YouTube's CEO limits his kids' social media use – other tech bosses do the same

To me it seems like basic parenting to limit access to tech.

It wasn’t healthy for kids to just play video games every day for 5hrs straight after school in the 90s either. But that also doesn’t mean they should never have had a PlayStation or all gaming is bad.

Hacker News is not representative of the average person in often very bad ways.

It's also person after person telling people to parent harder.

Lots of normal people don't think it's fine.

Lots of parents limited their kids' TV (television, you know) time back in the day (mine sure did, thanks mum and dad, even though I didn't particularly approve of the restriction back then).

Now you have to limit smartphone (and tablet and PC and TV) time. Lots of parents do this already, CEOs are not alone.

I doubt “a lot of people” think spending all day watching YouTube is fine; this sounds hyperbolic.

So you kinda saying youtube for kids should limit itself to N hours per day per IP address / device?

Perhaps australia should’ve implemented such limitations. Burden of enforcement on big tech since the have billions to spend anyway.

Seems like a pathetic appeal to authority to me. Why should I care what weird idiosyncrasies billionaires have? I'm sure they have tons of things they don't want their children learning that a lot of people would consider to be trivial. In my mind this goes back to whether you model children as property that you own or individual humans you're hoping to introduce to the world in the best way you understand how. It sucks that other people's children are going to youtube to turn off their brains. But my kids are excelling because of it and similar services. My girls are constantly trying new things because of what they see on social media and youtube. My 12 year old daughter already plays flute, violin and cello but wants to pick up the saxophone because of content she has consumed. We get everything from weird science experiments to a desire to try sewing or knitting. When people talk about the "dangers" of the internet and social media I struggle to understand what they mean because it's always been an enabler to me to excel. Somewhere along the way so called "hackers" wanted to create safe spaces to completely isolate their children from any variables the world can throw at them and I just cannot understand the mentality.

I personally think Youtube itself is just fine. It has parental controls and I can block channels etc.

What isn't fine is YOUTUBE FUCKING SHORTS. It's by far the worst of the infinite content producers in the world because automated uploads are so easy compared to the other platforms and there is no way to block it completely from kids without just banning all of Youtube. It _needs_ to have a separate setting.

"brainrot" is not used that way

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=brainrot

The best definition I see is

> the crippling addiction to low effort content

But also have seen it used plenty to refer to the low effort content itself

Brainrot is a small portion of social media

>All ages benefit from time-limited exposure to social media.

As compared to what? To no exposure? Or to unlimited exposure?

In schools there should be a class about safe internet use and it should be mandatory to write an essay about the benefits children get personally from using social media as well as the downsides.

I think it’s a mistake to put even teen social media use in the same category as screens for young kids, and I suspect most problems are from the latter.

3 things should be studied: screens for kids (regardless of app), short-form video for teens, and non-short-form peer-group social media (what teens had from 2008-2015 or so). I bet we’ll see very different impacts from each.

I don't think this is what you really meant, but the way this is worded I strongly disagree. What you wrote implies everyone should be exposed to social media, just in a limited fashion. No exposure is still an option that would probably be ideal for most people.

I do strongly agree with the cigarette analogy though. I have actually said before that I think we would all be better off if social media use was both legally and socially treated like smoking. (Not to say I think we should be age gating websites because that opens a whole other can of worms, but it would probably be better for societal mental health if we did).

Do you not find unrestricted iMessages to be problematic? Dont groups and content sharing in them end-up fomenting a similar doomscroll dynamic as access to other content rich apps?

Personally (as parent of two high schoolers) I think leaving texting unmanaged is wild. We block social media apps (Snap, IG, etc) and also regular media (YT, Netflix, Disney+, Tubi, etc). Social media because of toxic content and regular media because of distractions. We limit messaging app time to 30min/day, whether it's SMS/RCS, Whatsapp, Telegram, or something else.

By far the most distracting thing for kids is persistent notifications. Snap is the worst for this, but messaging apps are a close second.

Apple’s screen time parental settings are some of the most obtuse and frustrating features I’ve had to navigate on their devices (so much, that I honestly wonder if the people behind it even have kids).

I’m glad they exist but they could be so much better.

>It doesn’t take a lot of effort

Sorry, but that's where you're wrong (at least, if you mean enforcing effective limits). What you're asking is for parents to spend their scarce time and energy on fighting a technical battle, against a system that is designed to capture attention, and kids with nothing but energy and time.

>But it’s pretty well controlled and they adjust to it

Or they did 10 seconds of googling and have all the access they want.

Switch is an overall better choice for kids anyway, lots of kid friendly high quality games and they can even get some exercise in (switch sports, warioware, fitness boxing, Mario tennis)

> But some have a hard time doing it since it is a great babysitter.

We should be clearer on what it means. An iPad will satisfy their need for stimulation but not their developmental emotional and social needs, nor their fine motor skills and executive functioning skills (and it likely harms the latter two, unlike old-school toys). Boredom and non-excessive stimulation levels are essential to letting the child’s inner world develop. Giving young kids iPads so they’ll be quiet is a normalized form of neglect.

> Ye and Zuckerberg plugs the laptop mic with a dud cable.

Are you talking about Kanye West ? also can you expand what this means? "plugs the laptop mic with a dud cable"

It is easy to limit at home, but what if all of his/her friends are on social media? It is so difficult nowadays because many parents DGAF.

A lot of parents also drug their kids A LOT to get them to behave the way they want, sleep the way they want. "Kids melatonin", Benadryl, essential oils (plenty of which DO have some drug effect though not often what is claimed)

An iPad addiction is arguably better than being sedated so you don't bother your parents.

