[redbackthomson]

Working on a browser extension to make it easier to find content on YouTube that fits your interests.

I watch a lot of YouTube videos and have found it very annoying that YouTube latches onto one or two topics that you've watched and only recommends that type of content over and over again. Even if you use their "Not Interested" tool, not a whole lot changes in your recommendations.

At the end of last year I launched Relevant - a crowdsourcing website where users can categorize the channels they watch into a defined hierarchy of categories ranging from broad topics like "Science" and "Gaming" to more specific ones like "Phone Reviews" or "Speedrunning".

Although I've had good feedback on the website, engagement has been relatively low and I think that's because it's a big ask to have someone navigate to the website to find the content. This year I decided that I'd bring the content to them by making a Chrome extension that lets users interact with Relevant directly from within YouTube.

It's still a work in progress but I'd love to get a first version out within a month or so to start spreading the idea and gathering feedback. If this is of any interest to the people here on HN then please let me know what you'd like to see most on your feeds.

https://relevant.watch/

[Timwi]

Hm, I tried to contribute, but it asked me to categorize a channel I've never heard of (DefendTheHouse) and no matter how many times I click “skip” it keeps going back to the same one.

I also notice that you first said “browser extension” but later you said “Chrome extension”. Are Firefox users going to be out of luck?

[redbackthomson]

Hmm that's strange. Perhaps you have two Google accounts with different subscriptions? When you sign in I grab your subscribed channels and that's what I send when you categorise. You can check the "Subscriptions" page to see exactly what data we pulled.

I did say Chrome browser because with the deprecation of manifest v2, I had to make a choice about which to support. I decided given Chrome's larger market share that it would benefit the most people sooner. However I'm building it in such a way that porting to Firefox shouldn't require much additional work.

[Timwi]

I do have multiple YouTube accounts (channels) under one Google account. I initially logged in as one YouTube channel of mine that I wanted to categorize. Only then did I find out that it looks at subscriptions. So I logged out and logged back in as my main account which is subscribed to the other one. Then I hit the problem.

[redbackthomson]

Hmm okay. Maybe some wires got crossed in the back end. Perhaps Google OAuth doesn't distinguish between accounts and associated both sets of subscriptions with the same user? Interesting

[downboots]

Might pull good recs from https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=youtube.com

[HaZeust]

I strongly, strongly recommend adding video essays as a category as well - they're very big now.

[redbackthomson]

Yeah absolutely! The category list is meant to be dynamic as the industry changes and new forms of contents crop up. I can't stay on top of it myself, so I'm always looking for suggestions/maintainers from anywhere.

If you have a look at the category tree, where do you think video essays would go in that?

[bouh]

You might be interested by tournesol.app