YouTube Kids Is Going to Release a Whitelisted, Non-Algorithmic Version of App
buzzfeed.com
buzzfeed.com
As an ex-googler who saw the way some (a few) PMs made decisions with their own Impact (aka career) in mind, I can cynically imagine them choosing the algorithmic method because at Google you must scale, and you get promoted by launching a cool machine learning product and not a product with <200 channels that were hand-selected (that's boring!). But as a parent all I wanted was just a few channels. Some disney, some science, etc.
If you want a future without all this happening, stop giving your kids YouTube in the first place.
Kids shouldn't be accessing YouTube directly. It really is bad. A simple example: looking for videos for a school women's history day thingamajig, YouTube kept recommending outright twisted videos which were sort of women's history but algorithmically generated and just plain wrong.
The other interesting thing I found with YouTube is that it's very hard to find good parent curated playlists. The bad stuff overwhelms the good.
They feel kids keep themselves entertained with iPads and games. Some of them have glasses at a young age since they look at the iPad so closely.
I’m legit worried for the next generation of kids who grow up on YouTube consuming endless amounts of ads and crappy entertainment.
Add that to the fact that an iPad is a very poor creative device and mostly a consuming device. I learnt programming at a young age because I had a proper keyboard and programming was mildly entertaining. Flash and actionscript were my canvas of endless creativity in holidays.
It’s almost impossible to program anything relatively complex on an iPad.
For the parents of HN, how do you ensure your kids use tech appropriately and don’t develop mindless addiction to it?
That's what we grew up on, too. I was hoping that streaming video would let me cut ads out of my kids' lives, but... they just changed form.
it's almost something i could use the social graph to do ...
The current prevailing non-tin-foil-hat theory is that some animators realised that they could game YouTube's suggestion algorithm, and that kids videos are an easy target. Kids also are very inquisitive when it comes to subjects you tell them are inappropriate. Over time the videos with darker themes got more clicks and it has spiralled out of control since. Throw in some bots to increase views and comment rapidly once videos are released to increase rankings and you've got a perfect ad-revenue scheme.
Of course there's nutjobs who think it's a pedophile ring normalising sexual violence to kids, but there's an equal likelihood of pizzagate being real.
It's honestly the sheer number of videos that is the shocking part of the mystery. It's not just a few dozen videos from different animators, it's hundreds of videos from dozens of channels pumping this stuff out. Unfortunately I find it unlikely that we'll ever find out the cause.
(Also, I find it weird to give a kindergartener unsupervised access to any internet device. They don't understand the threats they're confronting.)
That was the selling point of Youtube Kids—it wasn't supposed to be unsupervised access to the internet. It was supposed to be curated.
Is there an actual explanation for this? Those are everyday colors... or have I been living on planet earth as an unwitting MKUltra subject?
And now something for those of us genuinely out of the loop?
Just a heads up, there are disturbing content and themes here. This topic is not for the feint of heart.
MkUltra as far as I understand is about conditioning emotional responses to specific events or triggers. In the case of elsagate the objective seems to be to condition children to think traumatic events are normal and part of every day life. Such as being tied up, being given a needle, being defected or urinated on, locked in a closet surrounded by bugs, etc.
Its an unpleasant topic to research but there is a lot of information out there that has been declassified. Based on what I have seen I would say yes there is a relationship between the two. It could be that the MKUltra techniques are being used to captivate their audience in order to make more money on monetized videos. Not necessarily anything more sinister, though that alone is pretty terrible if true. Those videos are sick.
It’s very disturbing, especially once you have kids of your own and it hits home.
Poor choice of language, Herod.
Why does this not exist?
If myspace gave us the canvas and an unlimited selection of paint colors, Facebook gave us a color by numbers coloring book and four pre-approved shades of blue, along with a small static shock whenever a color went over the line.
And you know what? As a guy with no kids If it takes parents getting mad at YouTube to finally get some sort of critical mass on giving more control to the end user how they interact with the platform (aside from obvious outliers like malicious/offensive/illegal content), I'm all about it.
I wish platforms would realize this. We're glad to use the platforms, just stop trying to herd us into doing it the way you want.
Maybe I'm looking at too rosy of an ideal, here though.
I see one YouTube Whitelist app on the Play store already but it's got in-app purchases and just generally doesn't look that great.
You just have to do it "the old fashioned way", aka, spending the time with your kids.
Besides, have you ever had a bad day and wanted to finish dinner while your child decided to be a bit bratty? It’s not the best choice to put kids in front of screens and I do it very minimally, but this shaming tactic isn’t helpful
* The few I have met who say these things have full-time live-in nannies so they're not exactly models of "spending time with their kids" either...
This is not a corporation's job. Multiple streaming services have kid sections, downloading actual files that are the ones you want your child to see, etc.
Curating content for your children has never been faster or easier, so...how'd our parents do it?
Have you seen what kind of bait and switch content is on youtube? It can look like a children's show, but turn out to be something really creepy.
