---
title: HackerTube
link: https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/hacker-tube/
source: karpathy-bearblog-dev
published: 2026-10-31T17:00:00Z
updated: 2026-10-31T19:09:43.646235Z
first_seen: 2026-10-31T19:30:57.182345052Z
summary: Instead of YouTube, watch HackerTube!
content: extracted
html: 2026-10-31-hackertube.html
remote_preview:
  url: https://bearblog.dev/static/og-image.png
---

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](https://hackertube.org/)!

![image](https://bear-images.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/karpathy/image-2.webp)

Opus downloaded all comments of HackerNews, filtered them down, ran Sonnet over them in a workflow, got rid of spam and low grade content, and narrowed them down to just 40K comments recommending a YouTube video. In total, we get 6,454 YouTube videos that have been recommended by a few people on HN from 2007-2026 across 150 topics. Then we wrap it up in a YouTube UI, get a domain, push to a VPS, secure, harden, optimize and voila!

HackerTube:

- Contains quality content
- Uses the 50% thumbnail instead of the uploaded thumbnail
- Custom and good ForYou recommendations without any user accounts, storing state in local browser session
- Keyboard shortcuts
- Export of the site's data available to give to your agent to easily create your own version

This takes ~2 hours now. I can breathe again. Thank you Opus 5.5 <3.