AutoShorts
2022Built a pipeline that turned Reddit threads into YouTube Shorts.
166K+ views
1,200+ watch hours
The pipeline
Reddit threads were scraped with PRAW and rebuilt as Reddit-style posts. Text-to-speech read them out, and MoviePy and FFmpeg put the video together.
What viewers wanted
The content alone was not enough to hold a viewer's attention. They also wanted a hypnotic background to watch while they listened. I added Minecraft parkour clips underneath, which spiked viewers and their attention.
Looking back
The codebase was one huge script with deeply nested classes. It re-scraped Reddit on every run, and even tried an automated upload to YouTube.
I learned…
that not everything needs to be automated, and sometimes 80% of the gains come from 20% of the automation.