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Comment by tspike | Hacker News Reader

Yes. It's irritating to me to hear screen time constantly discussed as a monolith. For example, I have no issue with my son playing Zelda: Breath of the Wild. He gets to poke around and experiment and explore and it has sparked a lot of imaginative play, curiosity and interesting conversations.

Likewise, it's fine if he wants to watch the videos we've taken of our family, it helps him to remember relatives we don't get to see very often.

Conversely, I have ZERO tolerance for advertising. I am increasingly convinced that marketing is the source of a majority of modern society's ills and I don't want it anywhere near his brain until he's able to properly comprehend its purpose.

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Advertising to kids happens through Youtube and Instagram, not those ugly Adsense iframes that can be spotted a mile away and at this point fall under "banner blindness" for a lot of users.

I'm not a gamer so I don't know much about Zelda, but the sort of hypnotic hold some Youtube/Insta personalities have on kids is astonishing. They will parrot their talking points, talk about them relentlessly with friends and buy whatever they're shilling, be it makeup, game guides, phone skins, what have you.

Yep.. YouTube is off limits. He's still little so social media isn't in the picture yet, will burn that bridge when I come to it.

This really isn't new to YouTube, though; kids have been responding this way to ads on regular television, and probably radio before that, for generations. I remember being "brainwashed" myself by the ads that played alongside my cartoons.

Zelda is the video game equivalent of a high fantasy novel.

Just tell him to use Chrome/Firefox and Adblock Plus.

Better to use uBlock Origin, which won’t let through “acceptable” ads. If you really want to protect the kid, and are willing to set it up or teach them, uMatrix is good too.

It won't help if the ad is part of the actual video itself, though. Only video editing can undo that damage.

Just use both

What does AdBlock+ give what UBlock does not? AFAIK they both use the same block lists - easylist and friends. Is there anything to gain when one runs both?

As a father of two toddlers, absolutely this.

TV, movies, and games are forms of entertainment. Advertising is a form of manipulation.

Sure, the lines can be blurred, so we do our best to filter out the bad intentions.

Modern advertising seems to become more effective as well. I never anticipated a defense of ads, but I've actually been criticized by visiting relatives for keeping commercials out of reach of our family. We're "out of the loop" now, unable to relate to a joke or situation delivered by commercial. And around holidays and birthdays, we get asked "How do your kids even know what they want without commercials?"

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