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Comment by xrd | Hacker News Reader

I've been experimenting with making a Firefox plugin to hobble YouTube. I don't want to outright ban it (easily done using /etc/hosts) because there is good stuff on YouTube.

I talked to a guy at a conference who seemed really offended I might hack into my kids computers by modifying their YouTube viewing. But YouTube is hacking their brains right now and it drives me crazy. No one seems to be concerned about that.

I'm trying to get my kids to use their Ubuntu Linux machines instead of the fucking iPads. There is no way to inject myself into their YouTube experience on iOS devices. It's just them and Google, with no insight or control by me, their parent. I hate it. And I pay for YouTube ad-free. Why can't I have a dashboard to prevent my kids from seeing Ninja kids where they just shill junk from Walmart?

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My coworker occasionally talks about his 4yo son watching youtube and it used to make me very uncomfortable. As someone without kids, I don't want to tell him what to do, but I thought it was a terrible idea.

Now, apparently his son has been watching lego and minecraft redstone tutorials, asking his parents to help him read the descriptions and linked text tutorials so he can build them! Youtube can really be an awesome place, but it's a double-edged sword for sure.

Speaking from experience, I was handed an iPod touch in middle school, and have been addicted to youtube ever since. Although most, if not all, of the passions that define me today were discovered/cultivated on youtube, all too often I'd never engage with them outside youtube. I really feel like I achieved nothing outside of class during high school and college, because I spent all my free time consuming.

What works for me now is using the unhook firefox extension [1] on my mac and android tablet, and then brave browser on my iPhone, signed out and with search history off. Basically eliminating all recommendations, I can still go to youtube with a specific purpose, but can't use it to doom scroll (that's what hn is for). I'd be happy to pay for premium, but not without a way to turn off all recommendations outside of search.

I'd be super interested to hear more details about the firefox plugin you're working on, is it open source?

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...

I haven't open sourced it. I will do that soon. I'm very interested in your story, thanks for sharing! If you email me at chris@extrastatic.com I'll happily share the firefox extension when it is ready.

> There is no way to inject myself into their YouTube experience on iOS devices.

Why don't you throttle YT on the iPads (via the firewall) so it's unwatchable, then blame Apple. You could make it somewhat intermittent to make it more convincing.

That's a good idea. Does that require pihole or something? I've got that installed but wasn't aware that I could do that. I'm not aware of how you can throttle traffic without intercepting on the device directly.

Throttle on the DNS level. I do that.

Does this require support from the internet provider? I don't see any options on the eero devices that come with Frontier. Does this require an intermediate router that supports throttling? I feel like this is something that pi-hole should support.

you know your kids are just going to start asking for new ipads instead of becoming linux users

Maybe they can run a Linux viewer on an iPad to get the best of both.

Lying to your kids is a terrible idea, unless you want to breed distrust and resentment.

This is the dilemma. They aren't rational about what YouTube does to their brains. They don't understand. And YouTube isn't honest either. What's the right approach to fight it other than complete abstinence?

There are a lot of dishonest actors in the Internet world, how do you be honest in a sea of drug dealers in another industry?

Leaving kids to navigate conquering something that adults haven't isn't super appealing either.

With the lack of options out there, finding a way to preview content before it's made available seems the way to go.

Doing it early and keeping it that way seems to be the trick. But kids will often learn there is a "different" youtube on other family member's phones, or kids at school.

> I'm trying to get my kids to use their Ubuntu Linux machines instead of the fucking iPads.

Take the pads away, daddy.

That's what being a daddy is about, preventing harm when you see it occurring right in front of your eyes.

Nobody's gonna do it apart from you.

It's a fight between me, my wife and YouTube, sadly.

But, your advice is 100% correct.

I mean that's a tough one, because the algorithm can be very subtle sometimes and trying to explain your reasoning as to why you think a certain trend in the content you're being suggested is an insidious form of behaviour modification is genuinely hard to do without sounding like a schizo who's spent too much time with Alex Jones.

Sometimes it seems to 'give up' and get frustrated - I literally was suggested some weird religious 'being gay is a sin' video followed by a literal vaginal speculum video once. Can't really misread that message.

