Algorithm That Makes Preschoolers Obsessed with YouTube
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
This site [1] has a good collection of screenshots of what I'm referring to. Unfortunately, it's such a heavyweight site that AdBlock is practically required just to open the page.
[1] https://vigilantcitizen.com/moviesandtv/something-is-terribl... "Warning: This article contains disturbing images … although they’re all taken from children’s videos."
If your children are watching YouTube, make sure they are doing it only when and where you are able to see what they are watching.
If I ever have kids, there's no way in hell I'm letting them run free with an iPad or iPhone. I know it's the "easy way out" to distract your kids at the dinner table, but I can't help but feel like it's bad for their mental development. Then again, I was part of the first generation that grew up with the modern internet and am decently well adjusted despite being exposed to weird content at a young age. Hm.
I'm not saying you wouldn't make boundaries. Boundaries are important. But that may also include a certain amount of time of letting the child "run free" with the iPad.
My 4 year old is just now learning to use a mouse, but she's been at a touchscreen for over 3 years.
She was used to iPads, but one day I gave her my Android tablet. She was upset at first because things are slightly different, but adjusted quickly. I was shocked at how fast she picked it up.
I had one family tell me they learned about five finger swipes from their 1 year old daughter.
When these are adapted for cartoons by Disney and others they are usually greatly sanitized. A parent who remembers those adaptations and thinks that is what they are getting when they get the original book versions is in for a surprise.
They are full of stories of people who are cruel and who cheat and abuse the weak and innocent, and in the end...that works out great for them and they get everything they wanted.
When I was 12 I yelled a friends name while walking out the door, and was expected to be back by dinner. If I wasn't the best thing my parents could do was to call my friends parents (homes) and ask if I was there.
All it takes is one asshole (Or good Samaritan) to give the latter a call, and you'll have a lot of explaining to do. And heaven help you if either group finds a joint in your home.
Nobody's gonna call Child Protection Services on you when the kids are at home with the iPad.
But turning the TV off (mobile isn't allowed) usually results in solo play with toys. It took a bit of coaxing but now when sitting down, we agree how many episodes will be watched before the screen goes dark.
I think there's some way involving a Google account but it's not obvious.
I used it differently back then too. I opened a browser with what I wanted in mind, I found it, then I closed the browser and did something else. There was never this mindless wandering or idle talking, just fetching pdfs and saving html tutorials and downloading compilers. Maybe I've romanticized it though...
But that doesn't mean these things need to be part of your kids home, work, or play routine. Even kids in nice areas around the bay area aren't about to suddenly bring home an iPad or iPhone without their parents notice. Kids will beg, but they will also learn to stop begging; they will learn that their family just does things differently.
I've seen plenty of parents choose NOT to buy their kids a major computing device until junior high age, and prior to then making them go through the inconvenience of typing on their parents computer.
It doesn't screw them up. It doesn't make them socially weird. It doesn't make them technologically aversive later, and it doesn't stunt their enthusiasm for play.
If you want to give your kids unsupervised play, because you need some personal or work time, what's wrong with biking around the city with friends?
But modern social media sites are something different entirely, and they've likely given their users a 30 second attention span or worse.
"Is captainsparkles child-friendly?" or "child friendly youtubers" into google will return lists saying yes, captainsparkles is child friendly. He's employed by MakerStudios, which is owned by Disney.
Seems pretty solidly okay for children.
Except, when he plays with other people, they'll start swearing.
So, you have to prescreen everything, or have the discussion about language, or just not care about language. (Even if you don't care if your 6 year old says "fuck" I can pretty much guarantee that schools and other parents see it as a problem.)
Sounds a lot like the Cartoon Network I was addicted to as a kid. When I watch some of those cartoons and understand the subtextual jokes ... damn that shit was pervy and weird.
As a kid I had no idea. Didn't even notice, I just liked it when the Coyote got flattened, Dexter's experiment blew up, and Jerry hit Tom with a baseball bat.
In some way my daughter must have learned just enough words and sentences to be able to communicate more or less right away. The teachers found this fascinating and asked us if we were teaching her or even talking English at home - which we don't. In fact we had no idea what they were talking about.
