Effective YouTube Kids: Quality Content in Small Doses | Hacker News Reader

Effective YouTube Kids: Quality Content in Small Doses

abparenting.substack.com

42 pointsphilips30 comments

I found the best way to deal with YouTube is to download the videos and airdrop them to my son's iPad.

This way he can still view a selected range of Minecraft videos without getting stuck in the cesspool of '100 days as a chicken' playlists.

Plex, Jellyfin, and similar solutions where you rip content for your own media collection and serve in a constrained manner can solve for this. App gets installed on kid's device, and you use the cli or use the web interface to push it into the storage system it's streamed from.

(i do this, it is very straightforward and keeps my kids off of Youtube)

I've been thinking of doing something like that with a Synology

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36378689 might be useful

Though the UI/iPad app of Plex is buggy and difficult too use. I haven't tried Jellyfin enough yet though.

I agree that this is the way to go. I'd also recommend the PBS kids video app as something you can let them navigate and explore without worry.

Yes, seems like a better strategy. Even something like newpipe on an old android phone curating/downloading locally and playing through vlc. Simple and works great.

I actually noticed in the brave settings on android recently it can block all youtube comments/recommended/etc so that may be even simpler

Incidentally I’ve been working on a parental controls app, which has some YouTube specific functionality. Currently it only gives you the ability to block YouTube shorts, but more channel-specific functionality is coming https://www.parentcontrols.win/

Admittedly I think it'll be hard for youtube (and similar sites) to build proper child filters and habits. Not because they're bad people or anything, just because it's too opposed to their incentives

> Not because they're bad people or anything, just because it's too opposed to their incentives

What a ridiculous turn of phrase. "I kill and eat other human beings, not because I'm a bad person or anything, just because it is my incentive to do so." Those incentives are self-imposed. Having self-created incentives to do bad things is what makes you a bad person.

i dont know how you can have such a strong opinion on cannibalism without trying it first. If attending a liberal arts college has taught me anything its that morality is relative and you shouldn't judge anything (except white people) without experiencing it.

I have thought about building something like this but it felt like building an ad blocking business: constantly doing wack a mole or fighting lawsuits.

How are you thinking about those problems?

COPPA regulations are certainly a concern; right now we save no child data and have a COPPA compliant terms of use/etc. In the future we'll have to save data (if only so parents know when their kid is using their computer), but we're in talks with lawyers and will hopefully have more custom and thorough processes for it. We also only operate in the US which simplifies things.

I'm glad the response to your post didn't dissuade you from protecting our children from the plight of atheism and /r/antiwork

Woah! Happy to see this on the frontpage.

I have enjoyed exploring the intersection between technology and parenting. It can be difficult to find great applications and tools to use with my kids. But, there are things out there that are awesome and aren't exploitive.

I have found that one of my principles while parenting young children in this digital age is trying to teach my kids that they can use technology but we need to make active choices on how to use it. The defaults aren't necessarily the best. In that vein I also put together a list of mobile apps too: https://abparenting.substack.com/p/mobile-games-for-playing-...

I would love to hear other creative uses and configurations people have for technology with their kids.

You can't leave your kids alone with youtube.

Its addictive and stuffed full of advertising. I'm lucky that I have BBC and netflix to choose from, sure its annoying them watching shit on repeat, but at least they are not one click away from something nasty, or downright bullshit.

If there is something good, we watch it together. But there is no way they are allowed it on their own

This , you have to be a really bad parent to trust YouTube with a child especially after elsagate. The fact that people here think otherwise is testament to broader culture problem.

No one has yet mentioned the surveillance aspect yet, so I will. Yes, they were caught spying on children too.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/04/technology/google-youtube...

> you have to be a really bad parent to trust YouTube

Sadly I don't think its entirely the parent's fault. Google does a good job of making people think that it's safe. There is a strong education component that needs to happen (public health style, similar to wash your hands)

But there probably also needs to be more consequences for Google when they muck up. However that requires regulation from a system that cannot regulate anymore.

The fact that you dont understand why parent leave kids alone with youtube shows the fact that you have no idea about the living conditions of most of the human race.

YouTube Kids is a different constrained environment - different apps and websites from YouTube. And with the configuration I lay out in this blog post the kids can only play videos you explicitly share with them. It is the easiest analogue to having just a VHS player and a home video collection that I can think of.

Regardless, I agree in general the defaults on YouTube are terrible for everyone including kids.

I've tried to work with the YT app, but it's got weird/bad failure modes with the allowed content. In the end, for the occasional screen I found Khan Academy Kids can be even more engaging and a better curated experience.

The "no sponsored content" restriction of YouTube kids is a huge downside. That eliminates most YouTubers I watch. For example, practical engineering.

I liked this one

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/U0VAswvOaJY

great channel recommendations.

Thank you! There are some excellent things out there- curation is the challenge.

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