Ask HN: I think I might have a brand new idea of internet revolution

Google has been building Gemini into YouTube and I've been seeing things like this pop up in the normal YouTube UI (as a Premium subscriber). A few times now I will see a video that looks interesting, but it 20 minutes long. Under it is an AI summary that answers the question the title poses and saves me 20 minutes. For videos that don't have the automatic AI summary, there is an option in (some) videos to bring up an AI chat which can summarize a video or answer specific question about it.

The results are hit and miss right now. I have the feeling that it gets the video context based on the video description and comments, not the video itself.

I toyed around with something for my own use, where I downloaded the subtitles of a video, put the subtitles together into something semi-readable, then ran that through AI to create a properly readable version of the video. This all worked pretty well. That article could then be summarized if wanted. It was a one-time proof of concept. I may make it into an Apple Shortcut once they release macOS 26 and their AI writing tools are in the Shortcuts app. I mostly did this because it was something my dad said he wanted and I wanted to show him he could do it today if he really wanted. It didn't take that long to throw together.

I wouldn’t consider YouTube to be any focus of an internet platform. It’s a privately owned and for profit walled garden of content.

If I were going to think about an internet revolution it would be a complete change of transmission scheme. WebSockets are vastly superior to HTTP in all regards except that HTTP 1.1 is sessionless. WebSockets also have a processing problem in that they are about 11x faster to send than to receive due to frame header parsing.

So, what I would do is create a new connection scheme with a new protocol that accomplishes only two goals:

1. Lowers transmission latency.

2. Increases security.

To lower latency I would ensure every message size is exactly 16384 bytes, which is maximum message size in TLS 1.3, regardless of actual content. I would also rethink what information is stored in a frame header and when it’s necessary to lower parsing effort. Balancing through put between maximum send rate to maximum receive rate would increase bandwidth and lower cpu management. That would ultimately lower the cost of network transmissions relative to other local hardware processing efforts.

To increase security I would create a new connection scheme away from a client/server model to a local/remote, which is the model git uses. I would continue to use TLS but I would also add an authentication layer based on a scheme of pre-shared keys. That way neither end of a transmission is anonymous, but anonymity is sacrificed for increased trust without reliance on certificates. That will increase privacy in ways the web currently struggles with and saves on security down the line by mitigating away layers of security abstractions that increase opportunities for exploitation.

The core idea has merit. “Curation” is the word you are looking for and it is a powerfully successful tool for being in the middle of people’s interests. A valuable proposition.

The trick is to do as little as necessary to provide the most essential end result in isolation.

You have big dreams, scale them back to this one idea, you are curating YouTube (or other stream source) content.

You cannot possibly process all YouTube content. Consider an interface like invidious with an alt button that queues the video, and from that precache clusters of recommendations, and then promote these to the similar interest group.

Whatever you do, curation is always a prosperous middle layer if you get the right niche interests.

Thanks for your suggestion, but I am a retired person and am too old for such a big dream. I posted this for those who are in their 20s, 30s, thinking to drop out from Harvard or Stanford and seeking some adventure. On the eve of AI taking over billions of jobs by 2030. This idea might be worthwhile a try for them. And one day such platform may just appear before us.

I actually think NSummary is more important than YSummary. NSummary can merge similar news from N resources and list all their http links. Now, if a news is just from 1 single source, it might be a candidate for mis-information. Today we subscribe to NYT/WSJ/WP... and read lots of redundancy news. This is just like pre-search engine times, we need to go to IBM/HP/Sun/.. each web site to look for something. Netscape and Google saves us many trips. Same thing here, with NSummary, we no longer need to visit NYT/WSJ/WP... one by one.

On top of YSummary, one might develops NSummary to summarize all news from various sources and give subscribers 10 minutes to 'read thru' world newspapers from WSJ to NYT to WP to to FT to Economists..etc. Further, Ysummary needs to expand to include French/German/Japanese youtube clips. This indeed will change how we use internet all together. Yahoo used to be the gate to internet, then Google. Now YSummary and NSummary will be the new gate above Google/YT/FB/IG/X.

This indeed will change how we use internet altogether. Yahoo used to be the gate to internet, then Google. Now YSummary and NSummary will be the new gate above Google/YT/FB/IG/X.

Thanks for sigwinch's comment. I guess to use notegpt.io extension, you might need to click all the clips you might be interested and then use notegpt.io. By doing so, we already entered to trap youtubers set up for us. My approach is use a new platform to globally browsing all youtube clips each day and summarize them, so our users can spend only 5 minutes and learn what happened in the YT world last night. This way we won't be drowned in the YT sea. that's why it is revolutionary.

"The journey is not a reward", it's waste of time. Ex: I saw a clip's title - To avoid HBP, one must not consume three fruits. Then I spend 26 minutes to learn those 3 fruits I already knew harmful. Now, how many 26 minutes do I have each day? This is the whole problem. Once I am certain I need to dig in the clip, then that's entertainment. Other that all time were wasted.

Yes I have that often with gardening tips. A summary of the video, with proper key points would save me a crap load of time. I would happily pay $5 a year. Now dont raise the rates because I am excited, just let me know when it is ready.

You might call that a spider, or a crawler.

A youtube crawler.

But yeah, I'd love the idea, it depends on whether big G is ok to have someone else doing what they could be doing but aren't to increase their ad money.

"The journey is the reward". Youtube is entertainment, not information. Information is the byproduct of being entertained.

However it's a great idea, go for it!

Take a look at notegpt.io, a Chrome extension doing this. I wouldn’t say it’s “revolutionary” but consider it for your use case.

Sorry but this isn’t a revolution.

99% of YT content is entertainment, at least to some degree, there is virtually no content worth reading that is already not available in other places.

I labeled it as a revolution because I am thinking of not just YoutubeSummary (YSummary) , but more to NewsSummary (NSummary) and FacebookSummary (FSummary), BlogSummary (BSummary) and BookSummary(BkSummary)...etc. These summaries will replace Yahoo and Google as the gate to internet. Youtube is only a subset of the whole schema.