Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by Rebelgecko | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

Rebelgecko

Some of the features that get disabled for "children's content" are a bit surprising:

Playback in the Miniplayer

Save to playlist and Save to watch later

Likes and dislikes on YouTube Music

Donate buttons

I guess it's hard to do these in a way that is compliant with the privacy rules, or they're worried that kids will donate $1000 to their favorite Youtuber with Mom and Dad's credit card? It will be interesting to see how good their machine learning is at identifying "kid's content". From reading the FTC page, the delineation seems a bit arbitrary. I suppose we'll see if there's a financial impact on Youtubers that are borderline (is someone playing a video game considered children's content? What if the videogame is rated M? Will the tiebreaker be statistics about their actual viewers?)

View on HN

Unintended purchases are a real issue. I've witnessed first hand how young kids tend to press anything on the screen without any thought. I saw them press and nearly purchase youtube's "Super Chat, a tool that lets you pay to pin comments on live streams" without knowing what it was.

Especially if it gets in the way of the content they are looking to use/view, they are just clicking buttons to get things moving and then next thing you know your google account bought an app.

Do you guys seriously put your kids on an account with credit card access? That sounds like a recipe for disaster.

All that needs to be true is that enough people make this mistake to warrant the UI change. No condescension or lecture needed.

“Enough people” does not make a questionable act less questionable

Unless you're giving them their own device it's easy to make a mistake and have an account with a CC accessible.

Even with a full password for confirmation, or without a CC, you can still see them click the link. The behavior is the same, and the reason that takes you to a purchase page is because someone is doing it.

I don't understand the prevention of adding to a playlist. Now I can't make a custom playlist of children's content for my kid?

You could use local browser bookmarks. No privacy issue with those!

Having a favorites list that follows you across devices is nice. Being able to publish a publicly viewable playlist is nice.

Also, on mobile that would require you to exit the app and move to a browser. Figuring out how to pull up a video from the app in a browser requires a certain level of tech fluency. (You have to know to hit "share", "copy link", paste it into the browser, then somehow force the browser to not punt you back to the YouTube app.)

My uneducated guess might have been the easy implementation of disallowing both children's and non children's content in a public playlist.

I guess Youtube is covering itself from someone alleging custom playlists is a form of tracking.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/03/world/americas/youtube-pe...

and related.

Maybe this is intended to prevent "YouTube babysitting" aka "make a long playlist, park kid in front of youtube, go and do something else"? Without the ability to schedule up hours of content, one is forced to look after the child regularly, even if it's just to start the next dull bit of entertainment.

Though if that was the motivation I'd expect them to also disable auto-play of next video for content targeted at kids.

> Without the ability to schedule up hours of content, one is forced to

watch hours of YouTube recommended up-next videos!

They're trying to avoid issues with COPPA, which basically says that they can't store user data for anyone under 13 without explicit formal consent from a parent (with some really complicated exceptions and ways to comply).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Pr...

And they consider a playlist made by an adult that contains a few videos for kids to be data on a child?

It seems as if the default assumption for all kids content is the "kid" did it, and hence assumed they also made the playlist. Perhaps features will be added at a later date to re-enable features such as playlists with default implicit parental consent.

I rather like the hard handed approach as a parent (who can be both lazy and diligent) as I think it reinforces good parental control of video content.

This will force lots of behavior changes for both consumers and producers. The key will be how they handle the suggested videos, which may have unintended negative consequences, as I am sure the UX will still be based on generated maximum ad dollars, targeted or not, and not "healthy" video viewing.

They're trying to shut down all their possible COPPA liabilities because they can get incredibly expensive very quickly so any data on made for kids content they're treating like it's data on kids. Also skimming the FTC's FAQ it sounds like if you're serving a web page targeted at children you have to do a lot more so google having channels aimed at kids puts them under the stricter standards about ensuring kids data doesn't get tracked.

Makes me think that youtube can't avoid putting a playlist into their big recommendation learning algorithms, or something, so it's easier to just disable the whole feature.

I think we'll find that distinguishing between "children's content" and "family-friendly content" is difficult not just for YouTube's algorithms but for humans as well. I suspect we'll see even more channels get hit by this simply because they're not identifiably "adult" in any way.

Yeah. For example, I don't find Veggietales to be family friendly. Its a minority opinion, but I can't get it removed from my kids profiles. So now I have to talk to my children, ugh.

I mean, most of the shows for kids look extremely creepy and unsettling to me.

The introduction of a world where everything is 'fair' and 'nice' controlled by 'authorities' is something I notice often in those shows. The faces are big and stretched out from reality as a distraction from the theme. Some of them encourage weird experimentation that can go wrong easily while pushing for odd stereotypes. Good guy beats the bad guy with violence... punitive justice.. fair bit seems sexual, promoting eating disorders, creepy parental expectations and misleading nutritional science.

I watched veggietales in school as a kid, but I don't remember much about other than vague recollections of a joseph and the many colored coat adaptation.

I'm just curious, what do you find not to be family friendly about the show?

I imagine they mean that they don’t consider a show that teaches a particular religious tradition as fact to be appropriate for children outside of that religious tradition.

Not the OP, but if you're not Christian, that show might not be friendly to your family as it is explicitly targeted at Christians or people the shows creators hope will become Christians.

So that may not go over so well with, for example, a Jewish or agnostic family.

ah okay, makes sense. I always thought the biblical stuff was just a fraction of the stories they adapted.

Propagating Christianity was an explicit goal of the show:

"Their aim was to produce children's videos which conveyed Christian moral themes and taught Biblical values and lessons."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VeggieTales

million dollar question, is anime for kids?

Guess we will see.

Are those perhaps all features that require either 1) to be logged in, or 2) to use a more complex version of the site that requires cookies?

CYA. It's either that or denying kids access to youtube altogether and that is very hard to implement, so better to disable those features that might lead to legal exposure.

Google seems to opt for the nuke it from space option as a 1st response. Let god or whatever sort it out.

YouTube is politically popular to attack, so they know they aren’t going to get the benefit of the doubt. And when regulators come after Google they seem to like aiming their fines in the billions of dollars range. So it seems prudent to respond to any inkling of having given a regulator an excuse to investigate by burning the entire thing down and vowing never to go near the wreckage ever again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com