It was Friday night at 11pm, I was tired, I went to YouTube to watch something and realized that I was looking at an enshittified wall of slop. Insanely exaggerated thumbnails, dumb recommendations of the same tired topics, truly terrible idiocracy-grade content. I’m sure this algorithm works well for the median person on the internet, but it definitely does not work for me. So this morning (Saturday) I took a hold of my Opus 5.5 and gave it the task: Let’s write our own YouTube clone based on whatever videos have been recommended on Hacker News. And Opus came back with: hackertube.org!

Scrolling this website brings me back to the early days of YouTube — when it still felt like a place for curiosity instead of a marketing funnel.

ⓘ When I was looking this over before publishing, I read that as “marketing funeral,” and honestly? Yeah. That works too.