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Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

Was just talking to a family member recently about this. Her daughter is into horses and so is watching a lot of showjumping videos. Apparently the algorithm keeps trying to lead her off towards increasingly bad showjumping accident videos and from there basically into /r/watchpeopleandhorsesdie

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My mom likes watching Animal documentaries. The recommendations have completely gone out of hand. Showing things like very explicit videos of animals having sex, wild animals eating people, and other terrible things...

Also with videos about cute / funny babys. It slippery sloped into explicit birth giving videos and other almost pedophilic things.

I had to manually delete every video in her history to fix that.

That's not even the worst of it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate

Daily reminder that the internet doesn't absolve you of actually parenting your kids, and keeping and eye on what they browse on the internet. This isn't unique to Youtube, there are all sorts of bad places kids can end up if left alone on the web.

The point of emphasis in this particular situation, though, is that the recommendations are actively encouraging bad content that the kid wasn't originally looking for.

It can also actively encourage good content that someone wasn't originally looking for. This is one of the things I most love about the internet. XKCD did a good job highlighting this in "The Problem with Wikipedia"

https://xkcd.com/214/

The problem we have is determining what is good content and what is bad content and who is the arbiter of what is good or bad. Something you think is bad, might be something someone else thinks is good. These determinations are highly subjective.

Sometimes they can be so manifestly and obviously bad so as to be objectively bad.

Is it bad content? That's subjective. They are suggesting popular content with similiar keywords and using the data that it is popular mixed with no flags to deem it safe to recommend.

This is true but it doesn’t absolve others of responsibility for what they do to children.

This is true, but youtube directly markets itself to children with children channels and the like.

Youtube has some culpability here.

Ironically that sounds like it might save his daughters life given the extreme dangers of show jumping.

I don't think she's in much danger at this stage. It's no different from a kid wanting to watch videos of racing cars - they don't need to see the possible gristly consequences unless they're thinking of actually taking up street racing or something.

While I can understanding wanting to not watch such videos because how the events are covered in such videos. Mainly to gawk at grevious injuries/incidents.

I do not like the idea filtering reality. A video could instead be if you do stupid thing X this happens. Then again it also depends on the age and maturity of the kid/teen. You dont want to terrify them or scare them wanting to try or learn new things. However learning from others mistakes is better than finding out first hand yourself. Like I said most videos on youtube are not an analysis of mistakes that lead up to an event.

Then you just have unfortunate accidents/events which don’t really tell you more than sometimes life can be brutal.

Although, I think youtube filters violent stuff unless your account says your over 18, and removes really disturbing stuff outright.

Then again automated filters are not perfect.

And sure, you as an adult should be able to watch whatever you want. But we're talking about little kids here, It's OK to shield them from the more horrible aspects of life. Let them be kids for a little while.

But it is filtered. Just the other way around. The most horrible content gets morbid curiosity clicks and the normal stuff is under-represented, filtered out.

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