Anyway, she seems to understand quite much. I have absolutely no idea where this comes from - the only thing I can think of is that it's because of YouTube.
Not that she spends hours and hours, but since she more or less never watches TV I haven't been bothered that much if she get stuck in front of a tablet for a while.
That being said, I try to be aware of what she's watching because there is some weird stuff out there although I don't exactly think that Spidey kissing is harmful.
TV for children is very restricted and regulated for a very important reason.
If anything it's people with problems that tend to search for such things rather than such videos causing something.
Over the centuries it's been sanitized and Disneyfied, but the primal drives that fascinated by that sort of thing have not gone away.
Also half todays cartoons would not pass neither comic code nor restrictions at early movies.
The comic code and movies are simply two additional examples of historical censorship.
In the US, there was no comic code or movie censorship, but there was things like Comstock laws. Would Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" raise many eyebrows today? It did in the 1850s-60s. (http://www.unm.edu/~unmvclib/handouts/bannedboston.pdf)
It is true that Grimm's tales were at first meant to be more of an educational archive of folklore that otherwise would have been lost. (https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2015/marchapril/feature/how-t...) However, apparently, it was found after publishing that the stories appealed to parents and children. So between the first and seventh edition, apparently the stories were made "more appropriate" for children of that era. (https://books.google.com/books?id=6gX-hNshMJEC&lpg=PR39&dq=M...) In those times, that more meant getting rid of any bawdy humor and any references to sex (violence to a "morally correct" end was okay though).
Culture changes; it seems like nowadays, some degree of bawdy humor is okay in children's entertainment. However, I've seen many articles wondering if the Grimm tales are too scary for kids.
It is pretty much impossible to defend comic code as written, even ignoring the argument that adults should be able to read horror stories (including those grittier then Game of Thrones) if they like them. Comic code was simply a reaction of people unable to suddenly process that many have different preferences then them.
Somehow they failed to be horribly scarred by it.
https://medium.com/the-ferenstein-wire/the-birth-and-death-o...
Try watching disturbing violence (war images/videos for example) for a while yourself. Empathic response will blunt itself within a week or two.
But I'm weird and think that it's far better to let children see sex than even regular hollywood violence, and that things like US military recruitment ads and ISIS recruitment videos should be treated identically (restricted behind a warning that they're not for kids). The normalization of violence is a terrible thing.
Trouble with children is that they may not yet have the moral compass for lack of a better phrase. I would find it important to talk to the child and ask him what he's thinking about the videos, and make sure he understands that the behavior in the videos is horrible, ends the life of another person, what that means, etc. I'd also make sure the child would not get trapped in some cycle of feeling guilty for simply watching some videos and having/not having whatever reactions to it.
Not a great source though.
I'm not sure what kind of parent would let their kids watch stuff like this but it's pretty shocking to see that this stuff is even marketed as "for children". The only "for children" things I've seen on Youtube are pretty innocent animated shorts (lots of nursery rhymes too). But I guess the algorithm will show you what it thinks you like.
How have you been trying to market it? What marketing avenues have you been trying? Facebook ads etc?
I watched poverty inc documentary and saw how parents with some money in Haiti spent money on private school for children.
I believe, thanks to khan etc, great education already exist, parents just need innovative tools to help keep children on proper path. I reached out to some orphanages / schools in Haiti and they are excited to try this out once android app is complete.
I'm halfway tempted to set this up for _myself_. You're absolutely right that 30 minutes is gone in instant when you start in on online entertainment.
If notifications are enabled, they will know when points are earned on education sites. Parents can easily figure out what's going on and react to it.
If you pay attention to malware analysis you will see raw IP addresses and random domains are very common in malware. I think corps should enable their outbound firewalls. Problem now is whitelisting each IP is way too much work.
My tests show a C++ DNS proxy can be used to whitelist IP addresses to ipset hash in iptables just before the DNS proxy responds to client. Raw IPs are now blocked and firewall outbound is coupled to your trusted DNS provider.
This would massively reduce attack surface to domains your org regularly uses. Not resolving new / young domains is important here.
At this point we can blame DNS and the firewall!
The videos that most children like are of a very poor quality at which most adults would cringe.
I've tried to redirect my children toward more high-quality children's programming. You know, stuff with scripts and budgets. Nonetheless, they want these toy porn videos produced by these toddler whisperers.
