... there is no way in hell I'll give him or her access to the 'net. Right?
Right.
Same with many other things: condoms, keys to a car, access to alcohol. There is a time for everything, and at the age of 4, a young human probably has not yet maxxed out on analog stimuli opportunities.
I learned YouTube when it came out in 2006 and I was 21. I've got 19 years of YouTube experience and I'm doing fine. A 21-year old logging into YouTube for the first time in 2025 will probably be doing even better within days. (hours ? minutes ?)
I don't see any reason that a child needs "the internet" (for a value of "the internet" meaning "mass-market apps") to prepare for the future.
Maybe you'd want to give them "Scratch Jr"[0] at some point to give them a head start ; maybe that would make much more sense. But YouTube??
While there are many formative opportunities about handling physical money (The sensation of exchanging physical coins is big on a kids mind or knowing they have money and having missplaced it), I can 100% see a case for a card instead, trackable, instant access to emergency money, etc
Personally, I worry about the mental models formed at an early age, and how distorting technology can be relative to the real world. It layers abstraction on top of abstraction on top of abstraction at a time when kids are trying to make sense of reality for the first time and establishing internal models that will stay with them into adulthood.
Sure, some carefully curated content may be fine, but I think there’s a deeper question to be asked about the impact of current technology on young brains. Adults certainly haven’t adjusted very well. The truth is, we don’t really know how harmful it is. Maybe we’ll survive the next 100 years to find out.
Everybody drinks alcohol. Should I help my toddler tryout alcohol to prepare to the future dinners, parties and weddings?
I didn’t want to drink before high school gatherings where there was peer pressure and I stopped shortly after that.
I see so many first-world westerners cringe at the idea of letting your child have freedom and make mistakes on their own. Tracking, parental controls everywhere, neighbors snitching when your child is out and about exploring the world, etc, etc.
Not that it means 2 year olds should run around the internet with unfettered access, but just that the aforementioned logic is not sound.
There is also benefit to being culturally in sync (not necessarily 1 to 1, but somewhat) with one’s peer group. It can be alienating to be the odd one out.
If it were up to my grandparents, I never would have watched a tv show or movie growing up, or read fiction novels. But while that may have had some benefits, it obviously would have some costs with me being unable to participate in some of my peers’ activities and conversations.
Some develop advanced reading proficiency well before that, and the more they read the more likely that is to become the case.
Every child is different, but the more you assume they can't do certain things, the more you'll find that to be self-fulfilling.
(That said, that makes an argument for extensive access to reading materials, not videos.)
Side note: Just a few days ago I witnessed a mom letting her ~2 year old daughter browse TikTok while shopping groceries. The kid mindlessly swept to the next video every few seconds. I was horrified.
YMMV.
My first computer was at age 13 and I had internet (broadband, directly) at 20.
Now, obviously both of those are very late for 2025+ and social pressure would be overbearing.
But I think internet usage before, say, 7, is useless. There is so much to learn in the real world before that, anyway (outdoors activities including sports, books, card and boardgames, crafting, ...).
Thankfully I live in a place where they're introducing school bans for smartphones, total ones in primary and during classes in secondary. That should reduce social pressure massively.
If all goes well computers will be introduced around 7, supervised (probably with a locked down Linux and various educational programs, maybe some simple multiplayer games, etc). A dumb phone will probably appear in a few years and a locked down smartphone as late as possible, maybe around 12?
I expect mobile device mastery to happen almost instantly, instilling desktop computer usage is the real target, maybe some programming.
Unsupervised internet usage is a tricky thing. Not sure when exactly, they need to learn about NSFW and especially NSFL. And of course about the crack-manufacturers employed by FAANG.
I miss portability of settings; configuring restrictions for an mdm is soul sucking.
I don't know. I didn't ever have kids, but if I don't mind letting a $3k laptop wear a few battle scars just for it participating in the life of a photographer, I have to suppose getting a little dinged up to help make a child smile must be at least as honorable.
For that matter, I recall a ferret - now long since gone to her reward, of course, this was decades ago - jumping on an Esc key just in time to cancel a Windows 2000 install, and that was funny enough to laugh about for years. How much more so with a cheerful, clever baby primate? Don't mind me, though. Just getting a little maudlin in my old age.
Also, adults have lots of responsibilities other than making sure children are playing constructively. Requiring over-the-shoulder collaboration for all online activity isn't realistic, especially when you have more than one child per parent.
