I used to suffer from pretty chronic eye pain when I was looking at the computer every day for work for 5+ hours. Consciously taking a breaks every 20 minutes has completely the symptoms altogether. Just being aware of how long it’s been without resting my eyes was eye opening (pun intended)
I started this project because at my company, we're still relying on ancient Makefiles as our build system and build tool versioning. I initially looked at using other task runners but they all use some sort of DSL that I think limits their functionality and/or doesn't allow for sharing and extending templates across repos. Nix-tasks lets you use Nix flakes to share common configuration - like your company-wide build scripts - and then import it and add repo specific tasks on top of them.
The project is still very much in alpha but I am using it every day and trying to find any annoyances or bugs before I share it further.
Two months ago I posted an update that I had begun work on my Chrome extension [1] for Relevant. Relevant is 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 had a little bit of engagement on the website, I found myself looking for something that could bring the experience onto YouTube, so I began work on a Chrome extension. It turns out there's a lot more complexity in building a Chrome extension than I realised. It's basically like building a website for the popup window, a javascript server for the background service workers and a message bus for the service worker.
After 2 months' of working weekends, I finally released a version of it that lets users see the categories of the content on the page, discover more channels matching those categories and contribute to the categorisation effort!
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
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.
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?
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.
Over the past few years I've been working on a new website called Relevant, and today I'm launching it under a beta!
YouTube has been my primary source of entertainment for many years. However, I've found that with recent iterations of "the algorithm", YouTube continues to serve me the same types of videos every single day. If you watch one video about a new game, YouTube then tries to show you 50 more videos about that game for the next week. I was frustrated with this experience and wanted a way to find new types of content on YouTube without waiting for it to be surfaced organically by the algorithm.
Relevant is a crowdsourcing website aiming to catalogue all of YouTube. We represent every possible category of content available on YouTube as a DAG, starting from the most vague like "Science" and "Gaming" down to the most specific like "Laptop Reviews" or "Car Mechanics". After logging in, users can iterate through a list of their subscriptions and vote for which category best represents the content for each channel. After enough users have voted for a channel, we assign that category to the channel. These channels are then discoverable through the explore page, with a separate trending page to highlight notable hot or new categories.
On Relevant I hope that people can find new areas of YouTube by seeing what other people have been watching, or by browsing through the tree of categories. Once we have collected enough data, I plan on introducing a recommendation system that can even recommend other channel categories that may be interesting to you. For now, though, I've written a blog post [1] for the beta launch that goes into more detail about the rationale behind the website and the limitations during the beta launch.
I hope other YouTube fans find value in Relevant and I look forward to learning more about what YouTube has to offer from all of you!