Culture Machine

Like television, but for humans.

Hosted at https://benchristel.github.io/tv

Why?

• There are a lot of videos on YouTube. The bad ones look like clickbait. The good ones also look like clickbait. They're all competing for your attention, and as a result, just choosing something to watch is exhausting.
• If you just let YouTube autoplay it will feed you absolute garbage.

The solution? Curate a set of videos that have some chance of being delightful or informative, and that have rewatch potential, and then just shuffle them.

How can I change the library of videos?

• Fork this repo.

• See below for how to run a dev environment.

• Open the "info" pane in the Culture Machine UI and bookmark the "Bookmarklet to scrape videos from YouTube" link. See "What is a bookmarklet?" below for details.

• Run the bookmarklet on YouTube pages to copy the video links on the page to your clipboard. The bookmark works on the following pages:

  • Individual video pages like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrLCLfoxKb4
  • Playlist pages like https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB0C8D8F4E658C3BC
  • Channel video lists like https://www.youtube.com/@urbanology/videos

  Note that only videos whose thumbnails have loaded onto the page will be scraped. If you want to get all videos for a channel, you'll have to scroll down until no more videos load, and then run the bookmarklet. This can take a lot of scrolling.

• Paste the videos into src/data/shows.js or src/data/music.js.

• (Optional) Edit the set of channels in src/data/channels.js. Each channel is initialized with an array of Episodes, each of which has a list of videos. The videos of an episode always play in sequence, which is how Channel 3 (the music channel) shuffles by album, not by song.

• Commit your changes and follow the deployment steps below.

Development

These instructions assume you have Node and Yarn installed.

• Run yarn install to install dependencies.
• yarn flow runs the typechecker.
• yarn dev runs the dev server. Tests run as part of the UI. You'll see a red banner at the top of the screen if there are any failures.

Deployment

This repo is configured for deployment to GitHub Pages.

• Run yarn build and commit the changes.
• Push.
• Set up GitHub pages to deploy from the docs/ directory.

What is a bookmarklet?

If you click the "info" button below the video player, you'll see a "Bookmarklet to scrape videos from YouTube" link. A bookmarklet is a small JavaScript program that you can bookmark, like a link. Clicking the bookmark in your browser runs the program in the context of whatever page you're currently looking at.

To bookmark the bookmarklet, right-click the link and select "Bookmark Link" (or the equivalent in your browser). To learn how to use the bookmarklet, see the section "How can I change the library of videos?" above.