Then these weird videos started showing up. We took youtube away for exactly these videos that are mentioned in this link.
These are targeting children and it's sick.
It's entirely possible the videos made this happen, or at least helped, but some kids just develop that stuff crazy-early. My daughter saw little video content before age two, and very little Youtube, but achieved all the same in the same timeframe with only basic work on our part. It was natural for her—she broke a 200-word working vocabulary by 14 months, could already count sets of things under ten, could name most letters of the alphabet, and so on. By age 2 she sounded like your average 4-year-old. Youtube had nothing to do with it, and we barely had anything to do with it. That was just her.
My son, on the other hand...
I replied that sounded like the most inefficient method of teaching ever devised. Not what he wanted to hear :-)
I'm from Sweden btw
Many Europeans told me they learned English from watching TV as children.
She has no access to YouTube anymore, which is a bit sad because again there's a lot of good stuff there.
Honestly - the image of grown men in thongs and Spider Man masks is disturbing to adults only in a certain context, you could just as well be describing modern wrestlers, whose content is targeted to slightly older children. But how would a toddler be damaged by it?
How would seeing this content actually be harmful to a toddler (1 - ~3 years old?)
I'm not a child psychologist so I may be wrong but I think you need a certain awareness of cultural norms to be disturbed by deviations from those norms, and toddlers might not even recognize what they're looking at, much less know that it's wrong, or why. I suspect these particular videos are more meant to disturb parents than kids.
It also concerns me that exposure to this sort of thing might help them form the impression that the behaviors depicted are within the normal range of interaction.
There is a reason why parent-child interaction is so important in early life. Children imitate adults. They are incredibly impressionable, their brains grow extremely quickly. Yes, you must talk slow and in simple terms to very young children, but they are not just confused idiots who will forget everything they saw when they are older. If you speak with a larger vocabulary, contextually, to a child, they will pick up your vocabulary and they will eventually come to recognize it as having a specific meaning in a specific context.
If a child sees spiderman peeing on elsa, he is either going to be upset and confused, or he is going to take this behavior as normal. This is how socialization works. He is learning from everything he sees.
They’ll use the computing power of a small nation to train their Go-Bot and can instantly identify anything that might belong to Big Content ... but when it comes to basic decency Google throw up their hands.
On the other hand, a user-maintained curated list of channels for children is not something that unthinkable (think of GitHub model, with pull requests and that sort of thing).
Join both things and you get a better alternative to Youtube Kids for concerned parents. I'm even surprised nobody has done something like this, it would be a nice project.
I absolutely believe there's a need for curated content for online video.
I'd love a tv-channel-like browsing experience, with seamless switching (maybe some clever caching behind the scenes).
I find it difficult to believe Google never knew these videos existed, since they appear to be an entire industry based on copyright infringement and gaming their algorithms, one would expect Google to want to kill them with fire. That they are allowed to proliferate can only mean they serve Google's interest for the site - they drive clicks and views.
Whatever other motives there may be for them (personally, I think they're nothing more sinister than monetizing clickbait) I think it's important to remember that Youtube is a business driven by clickbait, and the design of the site reinforces this everywhere it can.
That makes sense of course. In my mind I thought that doing this wouldn't stop them from running advertisements. But I guess it would undermine recruitment of new content creators.
As I understand it, Youtube isn't profitable for Google, and a lot of their decisions wrt their algorithms seem focused on increasingly desperate attempts at wringing some semblance of solvency out of the platform, so I wouldn't expect them to be very willing to work against their interests right now.
I saw how at my local primary school, kids were happily jumping up and down to a song and suddenly there’s a chocolate advert.
Imo the safest way to let kids browse is walled gardens like Netflix Kids. But that would also be unleashing an entire new addiction.
The ideal scenario is parent supervision, but most parents don’t have enough time/patience to sit with their kids everyday. In fact the iPad is meant to be the new babysitter!
It’s quite a problem, this one is.
Besides it is not that hard to download local copies of the videos you want and now you do not even need to be online.
Getting your kid off of youtube is probably a good thing.
For a young kid, the world is a strange and unpredictable place. Which means "scary" in some sense.
Watching a video (that the kid has seen many times before) is actually comforting. The kid can predict what's going to happen next, and is happy when expectations match reality.
There's possibly something similar going on with people on the autistic end of the spectrum, which may explain why they tend to get upset when taken out of their routine.