Banning youtube has been a no-brainer for me. The loss of the "smart" shows is a cost well worth reducing attention addiction.
Download tools and selfhosted video streaming tools exist for YT content. I run them myself. I learned to set them up based on a couple of HN commenters' passing mentions that it was easier than I had made it out to be, by following search terms from their comments, and by screwing around breaking things till they quit falling apart on me.
In other words, old-fashioned sysadmin work, of the kind I loudly hate and quietly love to. In aggregate, it took about two days' (ie ca 16h though not as closely tracked as if billing ofc) work, and though my notes are aides-memoires in no fit state for publication, I would be happy to share them privately and save you some of that time.
(This offer stands for any reader, and my email is in my profile here; to see those, click on the name above this or any comment. My fifty-year-old, brilliant but determinedly nontechnical, beloved catty bitch of an ex-boyfriend had much derision for the content of my library, but none for the quality of service. I confide you won't disappoint your family too badly, either.)
eta: What I wanted to add is this, a short and I hope not too dull piece which I wrote now almost a decade ago. Please excuse the state you find it in; my old website broke ages ago and this needs a rewrite anyway for that the man proved far more vile than I yet knew to paint him. But I think it still can stand as a hint of my real feelings on these matters, which might surprise you somewhat. https://web.archive.org/web/20220125083230/https://aaron-m.c...
I cannot really explain to a non-parent how different the life of a parent is. We don't have the ability to sit down and do 16 hours of time in a project in 2 days.
It's nothing for example I would shy away from administering for my neighborhood, tenant per family or account per family or whatever people want in each their own case - in the same sense we share other resources as a community, from a drop cord to a car or a bedroom. Indeed I have no kids of my own in large part because I was terrified I'd be homeless by 50, if I did not focus on building the kinds of skills that make this something I can do in a couple days without mostly at any time putting in a lot of serious effort - this was second-screen stuff I did mostly in bed with a cup of one or another of the embarrassing milk-and-coffee concoctions I like.
I never knew what I would miss that way, focusing on building a reliably remunerative career instead of fostering any other kind of social connection, until too damn late. I don't need to hear (and won't receive well) anything like "it's never too late;" no one else here is competent to speak to my personal regrets, and I speak of this one here only so I can cite it as one motivation among many to try to do something with that so hard-earned skill that makes a difference for folks whose lives are embedded among those of others in just that way I never learned the hang of. What else could I do that's worth more?
No one is asking me to do that for my community, not at the moment. I don't know if anyone else here would think of it; one major reason I bought here is because I've lived here enough years to know it is mostly unattractive to tech people and fast becoming more so. That's good; no monoculture is healthy and that one metastasizes.
So sure. In theory I could build something like a Helm chart or deployable Compose file, or some such awful useless other shit that no one with a life could ever make heads nor tails of. Those are all things I wasted too much of my one and only mortal life learning how to do, but there are no tools we make that a human can use so just that alone doesn't work. So then I'd have to turn it into a business, and pitch to YC just so I could say they rejected me, and eventually Alphabet would sue me into my next incarnation for threatening one Ads PM's metrics bonus best case, and all I ever really wanted to do was help the overworked parents around me make their kids happy in a way that was safe.
To hell with all that, it's for the chumps here whom I grant are in the majority but do not mistake me for one of them. I said before if you want my notes you can email me and I'll share them, Docker Compose file and all; if you don't have time to act on them then you can try to find a friend or family member or neighbor who does, if you still remember how to speak to any such person. Or trade someone for babysitting so you do have the time. Or let your kids learn something about what Daddy does all day! And if you're embarrassed of that, well, maybe you should be. Unless you know some grave occult evil of Jellyfin or yt-dlp, I don't see why you'd feel that way, though.
Any of those you're welcome to by me, or whatever else you like. Not my problem, but for whatever you find it to be worth, I would say any or all of them seems a better use of your precious time than to waste more of it whining to me.
3 to 4 year olds are still putting things in their mouth that they shouldn’t be.
In a village raises the kid scenario, there would be older kids and neighbors looking after the kid, presumably with good intentions since they are neighbors.
But in a world (the internet) where anyone from around the world can communicate any of their idea to everyone instantaneously, the village is no longer raising the kid, so village rules don’t apply.
Reminds me of the time I tried using pkunzip to expand a shareware demo and filled the C drive on accident.
You could be taught to use those machines respectfully, if you knew games were available.