It’s always some other persons poor kid in their imagination with bad parents.

Basically the only solutions I see suggested is some world where all tech companies in multiple countries band together to ban kid/teens from the internet or that government will start aggressively controlling access to the internet.

A big movement to have better education on parenting with tech and evolving via cultural changes is hard. Writing a law sounds simple.

The hypocrisy is not because they are limiting access to their kids.

It is because they are limiting access to their kids, while actively creating and executing algorithms to increase user engagement even to the point of making people addictive and dependent on their platforms.

I think you'd have a stronger point if stores sold Bud Kidz, a non-alcoholic beverage with all the great Bud taste and fun mascots.

You didn’t pick particularly good examples. YouTube Kids [0] is an actual product owned and marketed by Google.

Pfizer and Anheiser-Busch don’t market their products to kids.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_Kids

It’s hypocrisy insofar as neither Viagra nor Bud Light has a child demographic in their market. The CEOs of those companies don’t let their kids have them because they’re not for kids; YouTube designates at least some its product as for kids.

(In this way, it would be hypocrisy if Anheuser-Busch’s executive suite were all teetotalers.)

Their point is that despite being the designers of such systems, they prevent their own children from using them. Akin to a drug dealer not consuming what he sells.

You’re the one bringing the conversation back to superficials (blaming society and stuff you have no control over) instead of digging deeper. You don’t need to be rich or stay-at-home to talk to your kids or read books to them, which an increasing fraction of parents don’t do. Restricting tech use is common-sense and free. Books are cheaper than an iPad for each kid.

I’m from Europe. We have early childcare. Kindergarten teachers (I don’t know if that’s the right term) are still seeing obvious issues with screens and really neglected kids that the parents barely interact with. Don’t try to reduce everything issue down to one, the world can face multiple issues simultaneously. So can we talk about tech addiction in kids and parents without changing the topic to a different one?

Social media is not a substitute for child care

This is a cop out.

You don’t have to put your kids in front of a TV or tablet. You can simply establish boundaries and leave them to themselves. They will engage in imaginative play for hours on end just like kids have for thousands of years.

Source: my kids have been doing it since 5AM while I lay in bed sick.

Giving your kids the attention and protection they need is not just something to be "purchased".

I know this is HN and the everything-as-a-service mentality is prevalent, but come on.

You also have to think deeper than that, media in the west is propaganda, you have to ask why are they all pushing the "children are in danger from social media" narrative? You should never make the mistake to be so naive to trust in their genuine good intentions, this has nothing to do with children.

The real purpose is to build broad consensus for surveillance, control and censorship of social media, "to protect the children" is the thing they tell you to justify it. They are recognizing they have lost the narrative control. How do you manufacture consent for war and genocide when you have completely lost young people, they see the wall of carnage and dead children and will not be persuadable by the legacy media telling them to close their eyes and ears.

The problem with this approach is their peers. Prohibition culture does not work if it’s so easy to access it elsewhere. My parents learned this when they tried to restrict video games strictly to the weekends when I was a kid haha!

I find having conversations with parents at school and the parents of their friends leads to the best results (so far, I’ve only been at it a few years for my kiddos so we’ll see I guess longterm). If you’re all vaguely on the same page it just seems to make things a little easier. If that’s not an option, then just don’t be the first person to buy one and when all their peers start having certain technology you give them access too, but you sit down and talk to them about it or find ways to restrict the faucet.

For instance, when it became clear YouTube was not going to be completely eradicated from my house, I just ripped a few videos and added them to my Plex server. They get to watch a little bit of nonsense content, but they’re not just getting flooded with more of it constantly (or ads). As a result those YT videos are just one among several things they watch. It isn’t special or all consuming.

Video games have also been interesting. Most of the parents I know have, like me, adopted to use older stuff and/or just not let them get on the Internet.

Ultimately at some point you have to do some combination of “controlling the faucet,” watching what your kids are watching so you know what’s going on, and ultimately educating them/giving them context to the media they are enjoying.

> The only issue is that his future friends may not have the same idea, so it's going to be extremely difficult when he grows older.

Third grade and it’s already happening: My kid has already had trouble in his social circle at school because we made him cut back his Roblox time by a lot. It’s not even that anyone plays at school, but supposedly almost all the boys (and many girls) are playing after school.

YouTube Kids itself has a parental locked section where you can set a timer. The rest just don’t feel like they’re meant for kids at all. And that leaves adolescents in such a vulnerable spot.

It’s more convenient to use Apple’s parental control feature because you can set limits in one place.

It’s rarely quite that simple and I would try being a little more charitable towards people.

It's almost as if ... being able to download specific content for offline viewing ... might be a far preferable option in terms of selection, control, and not getting sucked into an algorithmic wormhole.

Does it really matter? Even if a billionaire’s kid gets hooked on Coca-Cola or social media, they still have vastly more resources (therapy, education, support) to overcome it. Meanwhile, kids in underprivileged communities don’t get that safety net. For CEOs like Zuckerberg or Coca-Cola’s leadership, that disparity is just a small price to pay for the profits their products generate.

I expect Sergey and Brin run ad-blockers as well.

I attended a screen free school, but back then we just called it a school.

Careful. Waldorf schools have some great ideas but they’re also rife with crackpottery and are somewhat cult-like in many ways.

No, in this context, "tech boss" refers to parents who are also executives of technology companies.

I agree with the point you make in the rest of your post, but it feels not really relevant given your misunderstanding?

The planet doesn’t operate under the same time zone and that’d be easy to bypass. Just take your kids phone away or set up parental screen time or network controls.

Remember when most TV stations went off the air after the late news?

You clearly don't have children.