Hacker News Reader

Comment by Smithalicious | Hacker News Reader

Is YouTube really so bad nowadays? I feel like I'm in a weird position as I'm young enough to have grown up with YouTube, having used it regularly since age 11 or 12, and I got a ton out of it, but "The Algorithm" wasn't a thing in the same way back then. I still use YouTube today and still get a lot out of it, but I mainly watch videos from channels I'm subscribed to or through direct recommendation by other people.

Am I living in a weird bubble while the rest of the world experiences a parallel, much worse YouTube?

View on HN

There’s plenty of quality content on YouTube. But there’s plenty of low quality knockoffs, and even outright dangerous videos like Blippi smashing things with hammers or Peppa Pig murdering her friends and family with a knife.

YouTube has too much crowd generated garbage to leave kids unsupervised.

Yes. The recommendations that are pushed to me are wildly different than what my kids see.

Mine are mostly DIY fix-your-shit videos and boring science stuff I assume it puts there because I'm old and boring.

Most of my kids' recs are the cult-of-personality YouTubers who gain popularity with innocuous unboxing videos and game streaming that attract underage audiences attracted to colors and theatrics, and over time devolve into progressively toxic "lolcow" or sexually-predatory behavior that makes the denizens of 8chan look tame.

That much, in addition to the sometimes-fatal "challenges" these clowns try to promote (though that's a TikTok thing too) and the "accidents" involving exposing audiences of children to incidental pornography.

These people used to be kept in check by ratings boards and the stations held liable by the FCC for what they broadcast to audiences. YouTube has no accountability whatsoever; you are entrusting your children's television programming to self-publishing internet trolls.

There is a big trend of odd videos that no adult can seem to understand. My 4-year old loves them. They star familiar characters like Mario, pac-man, siren head, huggy wuggy, etc. they use sampled sound effects repeated ad naseum. There is no plot or story that lasts more than maybe 10 seconds, but the videos can be 30 minutes. Sometimes there’s no plot or story at all.

https://www.theverge.com/culture/2017/11/21/16685874/kids-yo...

Yeah, I'm probably around your age. I remember YouTube being great circa 2011 ish, I started getting into Minecraft mods and from that programming because of it.

Now, in 2022 I've been YouTube short (and TikTok) free for a month or so and I consider that an accomplishment lol.

The problem I feel is mindful browsing vs doomscrolling.

A lot of platforms nowadays have gotten really good at promoting mindless content with zero required attention span that's just a dopamine injection. IMO that kind of content is just objectively bad. Then again, I also follow a lot of people on YouTube and other platforms that make content that I would say is the opposite of that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com