YouTube is a quasi-monopoly and one of the most important sources of educational content in our time. Kids use it, and teachers sometimes recommend it.

I am usually against regulation, but in this case I think having YouTube Shorts next to educational content is like a school kiosk selling crack cocaine next to hot dogs.

Very well said. There really should be a public option. Large scale PBS for the internet.

You mean a public digital commons owned by the people instead of malls we could be kicked out of any time?

It's ironic that you call for regulation to address a concern as a comment to a free product that addresses this exact concern.

What's the problem with people building tooling around it?

The third party tooling is constantly at risk of being broken by YouTube. Not sure regulation is the answer either. Any alternative still needs to at least attract creators and cover it's own costs.

Regulation is constantly at risk of having unintended consequences and preventing new entrants and innovation.

We shouldn't create regulations to deal with problems that are being solved by the market

Please point to any sort of competition or current market-based alternative to YT that addresses the concerns above.

Well, certain adult sites do have educational content, often with better economics for the creator than YouTube.

The regulation needed is to keep the tooling working. Require interop

It doesnt because if this gets popular, Google bans it.

A landing page or better a login-free demo mode would be great. Right now all I see is a sign up page, which does not convince me of anything.

The idea sounds interesting and attractive though.

Agree - I wanted to try this and I expect it to work like YouTube or close as possible. I am not watching 5 minute demo or signing up for a random project even if I would love to use YouTube in a more mindful way. Just give me a search bar and allow me to search 10 times for free and then I might sign up.

I am realizing this now, even when I am trying out a new project, I would love to see how it works before signing up and verifying my email address.

Thanks for your feedback, will work on to allow login-free access for demo.

I don't even know what it is based on the first impression. If you're trying to be the alternative to X, a comparison of "how this works" might be enough to get me to give you an email - though signing in to use it immediately feels like YT, not an alternative. Your "Why Choose FocusStream?" points are all over the place and unlikely to resonate equally with your audience. I'd suggest attacking the competition with the one major differentiator and then showing how that works.Example "See video lengths upfront, track your progress, and make every minute count." is not nearly as compelling as "No ads, no autoplay" IMO. Finally, I find this contradictory: "no algorithmic rabbit holes... Tell us your interests. We find the highest-quality videos from across the web" - I suspect what you're trying to provide is curation focused on helping me learn about specific topics vs. serving up what will keep me engaged and watching longer. If that's accurate something like "algorithmic recommendations that REDUCE how much time you spend on our site" would be a unique value prop.

Rakhim, nice to see you. Check out wordspike.com (launched last week), it’s def up your alley.

Hey, this is pretty damn cool! Too bad the Show HN post did not get much attention.

I recommend people to try out the Youtube Enhancer browser extension. I always get baffled when I used youtube on mobile, search is near useless now because of all the crap they throw in the middle of the search results. But beyond that the experience is just very bad.

A few features I like about it:

- Allows you to hide most engagement features like shorts, comments, related videos, etc

- Allows you to set a default playback speed and custom buttons to change playback speed with one click.

- Setting the default video size to "theater mode" (takes all the browser window above the fold, but without going full screen), so you don't see all that crap around the video you just clicked on

I'm not signing in just to find out what your website does.

I think those of us who want youtube without the distractions should start a campaign to convince google to make https://www.youtube.com/learning better. I think even tweeting about it so that our efforts are reported by large news outlets would work. If there aren't enough users asking for this feature, we will be ignored. Someone needs to build a website that coordinates our efforts.

Would be great if there was a signup free demo of some sort. As soon as I see a signup page for something that I want to try I just give up.

This is super. I tried signing up, and it worked,an app would be better. But when I was researching about PMF topics for B2C on Youtube, I always got distracted with other of my personal recommendations it keeps throwing. This allowed me review around 6 videos focused only b2c PMF. Absolutely apt for me in this case. Thanks for building this.

Guys, there was an issue while playing the video, I've fixed it now. You can try it out.

Also, I am seeking to connect with 3-4 people and get their feedback on how can I solve this problem better. If you're interested, you can email me on: ashwin.parihar@outlook.com

Good to see something like this, but you can solve some of the problems within youtube like autoplay, you can disable it. As for the recommendations on homepage you can clear youtube history and pause it in yours accounts activity center¹, for hiding video suggestions, personally I use theatre mode(so that i need to scroll) and extension to disable it. Similarly I hide the YouTube shorts using the extension.

Also, the landing page starts with a signup :)

1. The downside is that you also lose your YouTube Music history.

Except half of it doesn't fucking work.

I click on "show fewer shorts" on the homepage, refresh the page, and still see shorts in the second row. Sometimes I do that 10x in a row to no effect.

