HackerTube replaces YouTube thumbnails with frames from halfway through the video
HackerTube pulls video recommendations out of years of community comments and gives each video a halfway-frame thumbnail. Its maker says the project took about two hours.
The thumbnail has to come from the video. Imagine that. In his account of building HackerTube, Andrej Karpathy lists “the 50% thumbnail instead of the uploaded thumbnail” among its features.
His coding agent filtered a comment dataset down to 40,000 video recommendations, then to 6,454 videos spanning 2007 through 2026 and 150 topics. Those are the maker’s figures for the catalog.
The site keeps recommendation state in the browser session, requires no user account, and offers a data export. The halfway image can certainly be boring. It also makes a video creator’s exaggerated reaction face much harder to use as bait.
The useful next experiment is whether a personal catalog stays interesting after the novelty wears off. A different thumbnail gets you through the front door; the next recommended video has to earn the return visit.