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"

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).

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.

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.

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.

Exactly what I also felt "refreshing" !

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.

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.

Really? I quickly found some awful horrific racist material on "HackerTube". No thanks.