What does a family computer with minimal internet access look like in the constantly connected modern era?
A family unit should own all accounts in the family, parents should be able to reset any password to any owned account from a central dashboard without hunting down email links and 2factor. I don't want to set up a management account for each service. I want all any services management options exposed by api and displayed in my central dashboard. Of my choice.
Everything lacks the basics, and nothing reads system-level e.g. content rating restrictions, it's all per-service and per-device and it's maddening.
Worse, the single most-useful parental control possible, an allow-list, is often absent from TV interfaces and steaming services. Allow-list just the PBS app on AppleTV? Impossible, there is no way to do a case-by-case allow list. Allow-list only the handful of non-brain-rot children's shows on Netflix? Nah, it's just by age rating. Et c.
[EDIT] Our solution, after years and years of banging our heads against this? App-installation blocked everywhere, no YouTube on anything, all streaming services cancelled because they're such a pain in the ass, and the kids have a large curated set of pirated content served by Jellyfin that they can watch when they get TV time, including some things pulled from YouTube by yt-dlp. If we want to one-off stream something for the kids outside of that set of content, we "cast" it from a parent's device.
The non-piracy alternative would be to go back to discs for everything, I guess.
Standard ways of interacting with "modern" media services are just awful, if you're a parent. They're so bad that it's easiest to simply abandon them.
So I downloaded a bunch of the videos on our desktop and blocked the site. Works for my 3.5 year old, not sure the plan when they outgrow it.
>So I downloaded a bunch of the videos on our desktop and blocked the site.
Downloading videos from youtube and blocking the site seems more like fighting against the platform (and more work) than turning on a whitelist mode. Seems like the end result is the same but with more work.
Even the sidebar of recommendations is a dark pattern for a 3 year old. Unlike Netflix etc where you have to exit the video to browse something else.
You can youtube-dl whatever is good and stick it on a raspberry pi running kodi with no internet. You can get them el cheapo kindles and load them up with all the books they could ever read. You can let them use computers supervised for khanacademy. But please, as the rare adult who's aware of and cares about this issue, don't let your kids fall victim to it.
I'm fortunate enough to make enough to afford live in child care and a stay at home wife, so we're able to avoid almost all screen time. But the vast majority of families don't have this luxury.
"If you can't responsibly parent, why did you have kids?" This is a very difficult choice for many people. The drive to have kids is fundamental to being human. But it's very expensive and hard.
And I think people are responding to your dilemma with the very sensible solution of just not having kids. Unless you have a very flexible setup somehow, or lots of cash (or both), yeah, child rearing is nightmare fuel.
She spends her time with toys, puzzles, drawing, painting, crafting, Legos, books, playing outside, playing with friends, playing with her little brother, etc. She can easily do Origamis for one hour. I hope I can sustain this as long as possible. I know it will get harder and harder once she goes to school.
Meanwhile a couple generations of us grew up with two working parents who were happy to just throw us in front of the TV or our lego sets when they needed a break. And that seemed to work fine?
Our daughter is only 2, but she's still absolutely thrilled whenever we let her zone out to some Disney movie on the TV, and has yet to even hold a tablet (that we know of, at least). I know things will probably change for us as she gets older, so I try to withold too much judgement from the parents I see happily plopping a tablet with YouTube in front of their kid. But for now, it's just hard for me to even imagine doing that.
I'm sure many would ask "whats the difference between a movie on TV amd YouTube on a tablet?" Well, tons, just from my personal experience. But her pediatrician, early child development professional we work with, and research I've read, all seem to indicate there's a pretty big difference.
They were shocked! They were asking about the film.
And I was probably more shocked when they said they don't read books because they don't have the patience. One said she once read a whole book and it was really good, but hasn't don't so since.
Imagine going the other way round is detox, you need to pushback hard since they will fight you on everything.
I think it's worth it even in that case. Though obviously if you never offer that option from the start, you're golden. Toys, puzzles, long form entertainment, etc.
I know I probably sound incredibly boomer rn, but I see the effects of this in my generation (zoomers) and much, much more sharply with kids. I can't say it's "easier", but from my limited experience handling kids, it's trading a short-term hassle for huge long-term benefit.
It was not unusual not to want to watch what was available, and have to do something else.
I think this is a huge difference compared to modern video media.
I watch my ~9 year old Nephew play games on his Switch and he swaps between games every ~5 minutes.
