HackerTubewatch
Surprise me
Frame from I made a talking banana Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

I made a talking banana

Useless Duck Company
Comedy
YouTube
3 HN users recommended this comedy video3 months2018–2023 score 3.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN shares it as a funny, technical story about phonetic profanity filtering, relevant to Soundex and content moderation threads.

A maker builds a talking banana that reads YouTube and Twitch comments aloud on stream, then fights viewers who abuse it with profanity. He ends up building a pronunciation-based filter to catch bad words.

“terrific little video about the battle between him and his viewers” (HN, 2018)

1 strong recommendations · 2 recommendations · 2 citations · Comedy

5 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@hbosch Jun 2018 Strongly recommends
on HN thread How Peppa Pig became a video nightmare for children
You might enjoy this video. It’s part humor and part technical discussion on how his talking “Banana” bot was brigades by users on Twitch in an effort to make him say racist words and phrases. After he got a strike on Twitch, he patched the software and then it got circumvented... terrific little video about the battle between him and his viewers and ultimately ends with his approach to sterilizing input so that the banana couldn’t speak anything harmful. I thought it was great. * [this video]
Funny, technical tale of viewers abusing a talking banana bot
@rasz May 2018 Recommends
on HN thread Soundex
If you are interested in phonetic algorithms, sorting, recognizing and filtering, you will enjoy Talking Banana Twitch ban story by Useless Duck Company : [this video]
Talking banana Twitch story involving a phonetic profanity filter
@tonfreed Oct 2021 Recommends
on HN thread The naughty username checking system used by Twitch
You say that there's no "non-hacky" way, but... [this video] He made a filter that did analysis of the pronunciation of the messages that were being sent. His breakdown of it starts at around 13:30
Builds a pronunciation-based filter for incoming messages

Citations, criticism and jokes

@sorenjan Oct 2021 Cites it
on HN thread The naughty username checking system used by Twitch
Reminds me of the guy that streamed a talking banana on Twitch, where viewers could make it say things. People submitted variations of the n-word and got him banned, and after trying to filter out all character combinations he could think of he wrote a phonetic filter. That apparently worked much better than trying to think of every permutation of characters that sounds like bad words. [this video]
Phonetic filter beat enumerating character permutations

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

Keyboard shortcuts

/
Search
j k
Next / previous video
r
Surprise me
l
Like (video page)
w
Watch later (video page)
?
This help
Esc
Close