Malk.
Curate videos to a profile. Follow people with taste. Watch their stations.
The algorithm decides what you watch.
YouTube's recommendation engine optimizes for engagement, not quality. The best videos you've ever seen probably came from a person, not the homepage — but there's no infrastructure for sharing that signal at scale. You can't follow someone's taste the way you'd follow a playlist.
Profiles, follows, and Station Mode.
Malk lets anyone build a public profile of curated videos. Follow people you trust; their picks surface in your feed. The platform's signature feature is Station Mode — a continuous playback experience that turns any profile, category, or tag into a personal channel. Custom controls, URL-synced state, shuffle, multi-platform support. No algorithm. Just human curation.
Station-first
The platform is built around continuous playback, not just a scroll feed. Any profile, category, or tag can become a station — a curated channel you can sit back and watch.
People, not algorithms
Discovery happens through follows, not a recommendation engine. You opt into the curators you trust and get their picks — no black-box amplification.
Curator identity
Every account is a taste profile, organized by category and playlist. What you curate is the signal — not engagement metrics.
How it came together
- 01
Rebuilt the foundation
Migrated from an Airtable-backed prototype to a full Next.js + Supabase stack with Prisma ORM — a complete architecture rewrite that unlocked real-time features, playlist infrastructure, and production-grade performance.
- 02
Engineered Station Mode
Built a custom multi-platform video engine from scratch. YouTube, Vimeo, and Twitch players mount into a ref'd div and are controlled through a shared VideoService interface. Station state — index, shuffle, mute, URL sync — lives in a React context that wraps the whole app, with Framer Motion handling transitions.
- 03
Designed the curation flow
Paste a URL and metadata pulls automatically — title, thumbnail, channel. Add tags, write a caption, set visibility. The flow had to be fast or nobody would use it; every extra step was a reason to stay on YouTube instead.
- 04
Discovered two use modes
Two distinct behaviors emerged from the same platform: manual curation drives the public feed (76% of discoverable posts), while YouTube playlist import powers the private library (81% of private posts). A bookmarklet handles quick captures anywhere. Three ways in — two very different reasons to use it.
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A research hub for spatial biology — co-built with an industry expert to solve a real fragmented-data problem.