I think as a 90s kid we had a hand full of games for our Gameboys, N64, etc. but had to wait for a holiday to actually get new physical content. Now it's easy and cheap enough to just download a slough of digital games (with fast resume and what not) and hop between them like crazy.
Maybe the kids have realised that those pop hits are repetitive and uninteresting...
Plenty of pop music is excellent. But if you give it 30 seconds you will never find out if that’s true.
I, extremely strictly personally, find TikTok ironically un-addictive for this reason: it depletes my attention too fast to get me hooked.
Google has been trying to get me to watch Shorts since they introduced them with little effect.
One day they offer me a video of a Chinese girl transforming into a nine-tailed fox on Shorts which was a good choice for me. After that they want to show me endless AI slop videos of Chinese girls transforming into all sorts of things on America's Got Talent always with the same music, the same reaction shots, etc.
I tend to look at the recommendation problem as a classification problem [1] but one thing that challenges that is that the answer to "do you want to see more content like this?" is different for content that is 5% of your feed (you relish it) to the very same content if it is 95% of your feed (you're disgusted.) My own answer to the diversity problem [2] is to k-Means the content into 20 clusters and rank the cluster independently so I am always operating at the 5% point.
With ordinary YouTube content I frequently get introduced to something like Techmoan or Jay-Z videos that I can binge with relish the same way I can binge episodes of Shangri-La Frontier season 2. But shorts don't do that for me.
If I was developing a recommendation-based content site based on short content in 2025 I would take a cue from Yostar games and make it so people are actually discouraged from sitting in really long sessions but rather you get them to keep coming back frequently to graze. I'm amazed at how a mechanism like oil in Azur Lane can rescue you from a grindy task right when you are starting to get sick of it forcing you to either engage with some other part of the game or real life for a while. There are a few of us who will spend the holiday break playing Dynasty Warriors 9 or Asgard's Wrath 2 and realize we spent a few work weeks worth of time playing a game, but even then you burn out, I think mobile games are more successful at getting more people to spend more time with games, often with content that is thinner.
[1] ... actually every problem, Hot Dog/Not Hot Dog is not a joke in my pod
[2] which I haven't seen in the literature. I used to think that I didn't understand or believe many ideas in the recommender literature such as "negative sampling", now I think the recommender literature is frequently wrong
Just like modern casino slot machines aren't actually fun despite being made by the exact same companies as very fun arcade and home video games, it's just more efficient/profitable to optimize for the easily addicted.
A casino makes most of it's money from addicts, so why waste any effort/money on making actual "good" anything when they can just press harder on the addiction buttons. Everything in a video slot machine is optimized around pressing the very specific dopamine buttons in a gambling addicts brain, to the point that it is WORSE for those who are less prone to gambling addiction.
In the exact same way, google doesn't care if you watch shorts, you are less profitable than the user who spends all day doomscrolling. So the content isn't optimized for you explicitly because the optimizations that make it more addictive for problem users, and therefore more profitable, are diametrically opposed to making "good" media.
The creative mind behind Spongebob wanted to finish after one season. "It's done, it's good, I like it as art". But Nickelodeon couldn't let that happen because it was a cash cow. So it's gone for like 8 slop filled seasons, that everyone recognizes as "worse" than the first season.
But "Good" has never been as profitable as "Addicting", so any market where you can sell something "Addicting" will be completely filled by addicting slop.
I know adults who do this. I believe it's a lack of patience created by always available convenience. When nothing is hard it's not worth the focus.
Growing up there was no next/skip/shuffle - pick a radio station and deal with it. That or dub to tape which takes effort, and skipping also takes effort. Same with video games, as another poster mentioned we only got one game at a time so that was our focus. You had the new game and a few old games. Deal with it.
No ones has to deal with much of anything anymore and companies know this. And people dont seem to mind because its so addicting.
Uh, we monetized attention? Like, most of the people on this very board did this.
When you monetize something like that, of course it sets off an arms race and puts pressure on everyone's resources of attention.
The attention economy needs to be eradicated.
A newspaper of yesteryear couldn't print infinite ads. They had roughly a set number of pages, mostly down to the economics of printing itself, and had to find the most valuable advertising to fill that space with.
In the modern day, you can create more space. No longer do you have to curate advertising to ensure it is getting everyone reasonable value, because instead of having a competitive market, everyone just created digital heroin.
