WikiTok

Shoutout to APIs that do not enforce CORS preventing requests be made from FE without a need for a BE. There's so many toy apps I started building that would have just worked if this was more common, but they have CORS restrictions requiring me to spin up a BE which for many one-off tools and personal tools just isn't worth doing and maintaining. Same with OAuth.

This is awesome. I can imagine you likely are not interested in building one but this site could hugely benefit from a recommendations algorithm.

For example an algorithm could understand how much a user really enjoys a certain article and then starts sending the users down a rabbit hole of similar and tangential content. Designing, building and maintaining an algorithm like this though is no small feat.

Not to plug myself too shamelessly, but here's my resume if anyone is interested :) https://www.aizk.sh/Isaac's%20Resume.pdf

I remember seeing that tweet, I thought it was the craziest coincidence ever when I saw this on the front page. I guess it’s not haha

Next steps: ingest these offline and process them into quick 30 second videos with the most salient facts. TTS narration, additional images. Generate stock video using the images in the API and perhaps text-to-video. That would be a killer app.

Bonus: come up with a heuristic or model to filter out or de-rank universally uninteresting articles.

Kudos for the anthropological experiment. Indeed makes you wonder what's there about the sliding that makes it so entertaining.

I suggest you add some sort of summary that flows, so to add certain level of animation. Some articles have actual sound and animations to them.

Great inspiration!

This is freaking really cool, I’m at work browsing HN instead of doing actual work, but I’ll look into it more later, but the “killer feature” I think would be to add audio narration do this, or a quick summary, I would scroll that all day…

Awesome job!

This is super super cool. I’ll tell you the single barrier to me actually using this regularly—it needs an algorithm. It would be so cool (and a good learning project) to even build the simplest of recommendation algorithms behind it based on my likes, dislikes, bookmarks, and whether I click “read more”.

On one hand I am thinking about what a very basic algorithm would like (maybe even just categories I might do) and maybe how it would make people happy.

On the other hand, I'm not sure exactly the details of wikipedia's api TOS. Also as it stands this website is entirely in the frontend at the moment, and I'm enjoying just scaffolding out what I can with limited a more limited set of tools to speak.

I realize now the suffix "tok" implies a crazy ML algo that is trained every single movement, click, tap, and pause you make, but I don't think I really want that.

For each 10 seconds of reading, increment the tags on the current article as "favoured". Then, poll randomly from those tags for the next recommended article. Add some logarithms of division to prevent the tags from infinite scaling.

The relatedness of articles is already baked in with blue wiki links too. So it shouldn't be too hard to make something that just looks for neighbors.

Now, something that learns that if you like X you might like Y, even if they are disconnected. Is closer to the dystopic ad maximizing algorithm of TikTok et al.

That's what I was thinking this might have already. Maybe this could get insights from the articles linked from the ones you like too? Sort of like https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/

This would eventually collapse to people reading articles they do not actually like (i.e. get happiness from reading), I think, maybe tragic history facts or something like that? The truth of social media harm is that it's more about humans than the algorithms themselves. Humans just tend to engage more with negative emotions. Even IRL we tend to look for intrigue and negative interactions, just look at the people who stay with toxic partners even with no financial ties, or even friend groups who turn into dysfunctional gossip fests. The only way to avoid this is by actively fighting against this tendency, and having no algorithm at all in an application helps.

RHAAS

Rabbit-holing as a service

I would prefer at least an option to keep it on random mode. Both for the occasional exposure to cool stuff and to make it less rabbit-holey.

Since its text, especially text with links to other articles, there is no need for tags.

If I had a clue how to do this (sorry, just a neuroscientist), I would probably create "communities" of pages on a network graph and weight the traversal across the graph network based on pages that the person liked (or spend X time on before).

No way, StumbleUpon? I remember that site when I was a kid. Good memories.

I tried that and I was immediately taken to "the best place in the world to have herpes". I didn't click.

This is awesome. I've been passively looking for a Stumbleupon replacement, but never stumble upon it. Thank you for posting here. You have given me back a slice of old internet.

Pretty nice! Reminds me of StumbleUpon.

Cool. I immediately recognized the melonking loading gif.

Math articles are excruciatingly bad on this. I find myself setting the language to "simple english" and it helps.

Some other commenters have offered the idea of an algorithm to steer the randomness of the articles. I wonder if an algorithm would help with this issue of having random articles be too technical for you even though you are interested in the larger topic.

>"the only people who understand this page are people who ... already understand it / don't need to read this".

That is provably false

Wikipedia is useful for reference, but not education. Not sure whether that's intentional.

Maybe pairing this with an LLM could be useful here?

At this point, you could create short videos with relevant images and accompanying audio, post them on TikTok, and profit.

Also, the voiceover should be over some Minecraft parkour or Subway Surfers.

Like this: https://pdftobrainrot.org/

I second this! A voice-over would be very nice

Extra bonus for just putting it out there with a Github link.

Instead of landing page, login, "just $4/month or $20/year" with a "Show HN" and everybody patting them on the back for a "successful launch".

The author is refreshingly transparent about the inspiration for the project saying, "I built this on a whim at after seeing someone ask for it on twitter."

Who knows, maybe you'll stumble upon sth to build in the same way.

These simple ideas can be implemented by AI (like this) Unfortunately, this makes it lose some of its charm.

Good question: i had that thought for a second. But the I realized that for me, Incan imagine killing time here, but not in the random page. It is an image and a short text which allows to decide fast if it is interesting or not.

I used to take a technical dictionary, and read random articles when bored. So I tried with random wiki, but just didn’t work. I will try this and I can already say, it will work.

it looks and feels completely different, for one thing

Your question doesn’t quite make sense.

It sounds like you’re suggesting the two web pages are identical, just on different domains, but they’re obviously completely different.

A better way to phrase your question would be: "Why would a TikTok-style (infinite scrolling) website for browsing Wikipedia articles appeal to today’s internet users?"