Our first building block in tech for tykes: YouTube Kids | Hacker News Reader

Our first building block in tech for tykes: YouTube Kids

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98 pointsrey12rey72 comments

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

The lack of curation on YouTube has been a source of frustration in our house for a long time.

The kids just scroll down the list on the side of the viewer and hit whatever video they think looks interesting.

Then the next thing you hear is swearing, and there's no effective way to stop that from showing up on 100,000 other kid's feeds. (And it would be so easy to implement!)

Our kids love the variety of YouTube. Even Netflix is too slow and inconvenient for them.

This is why I'm most excited about this too. It's too easy for kids to transition from cartoons to teenagers throwing stuff into ceiling fans. Interested to see just how far they take the curation.

Last week we were watching "Annie" music videos on YouTube with my four year old and a commercial for a horror movie comes on.

It was a calamity. To stop the video, (which was being Chromecast onto my TV) I jumped to the couch to get my phone, waited for it to wake up, then spasmed on the screen trying to figure out how to exit or pause or whatever. It of course ignored me entirely. After all, the only reason I'd skip an ad is because I'm trying to bypass their ad-revenue. Le sigh.

My wife is meanwhile trying to get my daughter's attention innocuously so she won't watch a dead, rotting woman attack a little boy.

...

Needless to say, this change is welcome.

I have a younger-than-thirteen daughter who would love to be able to post her video creations to YT too, and have her own channel. I had created a gmail account for her before, then she tried to create her channel and was asked for her DOB which she answered truthfully resulting in… not only no channel, her whole email was blocked and, according to their statement, eventually deleted. Yes, mea culpa.

YT for kids is welcome, but alas, does not yet help make my little one happy. Is there a way to let little ones publish their own creations on their own terms? anywhere?

Lying about your age to get around a low-stakes boneheaded policy is about as white as a lie can get.

I still use my fake birthday (Jan 1 1984) for online accounts even though I'm 25. It's not exactly Rosa Parks level civil disobedience but it seems like the least I can do. January 1 birthdays both allow the provider to cover their ass and allow you to register your contempt for the silliness in a measurable fashion.

I still believe that COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act) is, overall, beneficial legislation that puts in place the minimum rules for protecting children's PII. As the Internet becomes more accessible to a younger audience, we should be considering the societal benefits of such legislation and how it should evolve with the technology. It's shortsighted to fault Google for complying with the law.

COPPA doesn't ban Google from providing services to kids. It just means they have to put additional precautions in place if they do - which obviously costs money, so their default position has been to opt out of servicing kids at all. This youtube announcement obviously represents a realization that that cost may be worth bearing... presumably because raising a generation of youtube-savvy kids is going to build their market for the next generation.

For me, that's where it gets interesting: as I understand, it is perfectly legal for Google to provide services to children, but they must obtain parental consent, first [1]. The problem is that isn't something they're interested in doing.

[1] http://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/comp... Parental

When this happened to my son, rather than deleting everything and losing all his contacts and emails with his auntie etc etc, google just demanded I pay a bribe of 50 cents on a credit card, on the hilarious assumption that the only people in a family with access to CC are parents. At least this is how they did it back in the good old days.

>on the hilarious assumption that the only people in a family with access to CC are parents //

Hilarious? How do under-13s get banks to issue them credit cards? Presumably they only allow the payment from a CC connected to an account rather than a payment card (I assume payment gateways do that sort of differentiation).

Even if some under-13s can access and use a credit-card it seems likely to me that the vast majority would be blocked by such a system. I can see kids stealing cash from their parents, perhaps, but stealing when you know it's going to appear on their bank-statement?? Just to use YouTube? Then you need to be able to actually perform the payment; no-one else [that I know of] knows my CC password and it's certainly not written down anywhere.

For general interest, note that a transaction on a credit card is one of the explicit ways COPPA allows for verifying that someone is not a child. See §312.5(b)(2) in https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/16/312.5

Any hilarity should be taken up with congress.

I got a debit card when I got my first bank account at 10 years old in ~2001. I didn't pay for anything online with it until my mid teens (when I had a job), but I do remember having to use it to verify my account for the SecondLife teen grid.

Virtually all bank accounts come with debit cards nowadays, if your parents are forward thinking enough to set you up with a bank account then you could have a card very young.

I got a debit card somewhere around becoming a teenager. But it was probably a decade later that I got my first _credit_ card. They're quite different things.

In the UK under 18 you can't usually be held to a contract and so you don't have to pay back a credit card debt - this makes companies more than a little reluctant to lend to under 18s. You can't get a credit card until you're 18.

Citizens Advice (an established UK charity) say:

>"If you are under 18, it is a criminal offence for anyone to send you material inviting you to borrow money or obtain goods or services on credit or hire purchase. However, if you are over 14 but under 18, you can enter into a credit or hire purchase agreement if an adult acts as your guarantor."

Of course it might vary enormously in other countries but I'd be surprised if it was wildly different in USA?