Imagine how awful the world would be if literally any shithead with a few dollars could slap a sign down on your front lawn that completely blocked your view and there was nothing you could do about it.
Don't imagine, because that's the very world software developers have built
And at the opposite end of the spectrum - I've been using Suno AI to literally extend pop songs I like where the originals are only 60-90 seconds because of gaming the Spotify algorithm :-)
So I would say this feature has so far been worth to me exactly two HN comments.
I do miss me some Calvin Ball though.
Trouble is today's AAA game competes with yesterday's AAA game on sale or an AAA game a little older than that used at Gamestop for $10 minus your $5 pro discount. Or a mobile game that will suck in more people for longer that costs most players $0.00 but finds enough people who crave what premium currency can buy (or who just find a $5/month subscription enhances their fun) that they are dominating the industry in terms of revenue and leaving the business folks wondering if they can afford to go on developing AAA games.
You realize that most mobile gaming operate on the same aspects of exploiting addiction, manipulating young people, and so on, who don't understand the value of money or have a distorted perception of how much things cost.
Somewhere between 1% to 5% of all the players that play the game are addicted or hooked into addiction through the use of dark patterns, behavioral manipulation or intentionally misleading game mechanics. They account for a "whale's" portion of the revenue.
They shouldn't be allowed, honestly.
- if the kid cannot play each of cheap games for more than 5 minutes straight, likely cost >$80 total, does it make sense to buy them multiple games?
- if answer to above is `false`, does it really matter if the game in the bundle cost $80 if bought separately?Plenty of valuable things are less exciting than a video game in their first 300 seconds, and last much longer than 5 minutes.
I give him another 20 minutes a day of creative time that he can use for things like TinkerCad or drawing apps. He only takes me up on it about half the time.
I do a similar thing with video content. He can choose from a very limited list of educational-ish shows (1 per day). Total screen time is under an hour/day, and I don't feel like any of it is brain rot. It does take more work up front for me on the curation end, but we don't need to revisit options all that often.
Those are all great slow-paced single-player games with a lot of depth. There are no dailies, loot boxes, battle passes, or activity feeds. They're entirely self-contained with practically no link to the Internet dopamine sludge machine.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. How is this like 95% of the comments here, as if Haidt didn't write an incredibly well known book about how all of this is bad!
Their propensity for scrolling has degraded their ability to criticize it.
OP followed a similar pattern by starting with "please add YouTube to the list", but they did at least elaborate and didn't imply that TikTok was being targeted unfairly.
Youtube kids exists, but far too many channels are not available without manual intervention.
I've disabled YouTube history now and it's almost exactly what I'd hoped for. Shorts are disabled, no 'feed', no suggestions, just my subscriptions. I owe you a beer.
Screens allowed every 2nd day. So far it has been working well, and our kid always finds something creative to do on the screen free days.
They want to play Minecraft sometimes but other times they want to go play outside or play with their toys or watch a show.
They definitely have a harder time stopping some kinds of shows though regardless of only watching them some days so I have to remove some them.
Short-form content, whether in the form of articles, posts, or "snippets", habituates the reader to a fragmented mode of attention. Over time, this practice undermines the capacity for deep focus and coherent understanding. The effects are cumulative: what is lost is not merely quantity of information, but quality of comprehension. Certain kinds of understanding only emerge over time, in context, and in continuity. A complex argument, or a meaningful dialogue, cannot be replaced by a summary or a highlight reel. To suggest it can overlooks the way serious thought takes place.
https://support.apple.com/guide/tv/install-or-delete-apps-at...
And the parental controls on their other devices are illogical and remarkably buggy. Clearly not a priority.
I suppose allowing parents to prevent their kids from watching the inane garbage that is shorts is a step too far in Google's books.
You can filter
(.*).youtube.com
You cannot filter youtube.com/(.*)It's truly a National Security issue at this point. I hope America bans TikTok, and if I had children they wouldn't be allowed to watch this garbage. Sadly most Americans value their "friendship" with their kids more than they value their parenting responsibilities, and so they let the kids do whatever they want just so they stay on good terms with them without the kids being mad all the time.
Also today's generation of moms and dads all grew up in the internet world, so to them, blocking technology from their kids seems like abuse of a sort, when it's not.
You can block shorts. Block keywords (e.g. Minecraft, MrBeast)
Email me if you’d like to test.
jim.jones1@gmail.com
So, please don't give up on trying to only block the brainrot. Also, kids are crafty and usually have more time than adults so be prepared to fight an uphill battle once they figure out VPNs, DNS, and other ways.
