I created my own YouTube algorithm (to stop me wasting time)

Using the YouTube API and Amazon’s AWS Lambda

Chris Lovejoy
Towards Data Science

Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash

🚀 Escaping the YouTube algorithm

I love watching YouTube videos that improve my life in some tangible way. Unfortunately, the YouTube algorithm doesn’t agree. It likes to feed me clickbait and other garbage.

This isn’t all that surprising. The algorithm prioritises clicks and watch time.

So I set out on a mission: Can I write code that will automatically find me valuable videos, eliminating my dependence on the YouTube algorithm?

Here’s how it went.

🗺️ The best laid plans

I started by visualising what I wanted the tool to do. I wanted something that would (i) rank videos based on likely relevance for me and (ii) automatically send me suggested videos, which I could select from.

I figured I could make some major productivity gains if I could batch-decide the videos I was going to watch each week and eliminate infinity scrolling YouTube browsing.

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Responses (28)

What are your thoughts?

This is great Chris. One of my biggest gripes about Youtube, especially the Premium offering is that it still relies heavily on its algorithms to prioritise Clickbait & Watch Time, instead of focusing on delivering value.

8

Chris, really solid project , I love it . I found that there is a YouTube API that allows you to insert items into a playlist , may be you can explore that too (PlaylistItemsResource.InsertRequest)

5

Hi,
Nice idea . Hearing about your Lambda troubles thought of suggesting Zappa . Zappa is a python library that takes way the pain of deploying your python function to Lambda . Hope it helps you .
On the usage of DataFrames , they can get risky…...

16