I deleted my YouTube history just this week, but my homepage is full of music mixes that start with a song I definitely listened to that are supposedly "deleted" from my history. I would think if I start from a supposedly blank slate that I would at least have to "teach it" that I'm not interested in pop songs that are popular in my corner of the world once again, but no.

My homepage may as well not exist, as YouTube insists of filling it up with like 2-3 niches that I am interested in, but don't want to watch all the time. Nothing new resurfaces there except when one of the people I'm subscribed to happens to make an appearance on someone else's channel.

Scroll to the bottom of the homepage in desperation and instead of showing something new it shows like 3 rows of exactly one channel.

The video recommendations on the side often have nothing to do with the video I'm watching. Listening to music? Here's a political debate. Watching something educational? Here's nothing but two video games.

The "new to you" button isn't at all "new to me", it's "things I've watched but didn't care about it enough to subscribe to".

It's truly fascinating how much I have to fight the product to find something even remotely interesting to watch that's not in my subscription feed.

Ublock origin rule to hide shorts:

!2024-03-07 Hide Shorts - HN

youtube.com##ytd-rich-section-renderer:has(#rich-shelf-header:has-text(Shorts))

youtube.com##ytd-reel-shelf-renderer:has(.ytd-reel-shelf-renderer:has-text(Shorts))

I'd suggest using YT not logged in and within a container. The "personalization" - as you mention - doesn't add much and really just increases your value to YT.

>I deleted my YouTube history just this week, but my homepage is full of music mixes that start with a song I definitely listened to that are supposedly "deleted" from my history

Consider clearing out session cookies, I am under the impression that your recommended videos are also using that as a source.

To me, Youtube and YT music are the same services in different shells, maybe the algorithm uses both (maybe it includes activites from other google products as well) to suggest them on the platform.

That's also a possibility. I've never been a fan of logging into YouTube due to the bad algos and am always greeted with a blank page when hitting the YouTube main page, feels better that way..

I am going to assume the way you have implemented this is that your application has a search component that searches for known topics, loads the videos, extracts subs and stores them in vectorized format inside a database. when a user searches for something you simply lookup this vector data and link the YT video corresponding to it

You could be hosting the cure for cancer and I wouldn’t make yet another throwaway account just to see behind the curtain.

I refreshed the main page and recommended topics disappeared with message "Failed to load topics".

Logout button doesn't redirect anywhere and I cannot log back in - too many requests.

Also remember me button doesn't change state onClick.

The traffic was huge (I was positively surprised), so there were some issues in the API. It's fixed now, do try it out.

Let me check the `Remember Me` button.

Doesn't load any content, and you can't even delete your account.

I don't see anything except a login page, so, no thanks!

It sounds interesting but what exactly does it do?

I tried signing up, it can't validate my email :) after I click on validation link, tried link and button...

Honestly speaking, I did not expect this level of traffic on the site, there was a slowdown in the mail sending service, it is fixed now, please try again.

Looks like it might still be struggling with the HN hug. I tried it, I gave it three easy topics to use, it understood them and tried to produce the web page, but it still says “Videos: 0” for all three groups.

You can still get your fix in quick enough to benefit from some of this traffic spike, go for it! Good luck.

Still says “Videos: 0” for all three of my topics.

Alternatively the Unhook Firefox extension allows you to toggle distracting Youtube elements.

This isn't a perfect solution, but you can bookmark your YouTube subscriptions page.

A few critiques.

1. Your base page doesn't describe what topics can or would be available. What are we trying to learn here? Languages? Science? How to be a better YouTuber? 2. You have a demo video. I haven't watched it. Why? Because I HATE having to watch videos if I could read a description instead. I read at least 10x faster than I can watch anything. That applies to learning as well, but some topics do work better in a visual medium. 3. You say its free but requiring me to sign up. To me that's not free. Maybe its not needing my money, but you're still needing my information. 4. Offer sign up/sign in with other identity providers.

TL;DR - Spend some time describing your product to someone who doesn't know need your product, not explaining it like I've tried other products and need shortcuts.

Thanks for your detailed feedback.

1. Yes, I'll be building a landing page to better place the problem we are trying to solve. 2. What do you suggest for this point? 3. I've received multiple feedbacks asking for a login-free access, so I am thinking around it. 4. Yes, for sure it's in my todo-list.

Understood your point about explanation.

I’m going to make some assumptions… I expect the account is for history, could you store that in a cookie initially, or local storage, and then invite people to create an account to carry history across different machines after they have watched some content maybe?

congrats on the launch

Thanks a lot. Do let me know your feedback of the tool.