If you think it's the job of parents to curate content, that's also fine, but youtube should allow for a feature that lets you whitelist content.
It sounds like you had lovely parents, though. Congratulations.
YouTube recommends "Secret Alien Spaceship you didn't know about" or some equally inane bullshit.
It's so bad I used ublock origin to just filter out that entire vertical section.
The recommendations are simply useless to an end user.
I don't think payola is a think for Youtube videos yet, though it seems inevitable that there's a market opportunity there.
Also google doesn’t officially consider youtube to be part of google apps for education even though it has the approval system for YouTube videos.
I guess for us outside the US we’ll just have to wait another 5 years for google to flip the switch to make this worldwide. Again.
At stuff like, Google really systematically sucks.
She pays for YouTube Red. There is no way for YouTube to not autosuggest, or to repeat the videos in a Playlist over and over.
I decided for her to use YouTube because of the auto caption. Will need to find some other solution...
I'd rather not install a computer there just to show some videos...and I don't know why YouTube forces the suggested videos to paying customers without giving an option to turn it off.
If there is a way to create that whitelisting I would happily pay. If there was a Foss alternative I would happily join.
We deleted YT on our devices the kids use. Google policy and practice changes so frequently, I don’t trust them as a long term solution. And like I said the content is low quality for the most part anyway.
Netflix has plenty of quality kids content for us.
Feels a bit like people being scared of "chemicals in their food".
I hope we don't get to the point where "algorithm" has only a narrow popular denotation and only negative connotation.
I wasn't expecting it to work, but after that he never made another dig at 'algorithms'.
It’s amazing how high & dry parents are left without options for their kids to use a Chromebook. You wouldn’t believe it until you see for yourself.
To be safe in this situation I'd just use something like youtube-dl [1] and save filtered videos locally. Kids tend to watch the same videos over and over, so why not save bandwidth/battery life and store it locally when it's so cheap to do so. And since it's likely cartoons, the compression is better saving even more space. Tip: You can download playlists, so if you set a cronjob task to download a playlist you can add videos to it from anywhere you have access to YouTube.
I'm still looking for a good player that would behave somewhat like Youtube Kids (auto play, fullscreen, no volume/brightness controls). All players I've tried have controls that kids don't understand and, accidentally or intentionally, end up ruining everything.
Human editorial is certainly better than algorithm editorial, and YouTube Kids was a nightmare so I'm not complaining, but I'm sure the value judgements of a lot of respectable YouTube employees are very different to mine.
Are Christian and Islamic and Scientologist morality tales all acceptable or not? What about science and engineering videos with high safety requirements, or even history?
Do you trust anyone?
I am surprised that there’s no whitelisting though. Looks like we’re going all the way back to the original Yahoo days with their curated list of acceptable web site lists.
The best bet if you care about your kid is probably to try and curate yourself. That’s definitely doable if you’re well-off in a two parent home with one child at a time, but how many families does that describe on average?
I'd bet that 8-year olds (as a population), with their under-cooked brains and extremely limited autonomy have MUCH more predictable psych profiles and viewing habits than adults as a population.
Anecdote for illustration: I, and everybody I went to school with, watched the same show when we got home from school. How much more predictable a viewing pattern can you get? Plus, you can bet that I wanted whatever toy they were advertising, and bugged my parents about it as soon as I could.
Thinking about it, I'll never see data to confirm this but I'll bet childrens' TV advertisers have better conversion rates than Facebook, with all of its carefully mined and organized profiling data.
Shows like Power Rangers basically have their entire commercial blocks bought out by the toy company that manufactures the Power Rangers toys. This creates a very interesting relationship where the show runners and toy creators work together when creating the next season, where the two companies have veto power over ideas from the other. The toy companies come up with special guns or powers unique from the previous toy line, but the show producer can argue that it wouldn't translate well on screen or that there aren't enough good story lines and vice versa.
In America atleast the toy tie ins are limited in the amount of advertising they can show. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the limitations on online advertising are far weaker than their television equivalents. This tracks with my own viewings as a child from what I can remember. I remember being bombarded with toy ads when I was young, but I also remember being excited about toy tie ins I didn't know existed when I got my parents to rent Power Rangers on VHS and having the first and last 5 minutes of the video tape consist of toy advertisements.
There was some variation, but it was all on a predictable theme.
How long is this been going on ..
I guess this is their response.
AI will never replace humans in judgement. Sorry Silicon Valley. It's not going to happen. Stop trying to make it happen.
The issue with AI is it's a lot harder to question the black box than it is to question a human operator. Accountability will be especially important as AIs come into contact with more and more of our lives.
Google et al. appear to have systems in place where AI makes the final say on your behavior, but then you can find a human reviewer if you really beg / you're important enough. I don't think that's sustainable from a social perspective
I think, quite firmly, that what we call ai we'll be used to augment many techniques without replacing them. I share the scepticism that it will replace them.
Though, I think it is prudent to acknowledge the progress that has been made. My self twenty years ago would be impressed with what we have. I suspect the same will be true in another twenty.