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Comment by arenaninja | Hacker News Reader

I've been waiting for a device to smarten up my TVs so the kids can stream on it but without YouTube. If google goes through with this I will buy some Rokus :)

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Just out of curiosity, and feel free to ignore this question if you’d rather not say, but why something specifically without YouTube, but presumably other streaming apps?

Not OP. My guess is because YouTube offers user uploaded content, unlike all the other streaming services like Netflix, Disney+

The crap that's on YouTube makes the cable TV networks targeted at kids look like educational television. Horrid stuff with kids shooting off their mouths.

It's pretty reasonable, and smart I'd say. The kids content on YouTube has been heavily gamed by content farms optimizing content for SEO, making absolutely bizarre and sometimes disgusting content.

Bit of a lengthy watch, but this video is pretty eye-opening:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKp2gikIkD8

(It's a few years old at this point, but not a lot has changed, and possibly has gotten worse)

Search for a period (just ".") and pick any of the things youtube recommends (don't press enter on your "." query). These are the kinds of videos it tends to suggest to kids. Someone else posted a detailed explanation on why but tldr is that kids are curious about things that they don't understand and adults exploited this curiosity.

Edit: And also this trick is known by a lot of kids according to a friend I have that works at a public school

oh wow. Never tried this. Lots of very very weird things, like this (do not click): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB910KU0myQ

Yeah that was a lot crazier than I would have imagined snd I do a fair bit of YouTube. I cleared my search history after that though. Yeesh

That’s insane!

YouTube is particularly addictive and damaging to children. There is very little content protection over whatever AI bullshit YouTube does.

My kids never cried for Netflix, Hulu, or Disney+, but when I banned YouTube they CRIED.

Like everybody else here said, YouTube is the wild west with zero content curation and shit moderation. My 4 year old loved this gaming channel on my one smart TV with a YouTube app, I saw a few episodes with him and it was all normal gamer stuff with reactions. Now I banned him from watching YouTube because that channel started doing reviews of games inspired by Squid Game (if you haven't watched it, it's essentially violence porn)

I had the same problem with my elder kid, YouTube is to kids what Facebook is to the aging population and Tiktok is to teens, an uncurated poison. But kids lack the ability to filter their own content, and YouTube makes no effort to curate. He complains he can't watch it anymore but when I stream kid-appropriate content from the other streaming platforms he'll watch it without further complaint

Thanks! I am without kids so would have overlooked or never encountered this, but this is still solid intel for the future.

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