Re: difficulty - Natively has a system where it asks users if x or y was harder. Like they save I’ve read this book and that book, then there’s a screen where you do that to help improve rankings. It’s kinda fun, might be something to consider if you want to make those ratings more detailed.

I actually like this Idea. I’m not sure if I would put that into the Feedback Dialog but having a section where a user can help to improve the Videos would be interesting.

That’s really cool actually. I saw a sort by difficulty, so I thought there must be something more granular. But then I figured setting that level of detail for all these would be too much work.

Well you were sort of right. I didn’t set an internal difficulty for all the Videos yet. They just default to 50 if it’s not set. The Idea behind this was to use the Feedback people submit to scale the difficulty up & down because I’m 100% certain I’ll not nail all the videos on the first try.

I’m not sure how it should work, but personally I just expected to go to the search page with that tag pre-filled. Difficulty filter remembered would be better, imo. Creator, I wouldn’t be as worried about that sticking, but some people might. Might be best to keep it consistent if difficulty is saving. Maybe down the road someday, saving each of the search filters could be a setting. Mainly I just want things on the video page that I can use to find new videos. If none of the similar videos in the sidebar appeal, it can be nice to see “Oh, there’s a tag for that, maybe there are more videos about that topic”, or “Maybe I should check out all the videos from this creator”. You have that on-ramp to keep using the site.

I see. Making difficulty “persistent” makes sense because you probably wouldn’t look for a higher difficulty all of the sudden. I’ll try & see what I can up with. I’m not sure if I see saved search filters as a big feature because the last state is saved into your localStorage anyway.

Thanks for the Feedback!

Yes. If I could try it out in a limited fashion and get a feel to see if it would add value to my learning experience without having to provide login details first, then I’d be much more willing to try it. Especially if its made clear that a login is not required to try, since so many sites have a Try It button that just leads to a sign up page.

I’ll see if I can do that in a reasonable time frame because currently the App depends on a logged in User. I agree that this would be better for people to check it out but it was an oversight while creating the Application. It just went from cool project for myself to a Product idea way to fast I guess

If the critical information I need to make the decision to try it out is present, easily accessible, and clear then I’m going to be more willing to try it. Not as much as if option 1 was available, but more willing.

Good to know. I’ll try to improve all the landing pages!

Woah, calm down buddy. I can understand people having a distaste for AI but the product is neither AI focused nor am I pushing AI content. But hey you do you.

The front page tells me almost nothing. All the info there blurs into corpo speak about how great the site is without giving me real info I need to make the decision on if I should risk giving out my email to sign up. It seems the only way to find the info I need in order to decide if I should use this site in any capacity is to sign up by giving you my email address. That’s a hard pass.

Would you be more open to test websites like this if you could try them out without an account but in a more limited fashion? Like you can see the VideoOverview & watch the videos but there is no progress tracking & Playlist and you would always see ads?

That was quick! Looks good. I was a little surprised to see the ‘videos like this’ sidebar when going back to watch them, instead of the playlist sidebar (since these are accessed from playlist page). But I don’t necessarily dislike that either.

I put the Watch Later into the Playlists for now but I’m not completely happy with that location so thats why you see the Videos like this & not the Playlist behavior. I was just unsure where to put it without disrupting the Mobile Menu.

‘Superbeginner’ label feels hard to read, might need more contrast

Noted

When watching a video, the difficulty tag doesn’t seem to be anywhere.

I’ll add the Difficulty Tag!

When browsing the video list, hovering over difficult expands and shows a number - but clicking still just goes to the video.

What do you expect to happen here? The number was only meant to inform you how difficult the video is inside the Difficulty bracket (1 easiest -> 100 hardest)

When watching a video, tags aren’t clickable - I’d like to be able to click those to go to a search filtered by that tag. Creator is also not visible on the video player page, would be another good thing to be able to click.

How would you like this to work? Currently I save your last search settings (difficulty, Creator, Tags). So when I click on a tag should the search still use the old difficulty & creator and only use the new tag or should it clear everything and only search for the clicked tag. Same goes for creator

This comment may be overly blunt, but I’m also frustrated with trying to find decent language learning tools. This is just being added to the list of frustratingly opaque tools that I’ve bounced off of. I clicked into it and didn’t even make it a full minute before leaving frustrated.