I don't know enough about COPPA to know who to blame. There are two possibilities:

1. COPPA goes too far

2. Google has done a cost/benefit analysis and decided that it's cheaper to ban children than to lead the charge in teasing out the edge cases

If #2 is the case it's absolutely reasonable to blame google. Of course, deciding who to blame isn't productive, what we really want to do is lobby for change. Now that google is playing the lobbying game they're a reasonable party to appeal to regardless of whether #1 or #2 is closer to the truth.

I realize that full curation probably isn't possible as this thing scales, but as a parent, this thing will live or die based on the content they allow into the stream.

I love watching videos of people building stuff with my kids. Moreover, I love watching the creativeness that some of the videos inspire in my kids. Unfortunately, to date, I have had to preview most of the content my children see on YouTube so that they don't either see a video review of something that's got the f-bomb every other word, or that the sidebar video recommendations don't bring up stuff that I really don't want my kid watching. And, to be clear, these are young kids.

In my mind, this is all about the content, the creators they allow into the system, and the curation of those two. I'd love to see an algorithmic way to accomplish some of this, but I expect on the front end, it'll require a lot of human filtering.

There's probably an app-idea in there. Maybe an app that costs video creators some small amount, say $5, that gets their video in a "for-kids" video app. The $5 pays to have your video reviewed and tagged so that parents can filter what they want their kid to see.

As a parent, I would definitely pay for that app/service.

Agreed, not a parent but my nieces love youtube and I’m pretty sure my sister would pay for this too

So... what does the video creator get out of it? Once you've got an actual monetary barrier in place, they're not going to pay for their videos to be shown just for fun.

They get their video in front of kids that otherwise wouldn't be allowed to see it. The video can still play normal youtube ads to make them money.

I don't watch much on YouTube so they may already do some of this but it seems to me like this would be an easy problem to solve if they so desired. Add a rating system where the content creators rate themselves and an easy way for viewers to flag them as incorrectly rated. Add to that a confidence rating of how likely a video is correctly rated (based on number of views without flagging) and you could confidently let your kids view appropriately rated material.

Whats it rating and how badly will it get abused?

Imagine a youtube video of President Obama's October 2nd 2002 speech on Iraq policy (not making this up, there is one...)

Or there's a classic nuclear winter / climate change-ish interview with Dr Carl Sagan right before he died in the early 90s.

Or any video that presents atheism or islam in a non-negative light. Say, a BBC interview with Richard Dawkins WRT his biographical book.

I suspect they'll be more than a little political gaming going on here, although theoretically a kid doing schoolwork could stumble upon them as a legitimate primary(ish) source.

What you describe is already supported, though it looks like it's only available for paid videos or channels (anyone can set whether or not a video of theirs is "mature" and should be age-restricted, however). The rating levels are listed here: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/146399

And instructions for creators to set ratings is described here: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/176714

This will absolutely require some human filtering, even if only as a backstop. That parents feel safe and comfortable with the content -- and all "adjacencies," such as comments, ads, and so forth -- is critical.

I'm not sure what their content strategy will be, but by way of inference from public record (job listings, this blog post, etc.), I would guess that they're priming the pump with content from established, kid-friendly publishers. They want to start off strong, with proven commodities, before opening the floodgates. There might also be a qualification process for new creators and publishers that is more rigorous than the process for all-purpose YouTube; that's just my speculation, though.

"kid-friendly publishers"

What does that mean?

I'm one of those minecraft weirdos and I can authoritatively say based on many hours of entertainment viewing that Direwolf20 and Pahamir have never said anything non-G rated, at least in their team video series so far as I've seen. So that's boring and no point discussing.

And my son has this unique skill to find "lets play" minecraft videos where basically every other word is "fuck" every time a player sees an aggro mob or their pick breaks or just for fun, which seems to be quite often. So again thats boring and no point discussing.

Whats interesting to discuss is in between. OMGchad is about 99.9% G rated but when he gets really, really frustrated, like once every ten episodes, out comes "damn it" and my wife says "language, change the video" and I laugh because my wife says worse stuff than OMGchad and my son is going to be driving a car in a couple years and voting in a couple more and probably on 4chan etc and from my own memory of being his age I suspect he is quite familiar with all the swear words yet behaves himself in public so all is well.

So video training a 3 year old to walk around the house saying "damn it" randomly is not going to fly, but how about a kid who's in his last months of preteen? Especially if the video is 99.9% G rated? And I can see differing opinions, like a extreme fundamentalist being alot more worried about some Dawkins video than mere straight pr0n or something...

"What does that mean?"

All I really meant is known commodities with proven track records in kid's learning and edutainment properties. Reading Rainbow (cited in the blog post) is a good example. Disney might be another hypothetical example.

"I'm one of those minecraft weirdos and I can authoritatively say based on many hours of entertainment viewing that Direwolf20 and Pahamir have never said anything non-G rated, at least in their team video series so far as I've seen. So that's boring and no point discussing."

I'm not saying these folks aren't kid-friendly. I certainly didn't mean to draw a qualitative distinction between, say, Disney and Direwolf20. I didn't mean to create a category "kid-friendly" in which these sorts of creators do or do not fall. I was speaking more broadly -- and speculating, as I mentioned -- about what Google seems to be up to.

