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Comment by redm | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised YouTube isn't on your list. We having streaming services, but my kids mostly watch YouTube.

Youtube is pretty magical. It has everything, even in the "kid zone". Which also means I can't leave them unsupervised for 30 minutes and come back.

If I do, my kids will've gone from educational video about the rain forest to sponsored video to toy videos to slime to fart jokes to music videos of bikini-clad bimbos to steamy romance videos to ...

Anyway it's just too much work to curate youtube for a child, IMO.

For example, my kiddo found a bunch of inappropriately steamy fan fiction for her favorite cartoons narrated on youtube... and she demonstrated that she knew it was inappropriate because she started hiding her screen from us.

This is exactly our experience with Youtube.

I can sit with my kid and watch a couple episodes of a show I've never heard of (Like Bluey) and say, "Yep, this is a definite thumbs up. You can watch Bluey when you have screen time" And I trust that when an episode ends, another episode of Bluey is what will show up.

For a youtube channel, I have to watch the entire video and I can say, "Yep, you can watch this exact video. Make sure autoplay is off."

I have no clue what video would play next. I have no clue what product the youtuber will try to shill in the middle of the video, etc.

The other thing we find with our 3 year old is that he can have his tablet and watch movies or shows on Netflix/VLC, etc. and it's pretty much all positive.

But he always prefers YouTube and when he's using YouTube, he mostly watches 3-5 minutes of something before getting enticed by another thumbnail.

At times when he's had free reign to YT, it really seems to drastically affect his general attention, patience, temperament and even ability to sleep (he wakes up super early asking for his tablet).

Once we cut it off hard, he goes back to normal.

We don't really believe in complete abstinence of those sorts of things (I think it will just make him even more sensitive to those algorithms in the future) but being aware of the effect, reducing YT and prioritizing actual movies/series has made a noticeable difference.

You could use a different YouTube client perhaps. I use newpipe. It doesn't really do those recommendations.

But in general I really hate video sites too so I don't use it much at all. Too many harebrained "influencers" now trying to sell stuff

As they get older, you’ll also find YouTube Kids serves as the primary gateway for consumerism / corporations to begin influencing your child. Between Netflix / Disney+, the traditional 30s television commercial has effectively disappeared for kids. Corporations have pivoted to sponsored content on YouTube kids.

YT Kids most popular channels are streamed play sessions and toy reviews with superhuman production values and unrealistic depictions of what the toys can do. Once a child has watched an episode of LOL doll play along (for example), YouTube algorithm will recommend LOL doll collection videos, which associate completist collecting with peer group social acceptance. Free to play video game spots were even worse, directly focusing on alluring introduction of the game’s addiction economy.

I gave my children access to YouTube kids for some of the excellent educational content reasoning that it would be a relatively safe experience. Within a month their homepage and all recommendations (and I do mean 100%) were sponsored 5-15 minute long toy commercials. Their interest in animals, nature, science, and dinosaur programming remained strong but disappeared entirely from view outside of keyword search.

All YT and Google apps are now removed from the devices they use. I allow unsupervised use of PBS Kids, PBS in general, Nat Geo, Disney Plus and Netflix Kids (with time limits) but YouTube is filtered from my kids devices at the router. They are not allowed Google accounts; all YouTube content access is done via keyword search with a parent selecting the material and remaining in the room during viewing.

There are programs on YouTube that can’t be replicated anywhere else. But the recommendation engine is distilled corruption and dismay.

My kids couldn’t handle youtube. They would watch algorithmically created garbage (5yo) or endless game streaming (9yo) and be impossible to handle afterwards. First we did youtube time-outs, but every time we added it back into the mix we saw their behavior get worse, so eventually we banned youtube outright. Give me a curated platform like disney or netflix any day.

Youtube is not for kids; TOS does not allow it.

They literally have Youtube for kids..

https://www.youtube.com/kids/

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

And? Small percentage bothers to use, and it’s not foolproof on inappropriateness. They were caught surveilling kids also.

I see so many of these complaints about YT having lots of good family-friendly content but at the same time being terrible at curation even in the kids mode.

Seems like the problem can be solved with a crowdsourced list of family-friendly videos (on GitHub?) managed by trusted collaborators and then a simple page that embeds only these videos?

Over time I assume it should work given enough people contributing. It's not like the content needs to be kept continuously up to date either (unless old videos disappear faster than new ones are added).

Youtube tries to "hook" you. Between autoplay and recommended thumbnails (that can't be disabled) it's easy to get "hijacked".

The worst part is that recommendations aren't in line with the content level of what you are viewing.

Don’t even try. You would basically have to rewrite the entire YouTube client to get rid of all the dark patterns.

It's already done though: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

The problem is that the business model of YT kids contact creators contains incentives similar to those of SEO farms operating in the Google keyword ecosystem. Good content is shouldered aside by low effort, low value, high profit messaging.

Absolutely no YouTube for our kids, just don’t trust it, not even their kids app. Too many stories of bad content.

Here in the uk we have the joy that is CBeebies and CBBC, so have iPlayer (and all the other kids BBC apps) on iPads for the kids.

The only other one we let them have free reign on is Disney+, I’m sure this will change for the older one soon.

Wish there was a way to block everything and whitelist allowed channels. There are some really quality ones but there are also a bunch of really creepy content, even in the kids app.

Does the kids app show ads? Aside from the creepy content (which required in-person parental filtering) the advertising was the thing that drove us away from YouTube.

It's fine on a laptop or desktop where you can run an ad blocker. It's not fine when you're trying to let kiddo watch YouTube on an actual TV screen.

Yes, on certain channels. Some channels are ad-free, but this can change over time. A channel that’s ad-free on the YT Kids app today doesn’t have to be ad-free tomorrow.

There’s a paid version of YouTube that doesn’t have ads.

Don't forget the heaping tablespoon of surveillance.

Things my son (2 and a half) likes to watch on YT:

- Lorry trucks (semis/big rigs) driving on the road/motorway

- The tube/trains/subways coming in and out of stations

- Large excavators digging in quarries and loading dump trucks

The videos are usually pretty slow paced and calm, and we're happy to let him watch in small blocks (5-10 mins max) from time to time. He's shown no interest in typical cartoons, kids shows, etc. I'd love to cut off YT completely, but are there other places to get this type of content for him?

I've seen DVDs of some of these.

In previous threads I’ve asked about the same thing and some parents have very strong opinions about what’s available on YouTube.

I remember one thread in particular where someone told me that you could find some very strange stuff just by typing a period in the search box (autocomplete does the rest, NSFW if that’s not obvious), and that school age Kids tend to figure this out or share this “trick” amongst themselves. So to each their own, but I’m not a parent yet so I abstain from having any strong opinions for the moment.

Has everyone forgotten Elsagate already?

I wasn’t aware of it.

What the actual fuuuck. Tried searching just a dot and I got a fish cutting video, an indian woman being slapped around, and some creepy horror doll shit.

Seems you got further than I did. I scrolled through and decided “there be dragons” and left it at that.

There’s an audience for everything but I am not the audience for everything.

Not even - those were my top results.

Yeah I noped tf out pretty quick too. This isn't even the first time I've seen crazy shit about YT - these parents are 100% right not to let their kids on unsupervised. Weird how it's not news more often tbh.

YouTube is a terrifying cascade of "wtf" for children.

IMO it's completely unsuitable for unsupervised children under, say, 13.

Interesting that their terms of service specifically prohibit children under 13, but a lot of people still insist it is good for them and ignore it.

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