> I'm trying to get my kids to use their Ubuntu Linux machines instead of the fucking iPads.

Why? Like seriously. Why? What benefit does this give to your kid?

From your kid’s perspective, the laptop is going to be less useful, more hostile, it’s going to limit how they’re able to talk and relate to their friends.

Outside of your desires as a technologist and personal feelings about Linux, why should your kid want to use it? It feels like you’re projecting the ideals and values of your career onto your kids and then you’re surprised when they don’t share those ideals.

Good question. This is my opinion, but I feel I've got facts to back it up.

I don't want them using iPads because I consider the walled garden of apple to be hostile and predatory. Specifically, this is a place where I cannot control the device, where there are countless apps that are "free" that are advertised to my children without my consent, and then attempt to convince them to beg me constantly to purchase stupid coins or avatars or whatever. These app designers know that parents will give in after a hundred demands, and I resent that manipulation. And, I don't think Apple cares, in fact, I think Apple actively supports them for the 30% take they get.

That's a mixture of opinions and facts, so you'll need to sort it out.

It's ironic that Steve Jobs called the computer the bicycle of the mind. I doubt he would have called the iPad that. I'm hopeful my kids will learn a lot more about computers using Ubuntu. They definitely do explore much more on that then on their iPads which are purely consumption devices. My son was voluntarily using scratch to code a game tonight! He uses his iPad just for YouTube, so that feels like progress.

Take away the iPad? Tell them no Youtube on the iPad?

Not everything is an engineering problem.

> It's ironic that Steve Jobs called the computer the bicycle of the mind. I doubt he would have called the iPad that.

FWIW, Jobs specifically said he would never give his kids an iPad because it's bad for their developing brains.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/11/fashion/steve-jobs-apple-...

Many tech folks keep their kids entirely away from screens because they know what screens are doing to kids, because they are doing it to adults.

There’s a pretty wide suite of options built into iOS which lets parents restrict their child’s usage. It’s actually a problem they cared about a lot and spent many millions on, it’s a bit disingenuous to say Apple doesn’t put control in parent’s hands here.

Which parental control features exist in Ubuntu which are lacking in iOS?

My issue is that you can control time on iOS. But you can't control the individual apps and it is the wild west with every other app control, like YouTube. They offer controls but they are all completely different and it is exhausting to keep up with the different options. The kids have more energy to creep through the guardrails. I think that's by design, it isn't YouTube's business model to stop people from watching.

Companies sure get to control what their employees can see or do on their devices.

Corporate mobile device management (MDM) policies can do a lot more for both on apple and android. Maybe that's somewhere to look.

that's what the YouTube Kids app is for. you log in with your Google account and you create the kids accounts. you can select content by age and blacklist channels or you can whitelist only. Whitelisted only is probably the only way you can block some of the more annoying channels like Vlad and Nicki, they seem to have literally dozens of channels all full of the same drivel.

additionally, iPads have strong parental controls. you can limit time overall on the iPad and you can limit time on specific apps.

I'd love to learn how Youtube Kids was not helpful?

https://www.youtubekids.com/

It bugs me how similar Youtube Shorts is to the spinning wheel game on The Price Is Right.

So much of social media is TPIR style gambling for dopamine and worthless knowledge.

Youtube Shorts, Tiktok, Instagram, Twitter... basically any 'infinite feed' of content is no different from channel surfing of yore, which I think is also harmful to our brain and attention span.

It’s not that hard, I bought my two daughters iMacs and threw their tablets away. They got over it.

Now they play Minecraft and Hello Kitty which is a slightly less braindead activity than YouTube!

try to teach thm chess

try to teach them chess

My kids are doing chess. After your comment, I searched for best YouTube chess channels. I love this one about amateurs (and trash talking while playing chess):

https://www.youtube.com/c/CoffeeChess

Found in this list:

https://blog.favoree.io/articles/best-chess-youtube-channels...

But, why does YouTube not make it easy for me to surface this content to my kids instead of these crappy channels like Ninja Kids or Aphmau which celebrate monoculture, consumerism, and fake accomplishments so they can sell junk from Walmart?

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