Show HN: Scroll Wikipedia like TikTok | Hacker News

Show HN: Scroll Wikipedia like TikTok (sdan.io)

330 points by sdan 5 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 88 comments Hey - I've been playing with LLMs since GPT-2 and recently experimented with fully generative UIs where the HTML/Canvas are generated just-in-time.Every post on the feed( on slop/duck/storytime) you see is streamed and generated just-in-time with HTML and into a Canvas with Gemini 3 Flash.Comments and DMs are bidirectionally linked with a Cloudflare Workers Durable Object which is why they feel so fast. Every generated post is saved into a DO SQLite which is then served into the "Following" feed so it can be served quicker.This was inspired by Wikitok, a VSCode Extension I made around brainrot, and another fully generative UI site I made.

| jaredsohn 5 months ago | next [–] Next step is allow viewing TikTok like wikipedia. Take a bunch of popular tiktok posts, use an LLM to describe what's happening via text/screenshots (with references to memes, etc), and link them to other relevant tiktoks.Some meme sites might be somewhat similar to this.

| lysp 5 months ago | parent | next [–]

Next step is allow viewing TikTok like wikipediaI tried that and this is what I got:Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nullam tincidunt at dui vel suscipit. Donec finibus viverra tempus. Ut ut tellus ac mi ultricies fermentum a quis nulla. Vivamus urna mi, laoreet ac purus sed, ultricies tincidunt nisi. Quisque vulputate massa nec hendrerit consequat. Suspendisse potenti. Phasellus dapibus suscipit vulputate. Suspendisse id semper turpis, sit amet rhoncus nisl. Aenean auctor purus orci, eget ullamcorper lorem volutpat sit amet.

| NoteyComplexity 5 months ago | parent | prev | next [–] Instead of LLM and just like Wikipedia, there should be users to submit the descriptions of the videos, and see people fighting for getting the most “correct” description.It will be hilarious to see what people will come up with when they see brain rot content.

| nephihaha 5 months ago | parent | prev | next [–] Allow TikTok to be run like Wikipedia... So that people with no interest or knowledge of a particular subject can go round deleting said content, or blocking every shared IP from uploading content while saying anyone can edit it.

| nolok 5 months ago | root | parent | next [–] That's a very wrong view of how Wikipedia works, and frankly vastly I prefer its limited but generalized gatekeeping than "everybody is allowed to lie and bullshit and as long as it makes engagement your feed is going to be filled with it" the TikTok way.

| Timwi 4 months ago | root | parent | next [–]

That's a very wrong view of how Wikipedia worksI think it's spot on. I used to be excited to contribute to Wikipedia, now I feel unwelcome and actively alienated. Everyone else I know doesn't even attempt to make any edits because “it all gets deleted anyway”. It's an incredibly hostile, unproductive and unwelcoming environment for anyone trying to make goodwill contributions.

| nephihaha 5 months ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] I have at least twenty years of experience of Wikipedia, and it is exactly how it works much of the time. I lost count of the occasions when people with no knowledge of a particular subject kept trying to delete articles on it. Then there were the continuously changing rules, jargon and oligarchical structures...Some subject areas have much better coverage than others: linguistics is much better dealt with than sport for example.Nowadays I rarely edit Wikipedia, because they block most shared IPs. I used a named account for at least ten years and it was counterproductive.

| Gander5739 5 months ago | root | parent | next [–] Would you be willing to give the name of the account?

| baby 5 months ago | parent | prev | next [–] There's already memepedia

| rhplus 5 months ago | parent | prev | next [–] TikTok like Wikipedia, huh? So we’d finally get to see how much of the recommendation algorithm was edited by IP addresses from US gov, Chinese gov and Russian bots?

| thiht 5 months ago | prev | next [–] I thought the scroll didn’t work at first, apparently only the bottom of the screen is scrollable. I see other comments talking about a voice, I don’t have it, just the music? Also the content is really irrelevant and uninteresting (I’m assuming it uses a random article? It should aim for the most popular instead), it really needs some curation.The subtitles are also hard to read, they should be displayed sentence by sentence, not word by word.IMO you didn’t capture what makes some interesting content work on TikTok. The scientific content on TikTok doesn’t have the brainrot music, it’s just interesting because of the short format. It looks to me like a clone of TikTok made by someone who hates TikTok and built it out of assumptions on what TikTok is.Honestly interesting Wikipedia articles summarized as TikTok content is a killer idea, but the implementation is not there yet

| sdan 5 months ago | parent | next [–] thanks! i spent last weekend building out the engine to create content but agree UI needs more polish. this is all great feedback will try getting out v2 of quickquack rebranded to wikwok :)

| saltwatercowboy 5 months ago | parent | prev | next [–] I think you are taking this more seriously than the creator. It's just a bit of fun.

