Yeah, I think there’s some stress about getting holiday stuff done, some about wrapping up work projects, some because I’d just gotten into a bad sleep schedule or got lazy in the cold… but as always, it’s time to move past the reasons and excuses to make more progress. 😄

I need to share back more, will try to keep an eye out for things that might make good posts. I do miss that about the old place, used to see more resources and advice just randomly go across. It can be a distraction, but also great motivation.

Mix of ups and downs this week.

I’ve gotten into to worse time-wasting habits on my phone, tending to mindlessly play chess or scroll Lemmy, etc etc during small downtimes. Need to snap out of that and stop letting Anki cards pile up.

Also started to drift a little into looking for resources too much. Love a good educational resource, but sometimes I find myself seeking those out insteading of using the ones I have. A handful is plenty.

On the upside, I finished my first novella in Spanish. (Not counting that short story collection I read a couple years ago.) Reading a paper book written by a native speaker, aimed at native adults, feels like a pretty good benchmark of progress. Did I understand it all? Not even close. Did I read fast? Nope. But I read through, followed along, finished, and enjoyed it.

Seriously! Even after knowing what it is, I look back at the picture and can barely see any hint of it.

Well that looks really nice. Interested to hear more info. The little armor thing at the end, the title, and the ‘new path forward’ tidbit make it sound like it’ll have some interesting twist.

Thank you for sharing, I had no idea this was a setting! That makes it a lot easier to get the other links.

From OP’s post in another thread about this:

The Title & Descriptions are AI generated based on the original Descriptions & The Video Transcripts. The original descriptions rarely reflected the video contents so that’s why I did that to make it more obvious what the Video is about, unless you prefer descriptions that just contain links to affiliate programs or empty descriptions. The Videos are still original & unchanged so I don’t see a big problem. Also every video has a Feedback option if you find something that you disagree with.

(To be clear, I’m not necessarily endorsing the response, just relaying it.)

Gaming Historian comes to mind. (Caveat: he’s no longer doing YT full time, so the uploads are a lot less frequent.) Anyway, he started out as the kind of prototypical kid with Youtube videos, doing a pretty well with the history angle. But over time evolved into a serious documentarion doing top-notch work. Along the same line, DidYouKnowGaming went from an ok channel that repackaged pretty common trivia into interesting but almost click-bait videos, into now being an investigative journalist kinda thing, where they semi-regularly share previously unknown information about old or cancelled games. Still on the games side, Electric Playground has been going for like a quarter-century, since back when it had to be on cable TV instead of Youtube, and Victor Lucas still doesn’t suck.

3Blue1brown and Ben Eater make great technical educational videos that, as far as I’m aware, haven’t really degraded.

Re: difficulty - Natively has a system where it asks users if x or y was harder. Like they say I’ve read this book and that book, then there’s a screen where you answer comparisons to help improve rankings. It’s kinda fun, might be something to consider if you want to make those ratings more detailed.

But then again, for mostly pretty short videos already tagged with understandable 1-5 difficulty levels, I’m not sure how important it is.

I don’t know of many (other than Wikipedia which is a great option), and I’m not at the level to read real native websites. So I’m not a good person to answer. I’ll watch the thread and maybe come back to these some day. But still, gonna throw some stuff out.

You’re way beyond these, but for fellow beginners that come across this thread, I’ll mention the well-known easy Japanese reading sources: NHK Easy News (if you’re more advanced, there’s also regular news), and the free graded readers at tadoku.org.

Another interesting site I’ve seen is this one that discusses Japanese grammar. Still not quite in the spirit of the question though. There’s this Matcha travel/culture blog, but it also has an English version. And uh… here’s this Pokemon wiki that I’d come across at some point, and this one for Soul Calibur VI. There’s https://tver.jp/ that was posted here a while back, but you probably need a VPN to watch things on it.

What do you expect to happen here? The number was only meant to inform you how difficult the video is inside the Difficulty bracket (1 easiest -> 100 hardest)

That’s really cool actually. I saw a sort by difficulty, so I thought there must be something more granular. But then I figured setting that level of detail for all these would be too much work.

My brain was like, this looks like a click target’, and it animating on hover doubled that impression. Following from that line of thought, I expected that the number was an amount of videos available at that difficult, maybe with some filters applied. Of course, the fact that it’s not consistent should have immediately told me I was wrong lol. What I’d expect to happen is to click there to see more [difficulty level] videos, but I don’t know that it’d be better. As always with feedback take it with a grain of salt - not pushing for changes, it’s just where one dummy got surprised.