My biggest concern is the attention thrashing. If they’re going to watch some garbage, at least be stuck with it for 10 minutes so you’ll get bored of it…
It’s the most attention holding thing a.t.m.
I wrote a blog post about it here: https://abparenting.substack.com/p/effective-youtube-kids
This is the primary reason I won't ever pay for premium. Youtube actively works against the interests of creators I have been following since before Youtube even existed. There's always some bullshit going on. I'm a grown ass man watching other grown ass men (they had to click the checkbox that their content is NOT FOR KIDS), but if they say "Fuck" too many times they still make zero dollars.
If I could see the ads, I know they are often softcore pornography or literal scams, but god forbid those companies get placed next to someone saying fuck I guess.
Google has spent near two decades reducing how much money they pay you for your content, despite their market only increasing. They treat content creators like dirt.
Google doesn't want ten thousand Simon Gertz and BPS.Space and AvEs and Applied Science and Practical Engineerings and Stuff Made Heres. Google doesn't want the channel that covered WW1 and WW2 in "real time". Google doesn't want Dan Olsen (Folding Ideas) content. Google doesn't want LGR.
Google wants 100 Mr Beasts. Google wants a hundred more fake "crafts" channels. Why pay money to that?
You should have never introduced them to it in the first place.
Not trying to be mean- just trying to be frank.
Our kids get almost no screen time. We watch a movie once a week as a family. That's it. We have no problems because we have never introduced screens to them beyond that.
Our kids like playing outside.
It will be blocked again and just handpickes local videos and games to choose from. I never thought I would have to do this as an adult, but what else you do?
I don't mean to seem blunt or rude. I don't actually have kids, so even if I were inclined to judge, I've no basis. But just looking at what YouTube has been doing over the last couple of years, even as a premium subscriber and so never seeing ads - I mean, it's terrible, it's as if it is actively trying to drag me down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole, in the sense that I might watch a half dozen videos today about simulated jet-plane gunfights in DCS, and tomorrow I'm seeing recommendations for what I only recognize as "Intro to 5G Covid Conspiracy (CONT 101, 3 credits)" because I have studied the subject. I report these videos and they stop coming, until the next time.
It isn't as though there is a game here on the other side of which for there to be an adversarial mind, but there are times when it feels enough that way - when I'm half asleep, perhaps, and most especially - that I just don't even open the app or website entirely, but listen to an old podcast episode instead because those at least I can trust. (I pay subscriptions or buy copies; anything 'ad-supported' is a hard stop. I prefer people just say outright 'this is what I have and what I think it's worth, let's see if we can make an honest deal' because I am an American.)
I am seriously considering hosting a local Invidious instance, or similar, and terminating my now about ten-year YouTube Premium subscription. Ads are a technical problem that I was happy to pay a few bucks a month rather than however many hours to solve. I did enough years of sysadmin work for a living that I no longer enjoy it even slightly, so that's no small trade for me to consider. But now I'm really looking hard at what that money's going to, and by the sound of things lately, I'm among the least enthusiastic of such critics.
The YouTube alg is obviously broken. By broken, it's optimized for monetary profit. I get tired of specifically having to search out my other channels that I subscribe to, that I'm contemplating giving up Premium, and only using it on an as needed basis, since I need to search for my workout channels anyway.
It isn't as though I would be asked to pay more or less either way, and I can't imagine the ad placements on that malignant pareidolia slurry are worth as much as on actual content: I recall reading that Premium distributions to creators are scaled to predicted revenue on the ads that would've been shown - or actual revenue? I don't actually know they don't auction the slot as normal, and it would make a lot of sense if they did. In any case, I would think that would tend to make the slop worth less to try to divert me into, because whether or not I actually see those ads, they're still going to only sell to fringe psychos and so sell for much less than when I'm watching the LPs and stream VODs that are the vast bulk of what I actually do watch - nothing highbrow I grant, but nothing I or anyone else need be embarrassed to be seen with, either: just plain old 21st-century light entertainment you can sell razor blades or home loans next to, no problem.
I can't model it in my head in a way that doesn't have YouTube hurting itself massively with this, and though it's titanic enough to survive like that for decades, it won't last forever. It would help explain all the new revenue streams we see them lately and somewhat desperately adding. But a really convincing just-so story is always first and easiest sold oneself, and maybe there's something here I'm missing.