Hey, sorry to hear this. That’s of course quite the opposite of what I want to achieve. I’m always glad about specific & even critical feedback so thank you for posting!

I saw no way to easily find a list of supported languages. That’s the only thing I care about when I click into a site like this. The site not having a list of supported languages in either the menu or on the front page instantly fills me with distrust. The front page tells me almost nothing. All the info there blurs into corpo speak about how great the site is without giving me real info I need to make the decision on if I should risk giving out my email to sign up. It seems the only way to find the info I need in order to decide if I should use this site in any capacity is to sign up by giving you my email address. That’s a hard pass. Any site that hides info I need in order to decide if it’s even going to work for me makes me feel like its just trying to either scam me or spam me. As a result, it goes into my list of do not use sites.

Someone already mentioned this & this is a HUGE oversight of mine! I’m currently redesigning the Landing Page (I’m not a designer so I’m struggling a bit here but it has to be improved!) Also the Corpo speak on there is pretty much a placeholder, I have to learn how to do marketing will actually doing this. I majored in Computer Science so it’s learning by doing. If you could tell me which section you really found useless/bad/meaningless I’ll try my best to vindicate that in the redesign!

Having seen the screenshot you posted here, I have to agree with the other feedback about why I wouldn’t just go to YouTube directly. At least there I can use SponsorBlock and sign in to save their already made playlists. I don’t see how this site adds any actual value over going to YouTube, to be honest.

Well honestly I think what I offer is aggregation & tracking not necessarily content so if people decided Youtube is a better experience & they bounce from my website that just means I have to improve my offered Service. Also as far as I know Sponsorblocks & all other Youtube related Plugins should work, thats why I choose to use the normal Youtube Embbed. I also could use a different Player without the Youtube branding but then plugins wont work. If they didn’t for you I would be interested in what browser (version) you tried.

Another musing, might be nice to have videos from other sources too. PeerTube, Odysee, Vimeo, BilliBilli exist. Tiktok has some good stuff, for sure. I don’t think this is worth the trouble though, considering those first few have almost no content.

I’m was thinking about this. I have to see which of these platforms allow embedding. I know TikTok does & BilliBilli doesn’t but no idea about the rest.

Rankings - my thinking was a few tags could maybe show under the video when browsing. Or searching by tag could return ones where the tag is most relevant.

I like this in general. I decided against the first point because it kinda overloads the UI a bit. Maybe if I find someone who can help me with design I can revisit this. The last part sounds like something I should do. Like ordering the Videos that have the tag by relevance sounds like a decent Idea.

Glad to hear the tags are human added. LLM only approach would scale better, but produce silly nonsense sometimes and make the site less fun. I do think if you have any LLM generated content (titles and description) that’s user facing, that should probably be disclosed somewhere in an About or FAQ page.

Well yea a pure LLM approach would be for sure faster & scale easier but you just can’t trust AI output enough so you need supervision. I actually tried to get a general sense of the difficulty based on LLM output but that took me nowhere so I had to revert back to do it manually. Most of the time I use the Difficulty the Creator has set but a lot of the times there is no difficulty anywhere & thats where I have to evaluate it myself. This is actually the hardest part because I don’t speak a lot of the languages so I’m depended on friends helping me out there.

For the difficulty though, that can probably use some input from automation (not even necessarily LLM, just good old fashioned code) - might not be too hard to figure out words per minute, % of common words, etc from the transcript and run time. But difficulty values from the channel that created it are probably more accurate, and I imagine most of them say what they’re targeting. And analysis wouldn’t capture things like visual aids.

This is actually harder than you would think. I had the same Idea after my LLM approach & it turns out this is hard as shit. Even linguists that studied a language struggle with this. Also getting data set’s for the most common words might be easy for English, Spanish, etc. but not for the more obscure/rare ones. In my research I found a service that offers this for English but it’s still mostly for written words TextInspector. Having a transcript of spoken words makes it even harder because there is no punctuation & spoken word is not always correct or uses slang. Like this whole topic is extremly complex & creating the Datasets could be a whole business by itself.

Also I added a Watch Later feature. Feel free to check it out & tell me what you think about it.

