HackerTube, and the Age of Custom Feeds
Karpathy wrapped a few thousand videos recommended on Hacker News into a YouTube-style page, and by Tuesday there were clones for books, Wikipedia, films and repos. A look at why the format travelled so fast.
On Saturday evening Andrej Karpathy posted a link to Hacker News: "HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN." The idea was simple: a YouTube-style page over a few thousand videos, pulled from tens of thousands of Hacker News comments going back to 2007. By Wednesday morning the post had thousands of upvotes and hundreds of comments. That is a lot of attention for a seemingly simple idea, and I think there is something deeper in that reaction.
The thread was mostly people describing the same relief in different words. One commenter said browsing it felt refreshing next to YouTube, "like I don't have to constantly be on high alert at being baited into some trap." Another called it "100% pure nerd content" and joked that watching all of it would make you "the smartest, most annoying person ever."
Twenty hours later came HackerBooks: "HackerTube, but for books mentioned on HN." Thousands of titles that at least two different commenters had brought up, each one linked back to the comments that named it. It did almost as well as the original. The author said Claude wrote most of it, and owned the flaw in the ranking: it counts mentions, so a book people praise and a book people dunk on end up in the same pile.
Wikihack followed on Monday, the same trick applied to Wikipedia articles, and it landed well enough to start its own argument. In that thread somebody floated the name Hackipedia, and somebody else asked what was wrong with a name that already exists. There is a Hackerpedia at hackerpedia.org, and it is a cybersecurity and pentesting dictionary, last edited in January. It has nothing to do with any of this. The name was taken before the genre had a name.
By Tuesday the genre had a scene. HackerTV turned HN's favourite videos into 24/7 channels and found an audience. There was HackerCinema for films, HackerReels for short videos, hnrepos for repositories. Somebody proposed HackerHackerTube: "my website that recommends HackerTube variants posted on HN." Somebody else wished for a front page full of "Show HN: HackerFoo" posts for two weeks. The wording sounded like a joke.
The worried version arrived as an Ask HN: "Isn't anyone worried about this flood of HackerTube-but-for apps?" It got a handful of upvotes. The original got thousands. Nobody was that worried.
So what's the fuss about?
The truth is that most people don't like their YouTube feed. It's a constant reminder of how, despite our best intentions, we take the path of least resistance and watch unproductive, low quality videos (at least that's me :)).
And that's YouTube's problem. It rewards the videos you watch. It doesn't take into account who you want to be.
A forum that has spent nineteen years arguing about what is worth reading is a recommendation engine that already put in the hours.
That instinct is the one behind innuce, pointed at all of YouTube. You ask one question. innuce searches YouTube, reads the transcripts, and lets a few videos through, each with a reason attached. The refused ones stay on the page so you can see the cut. The measure is the person you said you wanted to be. One credit per question, ten free to start.