request. I never want to see another video about colors wrapped in bible verses for the rest of my life.

View on HN

Same, I'm interested in Programming, Chess, History and Engineering.

YouTube recommends "Secret Alien Spaceship you didn't know about" or some equally inane bullshit.

It's so bad I used ublock origin to just filter out that entire vertical section.

The recommendations are simply useless to an end user.

I watch youtube a LOT and have 3 or 4 different primary interests, and I regularly spend a fair amount of time looking for new channels, etc typically with no success. And then occasionally, I will sometimes come across a perfectly relevant channel with 1 million+ subscribers, that the youtube algorithm has never suggested to me as a channel, or even any of the individual videos. It is so inept that it seems impossible to be accidental - obviously that makes no sense at all, but then knowingly allowing twisted videos to continue existing in children's channels makes no sense either, yet here we are.

Spotify does similar things with its discover weekly-lists, but at least in their case, the motivation somewhat obvious.

I don't think payola is a think for Youtube videos yet, though it seems inevitable that there's a market opportunity there.

Me too! YT Kids sucks in blacklisting and I don’t understand why can’t the parents whitelist some channels.

Like a Google Reader for videos!

Hmmm... Yes! I just realized that's exactly what I do for myself, I subscribe to YouTube channels using RSS and I have no YouTube account. For kids though, it would need to be able to display the thumbnails and play the video directly in the client (probably not possible with YouTube's API and probably not legal to do another way). They like playing things (a lot) more than once too, so it would probably need some features like keeping track of what they watch for more than a few seconds and keep those video hovering around in the lists for a bit. But, yes, it should basically just be a specialized RSS reader, however, I don't think we're ever going to get that from Google.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com