As the article begins, children crave autonomy. YouTube Kids gives it to them. It's an amazing application. I have a Google Music subscription, so my kids get to watch these videos ad-free. It's a pretty good experience for everyone.
I wonder how good/bad those "toy porn" videos are. I don't know, hence I prefer to play it safe and follow AAP recommendations regarding screen time.
"Daddy finger, daddy finger, where are you? Here I am, here I am, how do you do?"Yes papa?
Eating sugar?
No, papa!
Telling lies?
No, papa!
Open your mouth!
Ha, ha, ha!
I immediately switched her to kindle fire for kids and she improved a lot. I don't like Amazon per say but there is no competition to choose from.
It ain't easy being a parent, a 9 to 5 worker and a household manager within a 24h schedule. If parents leave their children to do some mindless thing while unnatended, it's often because they don't have enough time to give attention to all the stuff which is immediatelly pressing them.
In my experience, kids are willing to watch the same content many, many more times than an adult. This makes this strategy reasonable.
One of my favorite parts about it all is that my kids have been taking selfies, pictures and videos of each other. They are up into the thousands. They put on hats and shoot little films of them jumping off the bed. They interview their uncles, and make cooking and painting shows.
There's a lot of really cool things they do if you limit the non interactive, blob mode of the devices.
It also has a timer built in, and when the time runs out an animated face shows up and "goes to sleep" which is incredibly effective in avoiding a tantrum when screen time is up.
You can block channels, but there are so many of them that it's a losing battle. I would really rather just whitelist some specific channels, but I haven't yet found a way to do that.
I want to encourage my 2yo to be able to use technology like the tablet (and in fact, it's frightening how good she is at figuring it out) but I also don't want her watching this garbage. If she picks one of these and I turn it off, she gets annoyed at me and doesn't understand. I'd rather be able to let her pick her own show without worrying about exactly what it is, by having things like PBS, Sesame Street, TVO, etc pre-approved.
One of the channels I watch the most is Ashens. It's a British man playing with toys / retro goodies (and loosely reviewing them) on a brown couch and the videos last up to 30 minutes.
Of course, I am not an authority for other parents, but I hope AAP (American association of apediatrics) is.
The article hints at this, but doesn't really point it out, when they talk about children living to see the same kind of thing repeatedly, to try and figure it out.
I'd be really curious to see if this actually helps the learning brain, or hijacks it, preventing deeper understanding through varied examples.
I used to think it was disconcerting, but I also had peers that did the same and turned out alright, so I wonder if it's part of figuring out stimulus/work/gratification/reward/effort as a child and eventually growing into an adult.
Clickbait, misleading and outright deception in the headlines and thumbnails. For lack of a better term "trend-whoring" (a couple weeks back, a number of the video game streams suddenly had fidget spinners in all their thumnails)
I'm planning (hoping) on becoming a parent in a couple years, and it makes me really appreciate the regulations imposed on television regulators. Or the trust I'd have subscribing to a paid content service.
Youtube's suggested content feed often feels like dredging through bottom feeding sludge. And that's as an adult! I couldn't imagine subjecting children to that.
I often feel that way about AMP suggestions on my phone, though it isn't quite as bad, it sometimes goes really crazy.
I'm happy to read the rest of the parent-comments in this thread though, I'd love to hear what the rest of you with a bit more experience do.
Back then the recommendation engine was your friends and you would talk about 'Life on Earth's or whatever else was the main presentation on TV the night before. Everyone was on the same page so you could not ruin life for box set types.
In that framework you had to pay attention and understand the nuances of the story. If you didn't then you would not be in on convo and you would miss out. So you learned stuff.
If you only had two hours of time in front of a screen you were focused on the programming and it may have been what your parents want to watch, e.g. current affairs or drama. There was definitely an aspect of education to it.
I did not get all the channels or the colours that my contemporaries from other regions did so there is a 50% gap in my TV education, so I don't pick up on references to a lot of stuff, yet that shared culture is a good thing, humanising. The stuff I miss out on, it is like not being on Facebook.
The stuff YouTube are doing is wonderful but I wonder if we need to be trained into this solitary rather than shared viewing. The sharing in conversation was important to me.