When I'm trying to fall asleep, I will almost always put on an episode of a podcast I've heard 500 times. It's more soothing than one of those ambient-noise apps.
So my pet theory is that actually the opposite of the above theory is true. Kids rewatch movies that push the boundaries of their reality, in order to gain a better understanding of them. When the novelty wears off they'll move on.
Probably the truth is some combination of both. I wouldn't be surprised if certain times of day, developmental needs kick in and kids want to rewatch movies they don't understand; while other times of day, comfort needs kick in and they just want to see Elsa sing for the 100th time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr_lcVVoDIY
I remember re-reading / looking at things more often than I would do today. That is, a few books I liked a lot. Other than that, new and wild was always appreciated, just not so wild to be scary. But still, protection from overstimulation (and danger) is a really important job of parents, especially for infants, predictability to a degree is important. Vital, even. Too much lack of it puts the baby into survival mode so to speak. This is cobbled together from armchair psychology but I'll just say it anyway, I think a roaring sea of non-sequitur events is just about the worst that could happen to a developing brain, it will have to develop shells instead of being able blossom and keep the ability to be sensitive (while developing the ability to, when needed, protect one's own attention oneself). So I agree, it's probably a combination of both. New input, come to terms with it, integrate it, get comfortable, get hungry, get new input :)
Oral tradition must provide some survival benefits to be supported by instinct and genetics. My guess is today people only talk about oral history WRT obscure history or religion whereas when it was current technology, oral history was probably used mostly to store hunting and gathering data.
https://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/12/kids-and-movi...
But watch a YouTube video of a magic trick, and you'll likely click back and re-watch the critical moment a few times before you've even realized what you're doing. Even if you don't end up understanding what happens, your brain inherently wants to make sure you are entirely clear on what you saw, so it can learn the raw fact that "this is a thing that can happen" and then attempt to reconstruct your mental models and schemas to take that evidence into account.
Kids just need to do that for, well, everything.
That alone explains pop music success.
Thank you.
There was a line at the end of some Muppets movie I would watch over and over, as the credits rolled—some nudge to parents like “I bet you wish you were watching this for the first time!”
> Young children love repetition, whether it's watching a video or listening to song lyrics, because it's the best way for them to acquire and master new skills. In order to learn something well, children this age practice it until they get it right, hence the repeated watching.
This is an enjoyable experience for them, it is actually designed to be. This is how you sell tie-ins and make profit, the younger you get them the deeper they're caught in.
The side effect is that it is destroying their attention and impairs their self-development and cognition.
Also the human brain is a sucker for a good story, before screens and videos, kids were addicted to bedtime storytelling and could ask being told the same story a lot of times.
Even for slightly older kids, a curated platform is always going to be a safer bet than a moderated platform. It seems fairly easy to find good sources of curated content.
And of course there's just making sure they don't spend too much time consuming media in general. It's hard, but the less they watch the easier it is to be picky about introducing new things.
Maybe our overall perception of quality has changed due to being exposed to crap on the internet, and now new parents believe the stuff on YouTube is fine. And they don't remember the whole world of Sesame Street and alike out there anymore.
https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_cre...
I presume there's something bad about the new videos but it's not obvious for the rest of us.
Although actually, huh. Maybe it's a little more organized and is just a general memetic malware scam; con youtube's algorithms into putting your junk which was generated in 0.4 seconds onto a few million screens and pocket the ad revenue.
The point is, it might not be any more malicious than anything else that advertisers do on a daily basis, if they were just auto-tweaking the videos to optimize for revenue and hey, presto, colorful crap topped the list. After all, it's just an impartial algorithm.
Kinda makes you think about all the other stuff we happily let advertisers get away with, huh?
I think the real issue is that online advertising platforms are allowing this to happen and charging advertisers for it (even though these views/clicks are often not valid – whether they're people who click a fake 'Download' by mistake or kids under 13).
I remember some time ago watching a video discussing weird flash games and videos with the same sort of pain-and-comfort themes that some of these videos have, also including Disney and other licensed characters, and also the oddly repetitious and low quality "children's videos" related to (and possibly spun off of) toys (lacking violent or otherwise disturbing content,) likely just attempts at clickbait. These would pop up in compilations of "weird Youtube channels" from time to time, no doubt driving traffic to their channels, and making them aware of their potential virality.
So it may be impossible to know, at this point, what the reality is behind this content because a lot of it may well be attempts to cash in on a meme.