How Web3Tube ranks crypto videos

This build at a glance

The pipeline

Each step writes a file the next one reads, and each can be rerun without repeating finished work.

Sources covered

The community weight scales how much one recommendation from that place counts. Research forums count most; governance forums and large community forums count less because more of their links are announcements, community calls and promotion.

Conference and ecosystem talks are used as seeds: 24,391 videos from the Devcon Archive, StreamETH event recordings (ETHGlobal, ETHDenver, Devcon and dozens more) and the YouTube channels of Solana (Breakpoint), Polkadot, Parity (Sub0), the Ethereum Foundation, ETHGlobal and the Zero Knowledge podcast (zkSummit). A seed marks a video as a conference talk and adds a small bonus, but a seed alone never puts a video in the catalog.

How each mention is labelled

A link is not an endorsement. Most forum links are meeting recordings, announcements or passing references, so Claude reads the words around each link and picks one label. The number is how much that label counts toward a recommendation.

Separately, a mention is flagged as self-promotion when the author appears to be the speaker or uploader. Those count at a quarter of their weight.

How much one voice counts

Each person gets one vote per video, their strongest mention. The weight of that vote is:

vote = label weight × strength (0.3–1.0, from Claude)
     × author credibility
     × community weight
     × 0.25 if self-promotion

author credibility = 0.7 × forum trust level   (TL0 0.3 · TL1 0.5 · TL2 0.75 · TL3 0.9 · TL4 1.0; staff +0.1)
                   + 0.3 × how established     (log of the author's posts with videos, full at 50)

Votes are summed per community with diminishing returns, and no single community may supply more than 60% of a video's recommendation weight. Each author who promoted the video subtracts 0.5.

The six signals

Each signal is a number from 0 to 1. The score is their weighted sum. These weights are the starting proposal and have not been tuned against real outcomes yet.

Anti-shilling controls

• One vote per author. Posting the same link ten times counts once.
• Bursts collapse. Three or more low-trust accounts posting the same video within three days count as one.
• Community cap. No single community supplies more than 60% of a video's recommendation weight.
• Promotion subtracts. Each promoting author removes 0.5 of recommendation weight; self-promotion counts at 25%.
• Sponsor language. Phrases like "use my code", "referral", "airdrop", "100x" or "price prediction" in the description cut the score by 20%.
• Shill risk. The score is multiplied by (1 − 0.7 × Claude's shill-risk estimate).
• No popularity inputs. YouTube views, subscriber counts and follower counts are never read.

What gets into the catalog

• The video is still public and embeddable on YouTube.
• Claude has labelled its mentions.
• It is about crypto: its title, channel, description or Claude's summary names a crypto term as a whole word (about 90 terms such as zk-SNARK, rollup or proof of stake, and chain names such as Zcash or Cardano, which must match exactly). General communities like Hacker News also link plenty of unrelated videos.
• At least one independent recommendation, or at least three independent neutral references.
• A final score of at least 0.22.

Separate shelves

A small Claude pass tags each catalog video's stance. Videos that argue against crypto or the industry (39 of them, such as James Mickens' "Blockchains Are a Bad Idea") go on a "Critiques & skeptics" shelf. Market and trading content (59 videos) goes on a labelled Markets shelf. The remaining 1,617 videos fill the builder shelves. Critiques and markets stay off those shelves but can still be found through search.

Topic tags

Each video carries one to three topic tags, which drive the topic tabs on the home page.

• A fixed list. Claude picks from 30 topics, from Zero-knowledge, MEV and Data availability to Governance and History & culture. Anything outside the list is mapped onto it or dropped.
• Chains are named, not guessed. Bitcoin, Lightning, Solana, Cardano, Zcash, Polkadot, Cosmos and the Move chains (Sui, Aptos) each have a tag. A chain tag appears only when the video's title, channel or summary names that chain, and is removed when it does not.
• Ethereum protocol means Ethereum. The tag is reserved for Ethereum's own protocol work (EIPs, upgrades, clients, core dev calls) and is dropped when nothing about the video points at Ethereum.
• AI x Crypto needs AI. The tag stays only when the video actually mentions AI, machine learning or agents.

The largest tags in this build: Governance 553, Cardano 533, History & culture 329, Developer tooling 309, Zcash 187, Bitcoin 186, Privacy 165.

A worked example

Coverage notes and known gaps