Your Feedback about Youtube is pretty valid tbh. So yea no Idea on how to handle that problem but I just hope people like the platform enough to use it over Youtube. It worked for DreamingSpanish in the beginning (before they had premium videos) as well so it could also work for me. I guess we will see.

And yea the plan to enshitify overtime is not really something I wanna do. I just wanna over value at a reasonable price so people just don’t mind paying for the convenience. Also I don’t think is even a valid way if you don’t have VC money to burn.

And yes I saw DreamingSpanish changing to Dreaming.com & them offering French now but I think their business model is just different. They focus on extremely high Quality Content that they have control over & that makes them expand slower in to new languages. So for the meantime it should be fine.

About your two Ideas:

• Crowdsourcing Tags could be possible in the future for sure but also demands a lot of Moderation work from myself.
• Most relevant Tag Rankings: I’m not exactly sure what you mean with this? Do you mean inside the tag dropdown to show the ones people searched the most for / used the most? Or something completely different?

My Methodology rn is the following: I use a tool I created to scrape/download all the Video Information from a Channel that I want to Integrate into the platform. This data gets put into a google docs sheet & then let an LLM Model (n8n) run over all the data to change Title & Description. After that I manually Double check titles & descriptions. Now I assign tags & Difficulty and other internal values. Last step is importing the Google Sheet into my Platform.

I’m currently working on a fully integrated process inside my Admin tool to have less manual steps (copying back and forth, manual Import, etc.)

Well, the Ads on the page would only be banner ads because it’s illegal to play preroll Ads on embedded Youtube videos. But I like the Idea of setting them as the TL

Wow, thanks for the amazing feedback! This helps a lot!

Your concerns about the Landingpage are valid & yes its pretty much a layout copy of cjjapanese. I myself am not very good at marketing & design so that’s why I just started with something that already works. The Landingpage will get a full redesign after some feedback (I will for sure highlight the currently available languages!).

On your thoughts of the infinite scroll, I understand your sentiment but I think this is also highly subjective. I could probably add a setting or something similar that changes form infinite scroll to paging but that would be a pretty low priority at the moment. I’d rather improve the infinite scroll in away that it isn’t annoying, so would it be better to not load randomly & order them by Difficulty as the default option?

A Watch-Later option is something I will do for sure but its also not the highest priority but a nice feature that will for sure come.

The Tag loading problem might happen because I didn’t scale up the server very high at the moment for cost saving reasons during the test phase. This should resolve itself when I scale up the Server & databases at a later point. I agree that there are a lot of tags but there are also a lot of different Videos on the platform already & they will only expand. Maybe I can consolidate some at a later point & remove the ones that only have very few videos.

I like the Calendar progress tracking suggestion. I will add that!

Hmm, I see your point that you could just use my platform to discover the Videos & then watch them on Youtube but that is a general problem I guess. But what the platform is offering isn’t necessarily the content but aggregation, discoverability & curation and some people just might not value that. So if I offer unlimited watch-time in the free tier it might not be sustainable as a business because Progress tracking alone isn’t a selling point in my opinion. The problem on the Free tier also would be that it would be Ad-supported & that doesn’t really make a lot of money unless you go overboard with them. Currently you make $0.00025 to $0.002 per banner ad impression which isn’t a lot & I only planned to add some ads into the Video browse page & a small banner into the Videoplayer so I don’t think I would be able to recoup even only the cost on a free tier user. But nothing is decided yet so I might just have to go with it anyway to get people to use the app.

Yea subscription fatigue is a huge problem right now, especially for SaaS businesses. That’s why i would probably aim between 2-4$/month for the premium version. Also Dreaming & CiJapanese are for sure competitors but only in one language so I think there is still a lot of value in my Service. Also I don’t see the free Youtube Videos as a big competitor because the core of the business isn’t the content itself (not yet at least, I hope I can produce some later).

I’m currently planning to add 3 tiers of Users to the plattform after the open beta period is over (no end date yet).

Free-Tier:

• Limited watchtime per month & Ads

Subscription tier (price tbd -> Open for feedback on what would be a fair price)

• Unlimited watchtime, No Ads

Lifetime tier (One time payment with price tbd | Limited supply maybe around 100 slots?)

• All Premium features
• Roadmap access
• Exclusive Discord community
• Early beta features
• Lifetime access guarantee

This is what you currently find on the Website.

Some Screenshots to get a better feel for the App