| thiht 5 months ago | root | parent | next [–] Yeah because I think it’s a seriously good idea. Making knowledge and science somewhat addictive is a cool goalI could see myself using that

| saltwatercowboy 5 months ago | root | parent | next [–] It is a cool goal... but I don't think it's a realistic one.

| looofooo0 5 months ago | parent | prev | next [–] Graph structure of wiki could be exploited for user specific content.

| xnx 5 months ago | prev | next [–] Sounds like WikTok (2023, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42936723) or WikiTok (early 2025, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42936723).

| SirFatty 5 months ago | parent | next [–] "This was inspired by Wikitok, a VSCode Extension I made around brainrot, and another fully generative UI site I made."

| mellosouls 5 months ago | root | parent | next [–] I also thought immediately of WikiTok and was confused by this exchange and the grammar in the quote here; I thought they were claiming to have made a VSCode extension called Wikitok. I understand now!

| sdan 5 months ago | root | parent | next [–] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=SuryaDan...for clarification :)

| cable_ 4 months ago | prev | next [–] Cute and fun idea. Not something I would use personally but I enjoyed checking it out.

| cons0le 5 months ago | prev | next [–] This is amazing! I think this could actually catch on!Plz give an easy way to follow some tags so it's not showing me football stuff. If it was just topics I was interested in, I could scroll this for hours.

| sdan 5 months ago | parent | next [–] Huge- good to hear will see if I can add a way to type in what you want or to go dig further into just certain hashtags.

| fpsvogel 5 months ago | root | parent | next [–] One way to get usable and consistent categories for a Wikipedia article is Lift Wing: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Machine_Learning/LiftWin...I once used it to create a "Wikipedia StumbleUpon": https://github.com/fpsvogel/wiki-stumble#demoHere is the code related to Lift Wing: https://github.com/fpsvogel/wiki-stumble/blob/main/app/model...Mentioning this in case you're looking for something as a basis for tags.EDIT: Here is a list of all the categories from Lift Wing: https://github.com/fpsvogel/wiki-stumble/blob/main/app/model...

| Rad007 5 months ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] It's pretty cool.This is even scalable if you consider caching some of these requests and allow users to choose if they want a just-in-time version. Also the comments really are snappy and quick to load.

| recallingmemory 5 months ago | prev | next [–] Neat idea, and love the Undertale menu mp3: https://brainrot-vscode-ext.sdan.io/quack/music/undertale-me...

| personjerry 5 months ago | prev | next [–] The animations + audio are great. I feel like these meaningfully differentiate from some other similar projects. There's a lot of potential here.

| aizk 5 months ago | prev | next [–] Hi there, creator of Wikitok here! Very happy to hear that my random little project inspired you :) The attention to detail in the UI is good - I'm so over every default AI generated UI being rounded corners, centered divs, blue and purple gradients, etc. Nice work.

| sdan 5 months ago | parent | next [–] Thanks! Half of the work here was getting gemini to generate reasonable canvas animations within the window. I'm still experimenting which "style" I should keep/add

| -i 5 months ago | prev | next [–] 747.run is a realtime infinite Ai wikipedia, every word is a link to a unique article based on the word in the URL, Ai frequently checks all URL's and writes a new article based on the word you click.You can also write articles and all your words become links, use the website address bar to type any word after 747.run/ or type 747.run/ behind any domain to generate unique articles based on domain.Have a group chat with unlimited people and Ai, share any link to chat with anyone, press space to chat with the Ai, have an Ai chatbot on your website or chat with users privately by embedding it on your website with iFrame (set BG color or leave it transparent)The Ai sometimes drifts & hallucinates.

| asciii 5 months ago | prev | next [–] This is so awesome - i wish I could modify that annoying voice :)

| baby 5 months ago | prev | next [–] Wow this is so freaking awesome! I guess the pages I ended up scrolling on weren't too interesting though, how do you figure out what stories to create/show?

| sdan 5 months ago | parent | next [–] Wikipedia articles are randomly sampled, theres no algorithm per-se yet but hoping to collaborate with others to see that through

| sdan 5 months ago | prev | next [–] Note there's a rate limit on generated content for the time being, why you're unable to see any new content on the rest of the feeds. LLMs are expensive!

