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Comment by j4yav | Hacker News Reader

Curated and at least semi-professionally produced content, like PBS kids, is infinitely better in terms of providing consistently good content. I think YouTube is at its heart fundamentally incompatible with providing only high quality enriching content.

Everyone being able to make content means there are gems that would never otherwise get made, and also vast wastelands of garbage to sort through, or get dumped into by the algorithm.

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PBS Kids is made by people optimizing for quality content.

YT Kids is made by people optimizing for marketing dollars.

You can thank OPB for that. They have been long time partners with PBS and they curate and provide the pbs kids app and YouTube stream.

Yeah I mix Youtube Kids with PBS with good success, the key I found is to just watch it with them.

Compared to what I grew up on cable with manipulative ads YouTube Kids isn't even close to that level, but then again I make a point to pay attention to the content on there.

I think YouTube has and does provide high quality content, it's the filtering that's the tough part.

YouTube Kids does have a way of turning on curated content only[0]. The main problem is that when you do that the library is tiny (and seemingly stuck in time).

This isn't the default though: Parents have to actively enable it. But it does get rid of most of the toy/McDonald's/etc adverts and "child personalities" that are prominent on the platform.

[0] https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/introducing-new-choices...

> I think YouTube is at its heart fundamentally incompatible with providing only high quality enriching content.

You could say that about any publisher or platform.

PBS Kids was great the last time I saw it. Have they managed to stay neutral and not become politicized like so much of the media in the US?

It is nearly impossible to answer this question because everyone means something totally different by apolitical and neutral these days, but as far as I can see it is simple, positive children’s programs.

We love PBS kids for my 2,4,6 year olds. I don't feel I've seen any content I'd consider politicized on there.

I'm fairly sure PBS Kids contains politics since it has Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood, which is absolutely "political" just like Mr. Roger's Neighborhood was.

How was Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood political?

https://www.biography.com/news/mister-rogers-officer-clemmon...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKy7ljRr0AA

https://www.fredrogers.org/2021/03/12/daniel-tigers-neighbor...

I am still not clear how including black people or autistic people is political?

Did you know the US used to have segregation? Of course showing black people on TV is political.

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/611570/when-mississippi-...

Admitting that black or autistic people exist is political now. Gotcha.

It certainly is to the people complaining that TV is too political. It’s even worse if they admit gay people exist.

> I think YouTube is at its heart fundamentally incompatible with providing only high quality enriching content.

I think this is in some ways similar to reddit. While there are some great threads from time-to-time, it is a way for people to quickly vent/amuse themselves.

Once I un-subscribed from all the defaults and main stream subs, content got wildly better for me. I still appreciate being able to pick what subreddits I see, instead of a big prediction engine pulling from different subs I may like.

Huge ones like /r/askreddit are like tabloids. Same with any big /r/*advice. Niche subreddits are so good though.

Ex: https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberDeck/

That's a great point, and is in fact something I wanted to touch upon in my previous comment. Being able to choose great subreddits is a big plus, and to be fair there are great YT creators who create great niche content. But a common theme has been that they usually start small in size (hence niche) but the moment they grow big, they start to "look" similar to the large channels/subreddits: for YT, they start getting bombarded with clickbait titles, sponsored videos (not just an ad/video). For reddit, "funny"/"flaming" comments hijack every discussion.

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