Turn your YouTube subscriptions into a 2000s cable TV guide. Flip channels, watch what's on, and relive the golden age of channel surfing.
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By noah_buddy 2026-03-1319:49 I love this concept. I was recently thinking about how I used to be able to skip from one channel to another when an ad break came on. I would love the harness on a smart device to be like this so that I may switch between the Hulu and Netflix apps at will. Why should I have to restart the app each time I navigate in? Why do the apps even know that I am switching around?
By eegG0D 2026-03-1319:03 This is such a clear example of what I call "Signal over Noise."
I’ve noticed a major market shift recently where people are becoming paralyzed by the "firehose" of content. Information scarcity used to reward knowledge acquisition, but we now live in an era of information abundance, which requires better pattern recognition and synthesis.
In my own work building AI systems, I always say that leverage is a function of your skill multiplied by your clarity. Most "brain rot" happens because we outsource our clarity to an algorithm that is engineered to keep us emotionally volatile and stagnant. By returning to human curation, you’re providing the kind of focus that actually recharges a person rather than numbing them out.
I’m also a huge fan of the "no accounts" approach. I talk a lot about data privacy and the importance of keeping your personal "mental OS" protected—keeping data local is the ultimate firewall against being treated like training data for a system you didn't opt into.
I often tell founders to "launch faster" and "keep it stupidly simple" for V1. This nails the core "aha moment" without unnecessary complexity. Curation is a massive, underserved opportunity right now. Great work shipping this.
It just so happens I'm right in the middle of trying to change how I watch YouTube at my computer. Despite my best efforts, I find myself getting sucked into shorts, so I'm starting investigate if I can take advantage of YouTube RSS syndication. I recently build yt-dlp and got all the dependencies sorted out, so I can bring videos to my machine locally. I'm also checking out elfeed[0] which is an Emacs based RSS reader, and elfeed-tube[1] which further customizes the elfeed experience for YouTube as well as adding an mpv integration that lets you control video playback directly from Emacs.
By karthink 2026-03-1319:00 As a clarification, you don't need elfeed-tube to subscribe to YouTube feeds (channels or playlists) with elfeed, or to watch the videos with mpv. elfeed-tube only adds text to the feed entries, in the form of more video metadata, transcripts and synced playback with mpv.
Also, mpv supports lua scripts for a variety of actions on YouTube (or other streaming) videos, such as showing you YouTube's recommended videos in the video player, clipping and downloading videos, sponsorblock and submitting sponsorblock segments, and so on.
I've been doing this for almost a decade, and I do recommend it. In my experience, just importing my YouTube subscriptions into a feed reader was a positive experience. I've had a daily digest of mostly interesting videos and rarely (if ever) the urge to browse YouTube.
But with YouTube's recommendation algorithm out of the picture, it does mean that you'll have to find some other way of discovering new channels.
Turn off your watch history. It disables the front page and shorts, but you can still watch any video you want and also follow your subscriptions. You still get recommendations next to each video but I find those much less problematic personally.
Unfortunately, with watch history off, YouTube still pushes Shorts in the subscriptions page (at least on mobile web, which is where I primarily use YouTube).
By cubefox 2026-03-1319:34 The Unhook browser extension gets rid of that (and optionally other things).
By michimagdesign 2026-03-1319:00 [dead]
You've probably already done this, but first thing, turn off autoplay and make sure it stays off. Much easier to not get sucked into things when you have to actively click on them.
Turning Autoplay off, and getting rid of ads (Youtube Premium is well worth it across all devices) is a big level up. Blocking shorts is the other thing.
By darepublic 2026-03-1319:23 There are solutions for blocking shorts. Ie unblock origin filters, as seen previously on front page of HN
I did this too, I have pi that downloads and combined a bunch of rss feeds every 30min (cron) and downloads the vids, I browse them with Thunderbird on my desktop, I inject a special link to the mp4 on my pi. So I can just watch vids at 192.168.1.106/videos/X.mp4 using the Firefox mp4 player.
Did it in ~300 lines of node.js, was trying to learn how to use JS for server stuff, seemed like a good idea at the time. It still works 5 years later, but it stands as a reminder to me to never use async/await.
By normie3000 2026-03-1318:19 > a reminder to me to never use async/await
What issues did you face with async/await?
By bombcar 2026-03-1317:07 I do something similar as I hate interruptions of various kinds; what I'd love is a way to show a YT playlist in something like Jellyfin, where it downloads the "next" episode while you're watching the current one.
As it is, I can do that somewhat manually and it makes for a nice interface where I'm sure what the kids are watching.
By tssva 2026-03-1317:11 There are greasemonkey scripts available which hide shorts from appearing.