How would you like this to work? Currently I save your last search settings (difficulty, Creator, Tags). So when I click on a tag should the search still use the old difficulty & creator and only use the new tag or should it clear everything and only search for the clicked tag. Same goes for creator

I’m not sure how it should work, but personally I just expected to go to the search page with that tag pre-filled. Difficulty filter remembered would be better, imo. Creator, I wouldn’t be as worried about that sticking, but some people might. Might be best to keep it consistent if difficulty is saving. Maybe down the road someday, saving each of the search filters could be a setting. Mainly I just want things on the video page that I can use to find new videos. If none of the similar videos in the sidebar appeal, it can be nice to see “Oh, there’s a tag for that, maybe there are more videos about that topic”, or “Maybe I should check out all the videos from this creator”. You have that on-ramp to keep using the site.

すごい! Glad you were feeling confident going in. Now that you’ve (probably) taken it, what was your impression. Seemed easier/harder than expected? Do you think you did well?

I never have pursued taking it yet. Best of luck to everyone that tried this year! When do you get results back?

Would like to set it up as a goal and try one of the basic ones, but I don’t know that it’ll be close enough or convenient timing for me.

It’s very much easier to use than ardour. Makes it very simple to open the piano roll and draw in some midi notes. Includes a decent amount of default samples and presets. It was good for my know-nothing-hobbyist use case. Between tutorials and the manual, pretty figure-out-able.

Ardour by contrast seems more focused on recording live instruments. I’m sure it’s high quality stuff, but trying to do basic things just feels obtuse.

Awesome! Thanks for the list, I’ll check some of these out for sure.

This is actually harder than you would think.

That 100% makes sense. Anything involving language seems to have potential to be a rabbit hole problem.

Also I added a Watch Later feature. Feel free to check it out & tell me what you think about it.

That was quick! Looks good. I was a little surprised to see the ‘videos like this’ sidebar when going back to watch them, instead of the playlist sidebar (since these are accessed from playlist page). But I don’t necessarily dislike that either.

Couple other things that I noticed while trying that: the ‘Superbeginner’ label feels hard to read, might need more contrast. When watching a video, the difficulty tag doesn’t seem to be anywhere. When browsing the video list, hovering over difficult expands and shows a number - but clicking still just goes to the video. When watching a video, tags aren’t clickable - I’d like to be able to click those to go to a search filtered by that tag. Creator is also not visible on the video player page, would be another good thing to be able to click.

Yes. But, to perhaps a lower extent, this headline is also true if you change ‘Reddit’ to ‘the internet’.

And yea the plan to enshitify overtime is not really something I wanna do. I just wanna over value at a reasonable price so people just don’t mind paying for the convenience. Also I don’t think is even a valid way if you don’t have VC money to burn.

Always glad to hear that! Hope I didn’t come across as accusational, just kinda where my mind went trying to put on a business hat. Scary thing (maybe not for your service, but for many) is that fair-deal services have to compete with those that offer unsustainably high-value services cheap/free to get people in the door (I mean, I guess Youtube is a good example of this).

Another musing, might be nice to have videos from other sources too. PeerTube, Odysee, Vimeo, BilliBilli exist. Tiktok has some good stuff, for sure. I don’t think this is worth the trouble though, considering those first few have almost no content.

Crowdsourcing Tags, Most relevant Tag Rankings

True, it would be a lot of work. Maybe, depending on your user-base, a tag only gets nominated if some # of users suggest it (say, 2+ for now). Then it goes to the suggestions queue for you to look at it. Maybe new tags, but maybe not even that, just other tags you already have that aren’t applied to any videos. I realize you already have a ‘send feedback’ thing though, so that’s probably enough right now. Also, this could involve your Discord - maybe a channel automatically gets posts sent like “Should this video have the xyz tag?” and people react thumbs up, thumbs down.

Rankings - my thinking was a few tags could maybe show under the video when browsing. Or searching by tag could return ones where the tag is most relevant.

My Methodology rn is the following: I use a tool I created to scrape/download all the Video Information from a Channel that I want to Integrate into the platform. This data gets put into a google docs sheet & then let an LLM Model (n8n) run over all the data to change Title & Description. After that I manually Double check titles & descriptions. Now I assign tags & Difficulty and other internal values. Last step is importing the Google Sheet into my Platform.

