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Comment by devrimco | Hacker News Reader

noted the feature requests, thank you. already started working on the channel name thingy.

i also like algorithms but i decided it was not for kids, when i saw a friends little son watching video of a toy spiderman being bathed by a toy barbie acted by an old bald russian man, i decided it was not for kids. :)

also i would like to watch the latest high rated videos from only my favorite channels while i'm having a sandwich at my desk.

super bonus feature is also nice i'll try my best on that, as it requires a mega youtube request..

cheers.

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> i also like algorithms but i decided it was not for kids

Yeah, I’ve only ever heard negative things about video suggestions for kids. I guess the key search term for those who don’t know is “Elsagate”. Normal looking videos that draw in kids with popular characters and then suddenly they are doing bloody surgery on each other or whatever. I don’t even know if there’s negative intent on the part of the creators or if it’s just algo-profit drive led to this.

>negative intent

I think clickbaiting children in to a less-than-savory theme so you can get their ad revenue is probably enough negative intent to make me grossed out by them.

Very fair. You just exposed a part of my brain to me, where I put “bad profit-driven motive” into a separate bucket that I consider less severe than “direct evil desire for harm”, and now that I see that I’m not sure how bad that thought process sucks. It’s definitely driven by getting (too?) used to things having an average level of shittiness.

I totally feel that! I'm there too. The average level of shittiness has increased so much I basically don't expect things to work unless the specific feature makes the company money. Otherwise, it feels like an afterthought that may or may not function properly. Also, in case it was unclear, my original response wasn't meant as any criticism towards you. More just disgust towards those folks.

If they just want money, they can keep video suitable for kids. A common conspiracy is, these creator of Elsagate-like video try to make predating kids easier in worldwide.

Agreed, YouTube Kids is not always for kids. There is some very weird, sinister stuff on there that isn't in-your-face obvious. Stuff like that is just weird, it's definitely better to approve certain channels and keep the kiddos from getting pulled into any algorithms!

Folding Ideas had a great video on it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKp2gikIkD8

I mainly use YouTube through the app (although I’m slowly moving off it using RSS and yt-dlp) and my account can’t watch age restricted videos because I’m not that keen on giving google my drivers license or credit card. The amount of totally normal content being age restricted and the amount of highly questionable or outright disturbing or inappropriate content marked as “for kids” is mind boggling. Especially when you consider everything that’s neither age restricted or for kids.

Algoritm may be deciding which episodes to repeat more often, or if channels shouls be interleaved. (If a channel has 5 min videos and other 30 in videos, do you show one of each or 6 to 1?).

I agree that using algorithms torecomend crappy videos from other channels is bad, but it's not the only use https://xkcd.com/534/

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