YouTube Kids spammers rack up billions of views on disturbing algorithmic videos | Hacker News Reader

YouTube Kids spammers rack up billions of views on disturbing algorithmic videos

boingboing.net

68 pointsrbanffy28 comments

This is your usual boingboing churnalism. Original article is here: https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-in...

with discussion already here, making this one a duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15637504

Thanks to you both, we've marked this one a dupe.

That one does a better job explaining that it's bigger than YouTube.

People are trying to serve up content or products for every long tail set of keywords someone might search for.

Resulting in stuff like this: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*8Fp9PfzTGKYuegzmB...

Talk about niche markets.

churnalism! That's a fantastic pejorative I've yet to hear of until now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churnalism

I would not trust YouTube unattended with a child, I don't even trust television unattended with a child.

Things like Netflix and home media servers are the way to go IMO.

YouTube is definitely not okay to leave unattended with a child. I've seen auto-play cue up some disturbing and bizarre stuff, not to mention all the trolls who seem to delight in hiding things like slasher movie snippets in the middle of pirated kids videos.

Even attended. Things I'm perfectly fine with my kid seeing are often prefixed by ads that I cannot handle as an adult, much less kids.

I know a strong sense of commercialism was imbued in me from an early age by watching targeted ads. I would not want to do that to any child, I don't think it's healthy.

I don't know. I grew up the same way, and it really helped me become cynical about messages from media, which is a good thing. It's kind of like how European kids are allowed to drink alcohol, and they tend to not be as stupid with it as us Americans when they're in college. (Or so I'm told.)

They're just stupid with it in high school, right?

ditto. Even searching on video platforms is a dicey operation. I remember seeing at a dental office this patient table's video screen turned away from the patient while the tech searched for "Leap Frog" videos, and in the prefix tree search landing on "lea.." hit some leather bondage trash. Then when the searching was complete the screen rotated back to the patient thereby sparing them the unpredictably inappropriate content that had to be navigated past.

If this article peaked your interest than please read this: http://nautil.us/issue/53/monsters/the-last-invention-of-man

It talks about an AI that starts out by producing popular and appealing content and constantly evolves until it essentially controls and runs the earth. Its a great read and probably just a coincidence, but maybe this is exactly what is going on lol.

Good. related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15419619

I see very little difference between this and all the weird shit we and our parents before us watched on TV and the internet. The article claims that this time it's different because the stuff is "deliberately targeted with content which will traumatise and disturb them". But were not the incredibly violent things we watched also deliberately targeted to disturb us? That's the whole aim of a website like liveleak. It doesn't really matter that now the stuff is computer generated whereas before the stuff was generated by humans. I think we're underestimating how good people are at creating content and overestimate how well computers are at doing it.

I played the game Rise of the Triad when I was like 7 years old, maybe younger. A ridiculously brutal game. Still lovin' it today. Good times.

People are way too alarmist when it comes to kids consuming "mature" stuff. You can only withhold so much information from a kid in an ever more interconnected world. And that is good.

2-5 year olds weren't browsing liveleak.

But they did watch things similar to what a poster linked below (https://youtu.be/PFDKWbg2xjg), which, barring the uncanny valley component, I really see little difference between.

The one thing that worries me is that Youtube is very popular for kids and children and they tend to replay the same videos that have characters like superheros or pokemon, many times I've seen parents give kids their Ipad, etc. and then let them open up youtube. Its also why children toy review videos are one of the most viewed on Youtube based on socialblade.com because kids have a lot of time and tend to rewatch favourite videos.

The number of McDonald's ads on YT Kids is quite disturbing partiality as none are declared as such...

Overall the number of videos that are pure ads is annoying...

That's something I don't understand either. The government here has completely forbidden tobacco ads. Why not do the same with McDonalds and all that stuff? Will we have to wait a few decades more for the gov to catch up?

There's no way to anti-subscribe is there, like to avoid this appearing in suggested videos or whatever?

In the recommended section there is a three-dot button under each video, which shows up when you mouse over. Click -> "Not interested".

That was surreal.

Violent cartoons aren't new. https://youtu.be/PFDKWbg2xjg

Violent cartoons aren't new, but I am a grown man, and after 5 minutes of watching that I feel dirty and disturbed. I don't think it's the violence, it's the way they move. They move inhuman, it hurts my brain.

I think you're reacting to the uncanny valley; which I suspect small children are less susceptible to than us adults are.

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