Building FocusTube

Creating the app where users feels Productive

YouTube is not just an entertainment site but an educational platform with millions of tutorials from various streams such as tech, finance, medical, and many more. Despite YouTube’s huge influence in the education sector, it does not seem to prioritize or promote educational content because it’s a fact that educational and learning platforms tend to reward less than entertainment content. As a result, you’re already familiar with short-form content (reels) on YouTube, which is even more distracting. I am not an internal engineer at YouTube, but sometimes while browsing, I sense that YouTube wants to promote entertainment, and their algorithms are becoming somewhat identical to Instagram’s. However, these are just my opinions and don’t necessarily have to be true.

Distraction is the problem, and to solve this problem, I present FocusTube: your YouTube without distraction, your videos without algorithms. Basically, it is a clone of YouTube. What do I do? I simply ask the user to paste a link of the video they want to watch — it can be any video — then I provide a way to store all those videos in one feed with features like customizable playlists, watch later, and more. The only thing the user has to do is paste the link of a specific YouTube video.

As of now, for those who want to delete YouTube from their system, this might be a good alternative. The flow will be like this: On Sunday, users surf YouTube and try to plan and collect links of the whole week’s learning materials. After they finish collecting, users delete YouTube and do not reinstall it for that week. Then, they come to FocusTube, paste all those links (bulk upload or even upload files containing links is possible), and perform their learning without any outside distractions.

To sum up, my goal is to minimize distraction as much as possible. I am not saying this is a perfect alternative, but it’s a very good workaround. We might think that from YouTube we learn about politics, finance, and random topics frequently, but if we use FocusTube, we might get disconnected from that world. To be frank, the answer is simple: having too much knowledge can cause cognitive overload.

So, this is for very serious people who are preparing for something important. And honestly, why would someone preparing for Google want to know about politics or world news? The candidate is supposed to know only DSA, system design, and real-world projects. So, paste all the useful links related to your preparation. And this is not the end — in the future, more features might come, like creating bundles of useful videos pasted by others and loved by many, so new users can just select the bundle that matches their interest.

Please visit the repository: https://github.com/drona-gyawali/FocusTube

— Drona Raj Gyawali