Show HN: TubePen – My attempt to get more out of YouTube learning

Hi HN! I made this because I always forget what I'm trying to learn from YouTube.

Test yourself: Can you remember the main concepts from the last (educational) video you watched?

So, why not highlight and take notes on YouTube videos, just like in books? That's TubePen.

I’d love your feedback! What do you think of my landing page? Use the 10-day free trial and see if it’s useful for you.

Thanks!

tubepen.com

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48 points

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n0vella

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4 days ago

17 comments

Leftium ・ 3 days ago

I tried signing up for the free trial subscription, and am starting to regret it.

I successfully entered my credit card details (4 times), yet it still says I don't have an active subscription. So besides not being able to try this app, there is also no way to cancel my automatic payments, which starts on Jan 18.

After fixing this onboarding problem, I suggest making it possible to try without giving any personal information. (I expected the video player on the landing page to be functional, but I guess just the note section is.)

Also there are many typos on the site. Like "loged in as"

n0vella ・ 3 days ago

Please write me an email to n0vella@outlook.com to see what happened. I'm going to check the logs, nothing must be charged to you.
Typos are also my fault as english isn't my mother language, Will check that also.
- Leftium ・ 2 days ago
  
  The OP sorted out the subscription/signup/billing issues.
  The main reason I signed up was for a nice way to search through YouTube transcripts. YouTube requires many clicks, and the transcript is jammed into a small div.
  Another reason I signed up was because I was curious how the YouTube videos were being embedded. It seems like just via the YouTube API?
  
  rinvi ・ 3 minutes ago
  
  You can pull YouTube transcripts directly with a tool like this: https://youtubetranscript.com/
  This can be done programmatically with YouTube Transcript API [0]
  But you may get IP blocked if you do it a lot so you can use a Tor proxy [1].
  Afterwards, you can just cmd/ctrl+f through it or throw it at an LLM.
  [0] https://github.com/jdepoix/youtube-transcript-api
  [1] https://github.com/rinvii/yt-transcript
- Leftium ・ 3 days ago
  
  I forwarded the email I already sent to support@tubepen.com.
  Another typo is "Acess to the entire platform"
  
  n0vella ・ 3 days ago
  ・ 2 more
  
  Seems like outlook stop receiving emails from cloudflare redirection:
  upstream (outlook-com.olc.protection.outlook.com.) temporary error: Unknown error: transient error (451): 4.7.650 The mail server [104.30.10.49] has been temporarily rate limited due to IP reputation
  I don't know how to deal with this so right now you can contact me on n0vella@outlook.com
  
  bogdanstanciu ・ 2 hours ago
  
  Stress!
  Good luck and congrats on launch.
- undefined ・ 6 hours ago
  
  [deleted]

maalber ・ 4 days ago

Really neat idea actually! I love the landing page, both the interactive part and particularly the visual style. One thing that I would note though, is that scrolling down, I expected the images to be interactive since they blend in with the rest of the page and look like interactive elements. I would either try to make it more obvious that they are example images, or actually make them interactive

n0vella ・ 4 days ago

You are right. I think those images need some css to let the user know that are images.
Thank you very much for the feedback!

joelthelion ・ 6 hours ago

What I'd like from a site like this is to be quizzed on the videos I watch, right after watching and maybe a few days after. I think that would have a large effect on learning.

maleldil ・ 6 hours ago

There are quite a few services that use generative models to generate quizzes from YouTube videos.

rgbrgb ・ 6 hours ago

Looks cool, love work in this direction. I wonder how learning rates w this would compare to taking notes on paper like in a traditional lecture, which some studies show improves learning [0].

[0]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-writing-by-ha...

pplonski86 ・ 3 days ago

Congrats on launch. I see many people learning on YouTube, that might be useful tool. Probably you can easily integrate it with LLM and generate summary and quizzes based on videos

n0vella ・ 3 days ago

It could be an aditional feature in the future. Thanks for the feedback.

purpleinfs ・ 35 minutes ago

neat

registeredcorn ・ 2 hours ago

1. It would be nice if there was a short video, gif, or webm showing TubePen working. I see the image examples and they are nice, but seeing it "in motion" would be a nice reassurance before signing up.

2. I use brave browser on mobile to watch youtube, so videos automatically set to m.youtube.com/whatever. In order for me to try TubePem on mobile I had to drop the leading "m" subdomain and switch youtube to TubePen. Not sure if you could get things working with the subdomain m.tubepen.com, but it might be nice.

Anyway, cool idea. I hope it does well. :)