[1] https://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf (I don't know whether this is the same as the version collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again)
Thankfully they've taken to some PBS shows like Daniel Tiger and Thomas, so they're usually content with that and we generally don't watch them on YouTube, so there isn't an recommended content. One time, I did put up a Thomas YouTube video on one screen with on of my sons in my lap, while I finished up 10 minutes worth of work on the other screen. That's how we got sucked into the "Bob the Train" vortex. Not good.
I recommend tracking down some old-school Mister Rogers' Neighborhood if you can. Totally engages my 4-year-old, and she actually talks to him when prompted, which she does with no other children's show. The pace is sedate and the shots long (like, really long, in a way I didn't appreciate as a kid—that had to be difficult to film).
They make Thomas and Daniel Tiger and most of the rest of the PBS lineup seem like Ren & Stimpy by comparison.
Just for fun pick any show on any channel with modern content. Drama, comedy, even news broadcasts -- the average shot duration is only 3.5 seconds. SECONDS! Not only that, but the weird camera angles, and the infuriating "shakey cam" (handled camera being purposely jiggled) is predominant in children's programming, and used to keep our ever-decreasing focus. (It's a wonder that children today can focus long enough to ever read a single paragraph.)
Now, for comparison, watch an episode of Andy Griffith, or I Love Lucy, and marvel that one camera shot might be 3 minutes long.
I just assumed the movie was so poorly directed that they were left with stitching together a bunch of crap.
It will take far more then ten minutes to film this. The actors may nail line #1 and #2, but flub #3 or #4, or #7 or look at the wrong thing, or the director won't like something about their emotions, or whatnot.
You have to do an entire re-take, whenever one little thing doesn't go as you want.
Compare that to a short-shot film. Have each actor fire off twenty takes of their four second line. If they got tongue-tied on the pronunciation of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, they didn't waste an entire take.
Hell, with short shots the two actors don't even need to be in the same building for filming a scene, let alone on the same set at the same time. Do takes for one on Monday, do takes for the other one on Tuesday. It works better for everyone's schedules, and we can't afford to pay Scarlett Johansson to hang out on set any longer then she has to. Three months later, the director will decide that they really hate one of the shots, and it can be re-filmed during post-production.
The reason that this happens is because filming is expensive, budgets are bloated, celebrity actors command multi-million dollar salaries, editing is easy, and audiences will happily lap up action schlock like Michael Bay's Transformers (With its average of 3.2 seconds per shot.)
My SO works in musical theater. They don't have the privilege of stitching together a show from perfect four second intervals. They have to perform it right from start to finish - a two hour ordeal. This requires many, many weeks of grueling rehearsals... And each performance has many, many mistakes.
Incidentally, Fred Rogers went into television when it was figuring out what a kids show should be; YouTube Kids is in a similar situation now. I wish we had a modern-day visionary who could bring the calm, compassionate, thoughtful message of Mr. Rogers to the tablets and phones where kids are doing most of their watching.
I find Netflix kids to be pretty good. I haven't really seen anything on there that I really disapproved of (some of them I tell her that I prefer she doesn't watch it - mostly because of the consumerism and materialist content, like in Barbie - , and she's pretty good at listening to me). She also has a couple of games on there that she can play.
But ya, the YouTube stuff is absolute trash.
Even better is "PBS Kids" series of apps, including "PBS Video" and "PBS Games". 3 and 4-yr old approved. Also work checking out is "PBS Parents".
YouTube's random suggestions is a killer for kids. The first time I happened upon a "Lego unboxing" video I knew exactly what was going on and realized the danger of it.
For instance, there was a play-doh egg surprise with a lego doctor figure with a stethoscope. Imagine instead an egg surprise with a real stethoscope (and maybe the figure and/or say a real egg with an inked on scope). Then show kindergarten kids using stethoscopes (it's a thing). Build associations between heartbeat sounds, wrist and apex palpation, the flashing heart icon of blood pressure machines and fitness apps, ECG, hr, hr vs time graphs, and so on. Include a clip of an N-yard dash and cool down, with with heart sounds, flashing icon, and hr graph. Hr sounds for sleeping person, walking, running or climbing stairs. For resting infant, kid, adult. And for mouse, cat, small dog, big dog, human, horse, whale. It's fun to see dogs and horses anyway, but why not take the opportunity to add heart stuff and hint at scaling laws too?