Glad to hear the tags are human added. LLM only approach would scale better, but produce silly nonsense sometimes and make the site less fun. I do think if you have any LLM generated content (titles and description) that’s user facing, that should probably be disclosed somewhere in an About or FAQ page. For the difficulty though, that can probably use some input from automation (not even necessarily LLM, just good old fashioned code) - might not be too hard to figure out words per minute, % of common words, etc from the transcript and run time. But difficulty values from the channel that created it are probably more accurate, and I imagine most of them say what they’re targeting. And analysis wouldn’t capture things like visual aids.

On your thoughts of the infinite scroll, I understand your sentiment but I think this is also highly subjective.

Right, it is for sure just my opinion and probably not a very popular one.

so would it be better to not load randomly & order them by Difficulty as the default option?

Loading randomly is still an important thing, I think. I’d have liked to not be surprised by it, but I do think it’s important to have a way to get a random selection of videos within a difficulty tier.

The Tag loading problem might happen because I didn’t scale up the server very high at the moment for cost saving reasons during the test phase. This should resolve itself when I scale up the Server & databases at a later point.

Is there a way you can load that in the background as the rest of the page loads, and/or cache it? Point taken though, not something to sweat too much if it’ll self-resolve.

I agree that there are a lot of tags but there are also a lot of different Videos on the platform already & they will only expand. Maybe I can consolidate some at a later point & remove the ones that only have very few videos.

A lot is not necessarily bad, just keep in mind the keyword is curation. Constantly evaluate to see if the tags are helping users find what they want, and make sure the tags on the videos are highly accurate and relevant. That probably does lead to more.

Hmm, I see your point that you could just use my platform to discover the Videos & then watch them on Youtube but that is a general problem I guess. But what the platform is offering isn’t necessarily the content but aggregation, discoverability & curation and some people just might not value that.

Also I don’t see the free Youtube Videos as a big competitor because the core of the business isn’t the content itself (not yet at least, I hope I can produce some later).

I think Youtube really, really is your biggest competitor though (Youtube itself as a front-end, not the videos on it). It may be a general problem, but it’s the biggest one you have to solve - why watch videos on this site instead of going to Youtube? I think the embeds always have that big ‘watch on Youtube’ button for them to conveniently leave, after which they’re in Youtube’s discovery pipeline with no restrictions. Even if they can no longer see recommendations on LangGlitch, they learned the name of at least one or two channels so they know where to look. YT’s recommendation algorithm takes over from there, plus most good CI channels already have nice playlists organized by level.

To be honest, I just had this kind of experience with Dreaming Spanish the other day. Realized they had a website, started watching videos there, then after a day or two got told ‘no’ on something and immediately left. Sorry, I don’t know how to turn this around and make it very constructive, I guess I’m just giving my thoughts as a learner.

I guess the way I’d look at it is you have to offer a lot of value up front, then gradually alter the deal over time. That sucks for customers, but I guess it’s a way to make money. That’s the playbook for most online services - offer a sweet product at free or ridiculously low cost, get people to love and depend on it, then degradify and turn the screws on price. As a human not backed by a VC or megacorp though, I dunno that that’s viable. (Sorry again… this paragraph sounds way more cynical than I wanted it to… Anyway, strong note to not take any business advice from me, I don’t know anything about monetizing a product or running a company.)

Also Dreaming & CiJapanese are for sure competitors but only in one language so I think there is still a lot of value in my Service.

Yep, going multilang is a great differentiator here. Small note though that Dreaming does Spanish and has started doing French, and sounds like they plan to do more in the future, so sharks in the water there. But I think you’ve got an angle, targeting less popular languages and curating from lots of channels.

Again, best of luck. I think it’ll be very challenging to make it work, but it probably can. Tagging and organizing tons of videos and making them easy to find is really admirable. Two other random possibilities that come to mind that could be cool: crowdsourcing tags or most relevant tag rankings, detailed transcription search and stats per video

Curious also, what’s your methodology? Do you run everything through an LLM pipeline, grab tags directly from tags on YT, manually review?

I really like that idea! I think that whenever I switch the radio to a foreign language station - “haha, can’t get me, I’m here for anything in Spanish!”, but then I still leave it merely exposed to the name of the local automall.

Wonder if it’d make sense @LangGlitch, to have sponsored videos, that read a few minutes of copy about how great x or y is, but in target languages? Could be a good way to feed into some gamification/rewards shennanigans - watch a sponsored video, get some extra watch time or tracking time.

Right? lmgtfy has always been kinda rude. But much more so now, when talking to a human on the Internet is getting harder, and search engines barely work. If you don’t know you can just ignore it or say that you don’t know.

Or best case, you can use seemingly dead-end questions to further the conversation. “Oh, I just looked it up and I’m surprised to see it’s actually ___. Now that makes me wonder ___.”