tldr: I created a site for sharing your YouTube Home recommendation feed with a short link because I’d love to see what does the algorithm recommend to you. Here’s my feed.

why i built this

Recently, I was thinking how I wish there was a way to share recommendation page between people as a way to discover new content. Reason for my wish is simple and selfish: I’m chronically online, I love watching videos, and, most importantly, I love the new stuff.

I love the feeling of being blown away after discovering a new niche, a new community, a video explaining a viral meme that I’ve never even accidentally stumbled upon, etc. Anything that I couldn’t even imagine existed. I don’t know why I love it so much. Maybe it’s because it makes me feel what I felt as a kid, when everything was new and exciting.

More often than not it isn’t something that is actually new, just something that existed outside of my algorithm.

algorithmic bubble

Nowadays I feel stuck inside my recommendation page. I already have a general idea of what I’ll get there. Not literally, but it will always be something related to something I’ve seen before or liked by people who are similar to me.

But how am I supposed to discover something that I couldn’t even imagine existing? Wait until the algorithm decides to show me a video as a way to measure engagement? This works sometimes. However, the most interesting stuff (the obscure, the shocking, the uncomfortable) will never get recommended to everyone, only to those whom YouTube thinks it’s safe to show it to.

Basically, all of this is a lot of motivational speech for a rather simple tool that I vibecoded over the course of a few days: https://myfyp.link/.

The idea is straightforward:

  1. Open YouTube Home in your browser
  2. Click a button in the extension
  3. It collects the video links and corresponding metadata (title, author, etc) from the page
  4. It sends them as JSON to the server
  5. You get a short link you can share, and a link to delete (each snapshot is automatically deleted after 7 day lifetime)

You can find the entire thing on GitHub here.

what i hope happens

My hope is that it will catch on and I’ll occasionally see people sharing links like that on different forums to get a snapshot of people’s interests across the web. And if it does catch on, maybe we’ll get a first party implementation of a feature like that on social media platforms.

I have to be honest, the snapshot I linked at the start of this article is not the first feed I got after opening YouTube. I pressed F5 a few times. There’s something uncomfortable with sharing something like that, but I think that’s part of the fun of it.

Finally, I think that a service like this has a chance to start some interesting conversations, like how recommendation pages affect our opinions, or how we can be friends with someone yet have completely different tastes.