The videos linked to from the article didn't seem odd choices. They seemed to have rich and fun "learning about the world" content.
But judging by my son's behaviour he would just select the next video once the "boring" educational content starts :-(
Imagine a cartoon about a kid playing with a doll. Cartoon creators know a lot about related topics, like life skills, social dynamics, fashion, etc. And so they can seamlessly integrate bits of those rich domains of expertise into the cartoon. The OP cartoon bear video covers a lot of ground.
But now imagine a cartoon about a kid playing with a puddle. Cartoon creators know very little about puddles. Almost nothing of their physics, biology, chemistry, geology, engineering, and so on. No clue - stomp, laugh, mess. So science doesn't get the integrated and engaging storytelling which those other topics do. But there seems no fundamental reason it can't.
Except... searching for videos is painful. Even when you know a video exists, it's often implausible to find. Using google and bing video search to find bits of educational content, feels like searching the web circa early AltaVista - one stop among several, all of very limited effectiveness.
FWIW, here's a big stinky whale heart https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJnKuw7Wvz4 hoisted for display https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4JIwlkUdEs . A kid demoing a heart rate app https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOjWmA_7yUc , and taking a stress test https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCS_6ixfq8U . A fetal hr app https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XaYl6RJVsc&start=13 . A rabbit hr https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADLFLDszTYA&start=50 . A boring video of an interactive heart anatomy app https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLyXWjWcQtc&start=65 , to illustrate that VR/AR has the potential to massively disrupt education. A boring exhibit with some hearts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QthT9bs8Tws&start=15 . There are very many videos on stethoscope use, variously flawed. Which is great for assembling piles of Fair Use clips, but not so good for linking here. And... out of time.
So to reframe my original question: I wonder if youtube kids viral video formats might be used for outreach... but the cost of creation could be prohibitively large. Though there might be low hanging fruit, like a play-do egg surprise, filled with water, or bubble foam, or jello, or liquid nitrogen, or hydrogen, or...
Thanks for your comment. I was(am?) considering an education project, but was clearly doing selective memory on just how massively time consuming it would be.
They want a Paw Patrol figurine to emerge from the play-doh, for the millionth time. Not some stupid liquid hydrogen (I view it the other way around, but I'm not the target audience).
And the pull of those silly videos is incredibly strong. We also have an excellent app with literally hundreds of educational clips from "Die Sendung mit der Maus" [1] [2]. My son likes them, and will watch them for hours on end if he gets the chance -- and so will I, because they are genuinely interesting and amusing.
Yet if given the choice, he will pick Youtube and the silly videos every time.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Sendung_mit_der_Maus [2] http://www.wdrmaus.de/extras/maus_international/englisch.php...
> I was(am?) considering an education project
Wonderful. We can't have enough decent, genuinely amusing education, especially against this flood of trash.
>> or liquid nitrogen, or hydrogen,
> Not some stupid liquid hydrogen
Eeep! I'd intended the "liquid" to be scoped by the comma. :) Though I'd expect liquid hydrogen to be even more popular than the pop of hydrogen gas. The play doh freezes, and breaks like glass, and then... people like big explosions.
Neat Maus show - thanks.
But... consider the difference in testing culture between app development, and education video development. I tried creating some education video, using software style iterative development, and street guerilla usability testing. Which turned up all sorts of unexpected failure modes (say "millimeters", and some have traumatic flashbacks to learning metric in school; say "fun story about viruses!", and for some, that has the emotional loading of "fun story about genocide!"). Later, I was chatting about it with someone from WGBH, Boston's PBS station. Which makes a lot of education videos. Their comment was something like, yes, we'd love to try iterative development and testing, and we will... just as soon as we find anyone willing to fund it. So an underperformance of science education videos seems no more surprising than an underperformance of large-scale waterfall software projects.
> kids are incredibly primed to recognise and cherish brands
So I'd rephrase this as: the toy industry devotes lots of effort and money and testing, to creating things kids will recognize and cherish... and the science education video industry simply doesn't.