| baby 5 months ago | parent | next [–] Ad ads like instagram reels have!

| kerisi 5 months ago | prev | next [–] you can use LTX to generate the videos, this video took 15s on a 4090https://vimeo.com/1152992073?share=copy&fl=sv&fe=ci

| sdan 5 months ago | parent | next [–] nice did you make this just for the comment? haha

| kerisi 5 months ago | root | parent | next [–] yep haha

| gregjw 5 months ago | parent | prev | next [–] we live in an era of frictionless slop creation. yay.

| mappum 5 months ago | prev | next [–] Missed an opportunity to name it WikWok or Tikipedia.

| sdan 5 months ago | parent | next [–] great suggestion ! i might change it to wikwok, so good

| raleighm 5 months ago | parent | prev | next [–] WikWok is tremendous

| tylervigen 5 months ago | prev | next [–] Hilarious. The one AI voice is a little too grating for me, but with a little variation I might actually scroll it for a while.

| Imustaskforhelp 5 months ago | parent | next [–] Yea I didn't like the voice as well, it felt very coarse to me and not very enjoyableTo be really honest, I still occasionally browse shorts sometimes because of some youtubers/niche content (there is this really good etymology shorts guy and a fun fact guy I watch usually)So like the other day I was asking fun fact about niche legal laws just out of curiosity if anyone of them might be interesting/genuinely helpful to me lol to chatgpt about different countriesThere were lot of niche things but one which I found interesting was that its possible in finland and other norweigian countries to browse even private land / private forests etc. and finland even has a digital right to internet> Finland was the first country in the world to make access to high-speed internet a legal right, establishing this policy in July 2010. The law requires all service providers to offer a minimum internet speed of one megabit per second to every household, with a goal of providing access to 100 megabits per second by 2015. PBS edri.org (from Duckduckgo AI)

| ingatorp 5 months ago | parent | prev | next [–] They could have used Kokoro which is open source, fast and way more human-like.

| sdan 5 months ago | parent | prev | next [–] A few months ago I made a (theoretically) infinitely learning geo-guessing model that updated the policy with each user guess: https://geospot.sdan.io/Hoping to implement a simple RL loop here and optimize whats generated by the LLM to create the perfect slop machine :)

| vedmakk 5 months ago | prev | next [–] This is really cool. I'm interested in the GenUI part. Is the web app itself static and the stories are generated on-demand?Do you give gemini some UI components/templates to build with or is it just prompting to get consistent results across multiple stories?

| pests 5 months ago | parent | next [–] Google AI Studio has a Gallery[0] with some similar apps. It's an editor so you can view the code, they are usually react apps with gemini integration via genai package. Like this one here[1] is similar. It generates interesting stories to share about a route you are driving / walking / biking along. This is one of the pre-made examples I believe, I didn't make it or anything. Just to show some how some of this might work.[0] https://aistudio.google.com/apps&showcaseTag...[1] https://aistudio.google.com/apps/bundled/echo_paths?showPrev...

| sdan 5 months ago | parent | prev | next [–] Yes I have base css/js that I inject on top of whatever codegen gemini 3 comes back with -- It runs via ai-sdk so the specific function is streamObject which is prompted to generate inner HTML elements

| Edmond 5 months ago | prev | next [–] Work related versions of this, expense report:https://youtu.be/h0Bg-lqNlkUIn general Just-In-Time app generation is a bad idea. The right approach is to create human-in-loop tools that a bot would recognize and invoke as needed, of course the human-in-loop tool would itself be AI generated.Example of human-in-loop tool in use:https://youtu.be/srG5Ze7mS7s

| mandeepj 5 months ago | prev | next [–]

fully generative UIs where the HTML/Canvas are generated just-in-timeWhy? The UI is a template and the core structure never changes, in the context of TikTok’s feed, so what’s the benefit you are trying to reap by dynamically generating the UI?

| sdan 5 months ago | parent | next [–] sorry not the UI but specifically the content. every new post on the feeds that are not "Following" are created in realtime. just a demo showing whats possible but I could just generate them before hand in bulk too.

| exomonk 5 months ago | prev | next [–] Can you request a specific wiki article?I'd like to see https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_syst...

| vishnuharidas 5 months ago | prev | next [–] Coincidentally, I was vibe-coding a doom-scroller for Hacker News Top Stories today: https://vishnuharidas.github.io/hn-reels/

| breadchris 5 months ago | prev | next [–] I love this! I made a cooking knowledge brain rot app for myself from my favorite youtuber https://recipes.justshare.io/random-dan

| eastbound 5 months ago | prev | next [–] It lacks superlatives. “Discover how [the amazing] [secret|mystery] that no-one [wants to tell you|ever discovers]” should be the first sentence.Hopefully it will not make its way upstream in Wikipedia.