Similar to the theory that Netflix movies are optimized to be mediocre without a satisfying ending because it keeps you unsatisfied enough to keep watching something else
Think of it: challenging satisfying content is like a plate of fresh fruit or veggies. You can only spend so much time consuming it before you're full.
AI-generated viral conspiracy SHOCKING FACE content is like chocolate-coated salted nuts for your brain: no fiber, you can consume unlimited amounts for an infinite amount of time (which means watching aaaaall the included ads)
Sorry. I don't really have a joke to play that off with, unless it's what always happens when some of the very cleverest people on Earth get together and stop listening to anyone else for too long. Five to ten milliseconds is enough to get that ball rolling, I think, but everything goes faster these days.
My typical viewing on YT sounds kind of like yours. Wood working, AI, Astro, some rebuilding of heavy equipment. That's all fine. It's when you get into any war tech that it quickly spirals off into some rather insane conspiracy crap, even if the videos you watch are just reasonable documentaries.
First, it definitely isn't just miltech, though you are absolutely correct it is heavily that. That was top of mind for me today, but I would say there is also, for example, "light side" and "dark side" machining/mechanical content. Abom79 and Blondihacks are pure "light side". Zip Ties and Bias Plies was "dark side," though as a fellow Borderer-descended redneck asshole, I am sure that as with many former "Canadian American Patriots," he has smartened up pretty damn fast in recent months. (I wouldn't know; I got fed up with his ignorant, drunk, belligerent, impertinent comments on my government quite a long time ago.) AvE started out light side, lost his way for a while, and lately is with genuinely admirable sheepishness comporting himself so as to suggest embarrassed recognition of his prior excesses. And there are lots I just "don't recommend channel"/"not interested" as soon as I see it. I also see the same for gaming - I like some classic Doom mods that some fascist infants also have strongly stupid opinions about, for example - and from this I conclude that there is something in essentially any genre that could be pressed to support this sort of subtext-to-text transition in at least some stage. I doubt I would observe the same in makeup tutorials, for example, but the days when eyeliner improved my looks lie decades behind me now. And who knows anyway? I haven't actually checked. For all I know, half an hour of that, maybe I start hearing about "DID sfw agere unalived" and the trans-flavored "stranger danger" moral panic of the moment.
Second, miltech and history content on YT does not remotely for the most part constitute "reasonable documentaries," unless you refer to forgotten VHS and DVD transfers that are nearly never surfaced anywhere unless you search for them by name, and when you do, they spin for a glacial age before playback can begin. Not to indict modern "creators" (screenwriters, actors, directors, artists etc) en masse, of course. But few today even strive for the standard that older stuff, made before mere record-high count of eyeballs was taken as the only end, reached as a matter of course.
People do as good a quality of work today as ever, of course. It becomes available for streaming over the web only by accident and happenstance, and if that sounds like what a conspiracist would say, keep reading: sure, you'll find a million people on YT talking about the stupid Nazi UFO sex fantasy, and what the hell good is any of them? No one there will help you decide whether you think, if Lee Atwater didn't die of that damned brain tumor, we could've never ended up with Trump in the White House at all. Few I suspect could even appreciate the question.
A simple trick to see what conspiracy stuff is being pushed in your area is to open yt in incognito, accept cookies, and then watch one or two videos with titles in non-latin languages. Kpop fancams, NHK news, that kind of thing. Then look at the recommendation column. You will see two types:
- "related videos" (similar topic and language to what you were watching)
- "geo-IP videos" (not in the language that you were just watching, but clearly based in your country. These are almost always garbage)
Usually links like that come from here. It's quite eye-opening, like turning on showdead in your profile and just rolling around in the [flagged] [dead] "politics" for awhile.
But you will want to take a shower after, and you should; when Nietzsche said it looks back, this is what he meant, and it will ruin you if you let it. We all eventually become what we pay enough attention to, and we always pay a great deal of attention to what we hate. That's why it's worth so much money to get us doing it.
(I know I'm not saying anything new to you the extremely veteran commenter to whom I reply, of course. But as of course you also know, there are always young 'uns here who hadn't seen it said so plainly yet.)
I really wish that the EU would step in and force Google to either kill Shorts or give us full control over the crap they're pushing down our throats.
As this is HN and full of smart people - if there are any workable (OSS) options to filtering YouTube to remove shorts (and the far-right/Nazi crap) then please let us know.