Topic-Whitelist YouTube That AI-Filters Your Feed Instead of Begging the Algorithm
HN users keep openly saying they'd pay YouTube Premium pricing again, on top of Premium, if they could hand YouTube a whitelist and blacklist of topics and have an AI backend honor it... no kid content on adult accounts, no fake-DIY spam, no AI-slop, no rage-bait politics, yes specific creators, yes specific niches. Current 'Do Not Recommend,' SponsorBlock, Unhook, DF Tube all attack pieces of the problem but none let you curate by semantic topic with LLM understanding of the video content itself. Opportunity: a browser extension and mobile overlay that classifies YouTube content with an on-device or cheap cloud LLM and filters per user's topic lists.
Don't try to replace YouTube... overlay it. Ship a Chrome and Firefox extension plus a mobile Safari content blocker that rewrites the homepage and subscriptions grid using the user's topic rules. Push LLM classification to the user's own API key so your unit economics are clean. The first user who says 'my YouTube is finally sane again' will bring you a hundred more.
landscape (6 existing solutions)
The blockers market treats YouTube as a UI problem... hide shorts, hide comments, hide recommended. The real user pain is content-level: 'I want tech and cooking and travel, I do not want true crime, political rage, or AI-generated fake DIY.' Solving that requires classifying videos semantically (title + description + transcript snippet through an LLM) and producing a personal feed overlay. The extension that does this well, with the LLM cost pushed to the user's OpenAI or local Ollama key, is a clean $5-10/month product.