Over the past few years I've been working on a new website called Relevant, and today I'm launching it under a beta!
YouTube has been my primary source of entertainment for many years. However, I've found that with recent iterations of "the algorithm", YouTube continues to serve me the same types of videos every single day. If you watch one video about a new game, YouTube then tries to show you 50 more videos about that game for the next week. I was frustrated with this experience and wanted a way to find new types of content on YouTube without waiting for it to be surfaced organically by the algorithm.
Relevant is a crowdsourcing website aiming to catalogue all of YouTube. We represent every possible category of content available on YouTube as a DAG, starting from the most vague like "Science" and "Gaming" down to the most specific like "Laptop Reviews" or "Car Mechanics". After logging in, users can iterate through a list of their subscriptions and vote for which category best represents the content for each channel. After enough users have voted for a channel, we assign that category to the channel. These channels are then discoverable through the explore page, with a separate trending page to highlight notable hot or new categories.
On Relevant I hope that people can find new areas of YouTube by seeing what other people have been watching, or by browsing through the tree of categories. Once we have collected enough data, I plan on introducing a recommendation system that can even recommend other channel categories that may be interesting to you. For now, though, I've written a blog post [1] for the beta launch that goes into more detail about the rationale behind the website and the limitations during the beta launch.
I hope other YouTube fans find value in Relevant and I look forward to learning more about what YouTube has to offer from all of you!
[1]: https://medium.com/@nthomson113/relevant-watch-is-open-for-b...