As for the "silly" videos, imagine you were playing with kids. You might do something much like in those "silly" videos - hands on, rich in phenomena (play doh tearing, describing objects, making choices, and on and on)... fun and interesting. You wouldn't do "Now I will show you a still photograph of part of a bottle of sun screen. Note the number 10..." blah blah blah (example from the Mouse TV 1 video). I myself found the silly videos more engaging, despite an ignorance of, and distaste for, the branding and characters. So I suggest at least some of the appeal is elsewhere.
I greatly enjoy going to research talks. I generally don't bother watching science education videos. There's a richness in one that's missing from the other. And consider molecular biology thesis defenses (went to one yesterday), which at least around MIT and Harvard, end with a long thank you section. Something I've not seen in other fields. It extends to family, and significant others, and pets, and friends. It is illustrated with funny photos, and is leavened with inside jokes, and hints of their challenges and character. A moment of standing at this major milestone in their life, and looking back. It is just a richly textured few minutes. Not all defense acknowledgements are that notable. And yes, there are some science education videos which try to capture a bit of that in interviews. But you don't have people crying, or slips like "thank you to my husband <name of their professor instead>" as the room cracks up. It could be valuable educationally, to show those segments to kids. Especially with students from underrepresented groups, or no-college families. So they could see, that person is like me - that could be me in a few years, and it looks like they had fun getting there. But like so much else in science research, which might be of value in science education, the incentives along the pipeline to get them from one to the other, are absent or dysfunctional.
> this flood of trash
So perhaps a more upbeat perspective, might be that society is investing lots of creativity and resources, to discovering how to create compelling media and storytelling. Yay! And it's now up to people who care about science education, to create content which leverages those insights.
Hmm, I wonder how VR/AR will impact this silly video niche... hands-on direct manipulation play-doh egg surprises?
With cartoons they'd watch and be disappointed if we ended them. With this more addictive content my older kid would become aggressive and highly agitated if we stopped them.
kids + adults =/= perv
What really bothers me however, is this type of content tends to be some of the most watched content on YouTube outside of music videos. For example, to give some context on YouTube performance, in the last 2 weeks, the most watched video on YT (according to our systems) was 'Luis Fonsi - Despacito ft. Daddy Yankee' with 300M views, #10 was 'DJ Khaled - Wild Thoughts ft. Rihanna, Bryson Tiller' with ~70M views. I think everyone would agree this type of content is well recognized in pop culture.
Kids "content" starts up at #29 with 'Сrying Babies Accident! Bad Baby Playing Doctor and Learn Colors with Bandage / Nursery Rhymes Songs' (http://youtu.be/b6B0pt_dhe0) with ~40M views. This isn't "niche content" nor is the spread of it limited. "Сrying Babies Accident" is more well produced than the other videos I've come across but still has same traits - the same stock sounds, the same stock music, intercut with 10 second "educational" content where the a child yells out the name of a color (see 2:40).
This video 'Learn Colors With Soccer Balls for Children' (http://youtu.be/OY7ILLGvAJk), exhibit more of the common 'yt kids content genre'. Again the same focus on learning 'colors' (I've yet to see content that teaches something other than colors), but now you can see the recurring characters of this genre, name Spiderman, the Hulk, and Elsa. I doubt any of this content is licensed by Disney, but the guys behind this are likely making millions.
My absolute favorite has to be 'THE BOSS BABY Learning Color Funny Videos - Learn Colors For Kids Best Moments Tim And The Boss' (youtu.be/gZVFKXt5WeQ), which is just a clip from the movie Boss Baby. It starts off normal until the final scene where it pauses and a child yells the name of the color. What happens next is strange - the entire scene tint shifts (for example the main characters body is blue), the clip plays again and a child yells a different color (~10M views in the past week).
For fun, the most interesting I've seen is 'Superhero Gamezone' (http://youtu.be/amrkiS1Bjao) - while many of these videos have "older" characters that act out Spiderman and Elsa, this is the only popular one where a full grown man acts like a toddler with his son. No colors in this one, but the same Spiderman/Hulk characters along with the exaggerated facial expressions.
A lot of children watch this content. I can't pass any judgement on whether its good or not, but to me, the obsession with this content is strange.