Scrubber: YouTube Comment Timestamps

Someone has already written the note you need about this video. It is in the comments, it says "3:42 is the part that finally made it click", and it is four hundred comments down where you will never see it at the moment it would have helped. Viewers have been hand-typing timestamps into YouTube comments for over a decade. "3:42 is the part that finally made it click." "Skip to 12:05." YouTube turns those into links, then buries them under a thousand other comments where nobody scrolling will ever find them at the moment they'd matter. Scrubber reads those timestamps off the page and puts them back where they belong — on the progress bar. WHAT YOU SEE • Density marks over the progress bar. Taller, brighter marks mean more people stopped to say something about that moment. The shape of a video's attention becomes visible before you watch a second of it. • Hover anywhere on the bar to read the comments about that point. • As you watch, the best comment about the moment you're in surfaces on its own, then gets out of the way. One per burst, spaced out, and never the same moment twice in a row. ADD YOUR OWN The same panel you read from is the one you write from. Reply to a comment, like it, or write your own comment stamped with the moment you're at — it posts to YouTube normally, so it auto-links for everyone, whether or not they have Scrubber. Nothing is ever posted on your behalf automatically. Every comment, reply and like happens only when you click send, and nothing at all can be posted while you're signed out. WHY IT'S USEFUL On tutorials it's a table of contents the creator never wrote — roughly one comment in eight carries a timestamp, and they cluster hard around the parts people got stuck on. On podcasts and long interviews it's a map of the moments worth hearing. TUNE IT OR TURN IT OFF A minimum-likes threshold, a cooldown between pop-ups, and how wide a window around the playhead counts as "this moment" — all in the toolbar popup, all changeable mid-video. One switch turns the whole thing off without uninstalling. ABOUT YOUR DATA — THE SHORT VERSION Scrubber talks to YouTube exactly the way the YouTube page itself does: same origin, same session already in your browser. There is no server of ours, no third party, and no account. It runs nowhere outside youtube.com and stores nothing but your own settings. No analytics, no tracking, no telemetry of any kind. The only thing that ever leaves your browser is a comment, reply or like you chose to send — and it goes to YouTube, exactly where it would have gone if you had used YouTube's own comment box. We never see it, because there is no "we" to see it. The source is public: https://github.com/alex-mind/scrubber KNOWN LIMITS Comments come from YouTube's own internal API, which Google changes without notice. Scrubber searches that response by key rather than by a fixed path so it survives most of those changes, but a hard break shows up as an empty bar. The mark count in the popup is the quickest way to tell. Desktop YouTube only for now.