| omegabravo 5 months ago | prev | next [–] I was confused why someone would possibly configure the voice to be quiet and raspy.Seems like there's an issue with Firefox that was causing it. Chrome voice sounds "normal" - like TikTok.

| nephihaha 5 months ago | prev | next [–] Google should buy Wikipedia and be done with it. Or we could cut out Google altogether and just search Wikipedia because it is one of the few sites Google will show you.

| tyleo 5 months ago | parent | next [–] Day 1: Google buys WikipediaDay 100: Wikipedia is shut down

| nephihaha 5 months ago | root | parent | next [–] Google would probably asset strip it for all the info it could sell on or import into AI models.

| cornonthecobra 5 months ago | prev | next [–] The caption highlight timing is very inaccurate. It looks like it just steps through each word on a fixed timer, rather than using timing information from the TTS engine?

| sdan 5 months ago | parent | next [–] Yes just fixed timer, and using browser TTS nothing fancy here on purpose - when I did some research on tiktok videos generally simpler/worse quality seemed to be better XD

| cornonthecobra 5 months ago | root | parent | next [–] In this case, static text without the highlighter would have been better. Because the timing is so far off, the highlighter interferes with reading the captions for hearing assistance.

| grugagag 5 months ago | prev | next [–] Good. However, on a smaller phone such as Iphone SE the viewport gets cropped all around and I don’t see around 20% of the content.

| furyofantares 5 months ago | prev | next [–] Reading it with sound off is really hard because of the way the words come up one at a time, rather than the whole sentence at once.

| maxbond 5 months ago | prev | next [–] Having a generated voice tell me about some historical massacre in a chipper tone with a generated infographic and set to TikTok music was. Especially dystopian.As an experience I found it nauseating and am never doing it again, but as an art piece I give it high marks. Good job.

| gregjw 5 months ago | parent | next [–] Indeed.

| bstsb 5 months ago | prev | next [–] wow, my attention span is terrible - the first time i tried watching a generated video, i instinctively held the right side of the screen to speed it up to 2x…is there scope for allowing users to search for / ask about specific topics? although then you do have to think about security issues with prompt injection

| FergusArgyll 5 months ago | prev | next [–] I've never used tiktok, if this is an accurate representation, it's jarring!

| anotherpaul 5 months ago | prev | next [–] Oh I hate it it's so brain rotty. Well done. Well done indeed.

| casey2 5 months ago | prev | next [–] Bit too much text I'd suggest using an RSPV style

| alexpadula 5 months ago | prev | next [–] It’s a cool idea but the content needs to be more useful imo.

| sdan 5 months ago | parent | next [–] how could i make it more useful? different formats? would you want to keep you engaged for longer? entertained for longer?

| garyfirestorm 5 months ago | root | parent | next [–] Relevant content - what is relevant to me may not be relevant to you.

| fitnessapp 5 months ago | prev | next [–] The idea is really interesting the implementation sucks.

| keepamovin 5 months ago | prev | next [–] That's awesome man that is REALLY cool. Useful :)

| ram_rattle 5 months ago | prev | next [–] Looks super cool

| oceansky 5 months ago | prev | next [–] Very cool! But text moves way too fast

| cramcgrab 5 months ago | prev | next [–] How appropriate

| lukebechtel 5 months ago | prev | next [–] Honestly, pretty cool.

| nseth 5 months ago | prev | next [–] Another sick Surya project, well done dude![Neall]

| sdan 5 months ago | parent | next [–] thanks

| emsign 5 months ago | prev [–] Nice tech demo but in practice utterly annoying and without purpose. I mean don't you think enshitifying Wiki knowledge kind of beats the purpose of acquiring knowledge?

| odie5533 5 months ago | parent [–] It's a proof of concept to pave the way. I could see benefit in having series which deep dive into material. This felt too shallow to me.

| emsign 5 months ago | root | parent [–] Deep dives with TikTok mechanics? That's not going to work, that TikTok UI was optimized for dopamine release. You want to teach junkies new things? All they learn is how to get their kicks, so outside that settings nothing will stick. When they have to apply the infotainment snippets in a real world setting the won't be these high reward stimuli. I mean if you want to hook them on feeling great while believing they've learned something...

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