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Comment by Despegar | Hacker News Reader

>You can't compare Netflix/Amazon with Youtube.

Yes we absolutely can. YouTube's business model depending on user generated content is their choice. Not being able to review all the content is entirely a problem for Google to solve. Maybe they should stop optimizing for growth and put up some hurdles to who can upload content? That's for them to figure out.

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Or just have YouTube kids be a curated subset of regular YouTube content. How hard can that be. Doesn't need to be a dynamic amount of content.

This seems especially true for YouTube kids to me. Do kids really care whether the content was produced a year or a week ago? It's not a news outlet. We literally have enough content available for each kid's whole childhood. YouTube could decide to review and allow one new channel per month per language and the consumers wouldn't be affected.

> Do kids really care whether the content was produced a year or a week ago?

I'd be surprised if there weren't a bunch of kids who really wanted to see content from the latest Minecraft update.

A full time staff of 20 would be enough to scan enough content to outpace what any child could ever watch during their entire adolescence.

Yes, they care.

I guess I should've been clearer about the age/context here. There's a period when they'll watch some show on repeat a hundred times. Or a generic cartoon - it doesn't matter when it was produced.

Sure, it will start shifting once they want to watch something their peers watch. But at the time parents choose the media, how would they even know it's not the latest production, or some mix of old/new?

Peppa pig started in 2004. At the time kids are interested in it, if you show them ep 2, will they say "this is not from series 6 from 2019"?

They care when growing out of "kids" program and they care for specific series.

Even with a more restrictive approach Google/YouTube could whitelist specific content providers, which could provide fresh content on a frequent schedule.

I never understood this either. Why not go to a whitelisting model for channel owners and just start with large brands like PBS that have a vested interest in their reputation. You get the benefit of new videos from those channels and then slowly work through a backlog.

Now that ads are blocked, what is the revenue model for YTKids videos?

I was about to suggest that content creators pay a nominal fee for the content to be reviewed but if creators have no way to monetize the platform, that proposal is bijective with suggesting that Google just shut down YTKids. Or are parents paying already for access to YTKids and the reviews would come out of that?

The YT Kids app itself was never monetized to begin with. They only monetized viewing of kids videos on regular YouTube.

There was a post here a few months ago showing curated youtube content for kids. I'm sure a few of these exist.

The outrage machine would find something new to be upset about. Every week there'd be another channel coming out of the woodwork upset that they could not make the YouTube Kids cut.

Curation is messy, but that doesn't mean we should throw up our hands or, worse, think an algorithm can do it.

The argument here is whether imperfect curation is better than none, and the history of television tells us that it is. We never had a TV channel that randomly showed kids pro-suicide messages.

Not being able to review all the content is entirely a problem for Google to solve. Maybe they should stop optimizing for growth and put up some hurdles to who can upload content?

This sentiment is so shocking that I had to say something.

Please no. Let's not encourage a world where people are even less free to share their ideas.

I get where you're coming from, but "Think of the children!" has been used to justify so many evils throughout history. It's an emotional appeal that should be resisted.

Putting up barriers would also be the first step towards losing dominance. But in the short term, it would suck not being able to share a video without waiting a long time or being approved.

Putting up barriers on one privately owned website isn’t the same as making people less free to share their ideas. Particularly when the barrier might be something so benign as “to be included as kids content this video must be pre-approved”.

But won’t someone think of the poor content creators who might have to wait or upload their content somewhere else!

It's people's livelihoods. There is nowhere else.

"Think of the children" is equally bland.

So the issue isn't sharing ideas it's monetizing sharing those ideas?

This doesn't make any sense. There already exist non-user-generated platforms, as mentioned in the previous comments. If you don't like the downsides of the user-generated ones, why on earth would a reasonable reaction be "this shouldn't exist" instead of "this isn't right for me so I won't use it"? What a small, petty way to see the world.

if you don't like youtube for your kids, ban it and give them access to netflix and the like.

somehow youtube became the parent that oversees what content your kids get. this to me is a dereliction of your parenting requirements.

Expecting a service that has "Kids" in the name to have decent kids content is not a dereliction of parenting. It is full of low effort, addicting (to kids) videos.

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