YouTube for Social Media Skeptics

No suggestions, no comments, no likes, and no dislikes.

Just search for what you have in mind and when you run out of ideas, you’re done.

So in my first project at General Assembly, I decided that this would be the project I would take on.

Using an HTML form embedded in a single page application built with CSS and jQuery, the user can type in a search term and submit it to the search endpoint of the YouTube Data API and get back a list of videos.

I’ll quickly run through it below:Type in a search term.

See a list of results that you can scroll through infinitely.

Click on a video that you would like to watch, and hit play.

That’s it.

At first, I was proud of the simplicity of my new YouTube Search app, but then I started to think that maybe it was too simple.

I thought it might be a better experience for the user if they could more explicitly tell YouTube what videos they wanted to see by using subscriptions.

The flow would be like this: log in using Google OAuth, see a list of your YouTube subscriptions, click on a subscription to see all the videos uploaded by that channel, and subscribe or unsubscribe whenever you want.

This, I thought, would be a good way to cut all of the fat out of the user experience and provide the user with a more streamlined YouTube that only shows them what they want to see.

Immediately after finishing my YouTube Search app that I built with HTML, CSS, and jQuery, I started to build this new and improved version (which I’m calling Tubeless for now) with React, Node, Express, MongoDB, and SASS.

It’s not quite live yet but I can show you a few screenshots:The sidebar on the left shows you your subscriptions, and when you click on one, you can see all of the videos uploaded by that channel.

The search functionality from my first project is still present, but now also searches for channels.

After clicking on a video you can see a little more information like the description, views, and date published.

It felt really good to be able to make something that I actually want to use, and hopefully, if you’re someone who has to fight to stay out of the “YouTube Wormhole”, you saw something here that you would find useful as well.

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