Comment by sangeeth96 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sangeeth96 | Hacker News Reader

I really wish there existed a central platform that tracks/links to all tech conference videos from past to present because YouTube just plain sucks for this and in general, to focus. They've had DECADES to polish this experience (in general for any educational content), at least under the premium tier and I've given up all hopes of them ever getting this right.

Off the top of my head, such a platform could:

    1. Encourage and foster great discussions (and support markdown!)
    2. Have a "community notes" kind of feature to highlight outdated info, errata, related talks etc.
    3. Expose brand new conferences and lesser known ones
    4. Allow people to share curated lists
    5. Likes/dislikes restored
    6. View count tracking from across multiple sources (some confs host on their site before YouTube upload)
    7. Support for interactive viewing of decks, source code etc.
    8. Speaker profiles (w/ verification)
    9. Automation to help conferences/speakers/etc. to submit/update content they own/keep things in sync

etc.

I don't think such a platform exists today but would love to be wrong.

I think this is a great idea for a startup.

As a scientist, I would definitely be a paying customer, and on top I could deduct that membership from my taxes or have my lab pay for it like we (like many others) are paying Overleaf just under $1000 a year only to have LaTeX run in a Web browser to collaborate on papers (now my most important online service/app).

We usually know where to find the talks and recordings for the conference venues of our own specialist areas, but if there was a general "ScienceTube"-type Web site, you could also check out talks from neighboring disciplines. God knows, this might be as useful/addictive as HN.

Should you want to launch this & need someone for the scientific advisory board, please get in touch.

EDIT: typo fixed

>I think this is a great idea for a startup

Ideally, this runs like wikipedia or Lichess, if I'm being honest. I don't think its a great business model for a VC backed startup[0]. Perhaps a more traditional business inception might work, if you are selling it to the big conference organizations / hosts and make it attractive enough for it to be their go to for posting videos and such.

I think it ends up imploding against the pressures that come with it with being a VC startup though.

[0]: I'm taking the term startup to mean shorthand for venture backed startup, as it is usually used on HN and other places.

It's much more like wikipedia than Lichess IMO.

The hard part with going completely free is building enough of a community of strong contributors that they are able to effectively curate the contents for quality's sake, rather than the obvious commercial and career incentives to advertise their own work (or sneak in less educational content). That could be very hard to bootstrap without doing a ton of the curation yourself initially, and it requires an ongoing commitment to manage the community once it is established, which is also time consuming.

> I'm taking the term startup to mean shorthand for venture backed startup, as it is usually used on HN and other places.

I don't agree with that characterization because there are plenty of viable and useful "start up" opportunities that require zero outside funding, or only enough to get started. Also, VC funding is literally just debt that can convert to equity (it's a loan that can have an extremely high effective interest rate if you're successful), so you actually want to avoid it as much as possible if you think you have a good shot at accomplishing your goals without it. I think a surprisingly large number of founders and people working in SV/startups don't fully understand that.

Network egress fees are going to kill you, unless you have sufficient capital to run your own DC

There's a good directory of conferences at https://confs.tech/ and at https://dev.events/

> Likes/dislikes restored

Why? It leads to a lot of abuse.

What you see as abuse some would see as user agency. User agency is a very powerful thing, and it's shortsighted to squash it just because your users aren't using it strictly to enhance your content in the way you want.

It's especially shortsighted to squash it just because they used it on some of your advertisers' content and your advertisers yelled at you about it.

I think my point is that it requires a (perhaps opaque) algorithm to work well. A pure popularity metric never led to good quality in my experience.

So even if you have your up/down votes, expect that how videos are presented to you are not strongly reflective of the vote count.

The security community used to maintain one that was fairly active pre-covid.

https://github.com/PaulSec/awesome-sec-talks

Checkout https://dev.tube/ site. It is not as feature-rich as you said but better than nothing!

I've had the same idea a few years ago and started working on it, but never found the time to push it over the finish line.

this sounds like a lot of work for something this niche

I don't think this is about a niche but rather a broader need for lists, more specifically, integrated lists from users. Pinterest, for example, is built around lists, Amazon has wishlists, IMDb[1] provides movie rankings, etc.

From a data portability perspective, the real challenge is getting users to connect all these platforms to a kind of unified list, making it accessible for queries, machine learning, or other applications. This, in my view, is a traction problem rather than a technical one, independent of whether it justifies a business. FriendFeed[2] was a very interesting project where users could connect their profiles with many services and their followers saw their updates. It seems their Tornado web server keeps getting updated [3].

More than a decade ago, I explored some of these ideas [4][5], conceptualizing a directed acyclic graph (DAG) model where data operations could be performed at a global level, dynamically recalculating like a spreadsheet.

Going to more complex topics there are resources such as differential dataflows [6].

[1] My movies ranking: https://www.imdb.com/user/ur0601133/ratings/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FriendFeed

[3] https://github.com/tornadoweb/tornado

[4] https://blog.databigbang.com/ideas-egont-a-web-orchestration...

[5] https://blog.databigbang.com/egont-part-ii/

[6] https://timelydataflow.github.io/differential-dataflow/intro...

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