All of this is speculation on my part, based on having closely followed this space, having followed YouTube/Google's job listings very closely over the last four or five months, and having had casual chats with friends at Google and YouTube.

"So video training a 3 year old to walk around the house saying "damn it" randomly is not going to fly, but how about a kid who's in his last months of preteen? Especially if the video is 99.9% G rated?"

My understanding is that Google is focused very specifically on the young, young demo. A 3-year-old fits into what I understand of their thesis; an 11-year-old might not. But again, this is my best guess. I can neither speak on Google's behalf, nor claim any special knowledge above and beyond what is publicly available.

I suspect he is quite familiar with all the swear words yet behaves himself in public so all is well.

Yeah, I think it depends on the kid and the parents' ability to define boundaries and not treat kids as mini-adults with the rights of adults. My dad swore like a trooper (still does) and I knew all the words by the time I was a teenager, but I didn't dare swear until I was an adult.

It's decidedly untrendy to treat kids as kids and adults as adults these days, but I think having one rule for kids and one for adults is the best way to go.

It might be possible to automate it! Google keeps posting these incredible recognition results. Perhaps they can apply it to the video/audio looking for items it has trained it to be inappropriate?

This is what Curiosity.com is aiming to do.

Disclaimer: I work there.

I can't find mention of whether or not there are ads. Ads are a deal-breaker for me with the kidlet. Currently whenever she asks to "See ostriches" or "People throwing fish!" (we brought her to Pike's Place market in Seattle and the kid was oddly obsesseed) it's a dice roll whether we sit through a Lexus ad. I'd happily pay a modest amount for a product like this one provided she doesn't have to see ads (regardless of whether targeted to kids of their Lexus-purchasing parents)

On PC, AdBlock works great on YouTube. If you're using a mobile app, yeah, I think you're SOL for now. I also would pay a monthly fee for an ad-free YouTube.

If you block all trackers (eg ghostery) ads usually just don't show up. Seems like there are no ads without tracking.

I have my Raspberry Pi set up as a DNS adblocker: https://github.com/jacobsalmela/pi-hole

Recently, I've seen two things change on YouTube:

1) (a few months ago) Adblock stopped working. Fine, ads were rare, short, and skipable, didn't bother me enough to try to fix it.

2) (a few weeks ago) The percentage of videos displaying ads increased significantly, and most of them are now unskipable.

I even had one that lasted for maybe two minutes with no sign of ending the other day (it hadn't repeated yet, it was that long! There was no indication of how much longer it would be) which eventually prompted me to reload the page, which clued me in that the "unskipable" ads can be skipped immediately by refreshing the page—it rarely (maybe 5% of the time, tops) plays an ad on the second load.

What are you even doing on a tech site if you can't even reinstall an adblocker and select the proper lists?

> (a few weeks ago) The percentage of videos displaying ads increased significantly, and most of them are now unskipable.

Whether or not ads are unskippable (and whether or not to show ads at all) is up to the video owner, so it's more likely you've just wandered into a different subset of videos recently.

I almost never see unskippable ads anymore, though it seems like the worst offenders are "official" vevo music videos and (most annoyingly, since the video itself is already an ad) some studios' movie trailers.

As of Jan'2014, stopping YouTube ads requires blocking the following domains:

  ads.youtube.com
  s0.2mdn.net
  s1.2mdn.net
  googleads.g.doubleclick.net

Many routers include functionality to blacklist by domain, eg. Netgear: http://kb.netgear.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/20483/~/set-up...

Hey, thanks! I'll give that a shot.

YouTube Kids includes kid-friendly ads:

http://mashable.com/2015/02/23/youtube-kids/

Late to reply, but thanks for the clarity! I can't help but think this is an unfortunate misstep. First off, I don't think there is such a thing as a "kid friendly" ad, at least not for really little ones (<= 6?). Second, the GOOG is gonna know about my kid's relationship TO ME and what she watches. That gives them plenty of new data to monetize against selling me shit, or whatever other awesome stuff they want to do with that information.

But of course, they'll presumably do that also.. I just wonder what making the product ad-free would do for increasing the user-base (since ads cost me as a user, and presumably I'm not the only one)

I would also want to know how much stuff is tracked. Disney knows the secret, that the shortest path to a parents wallet is through the kid, I am not against Google-Youtube making money out of this, but just want to know what is and what is not tracked. Of course, ad policy will also help.

My kids, 5 and 2, have really been into these weird toy unboxing videos recently. They're fine with me from a "ok for kids" point of view, though I don't see the attraction. Anyway, I just wonder if these type of videos will be available.

example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_e8CPuVepA

Relax, your kids are normal -- this is a well-known phenomenon amongst children born in the last decade:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/17/magazine/a-mothers-journey...

Ha! Thank you for the link. I wasn't worried, I generally figure all kids do "weird" things. I guess I'm more worried they won't be able to see these videos on the Kids youtube, and thus the app won't help me protect them from weirder things they sometimes stumble onto.

The Disney collector lady is something like the #1 youtuber in terms of views in North America (or close the last time I checked). I don't think youtube is going to skip her.

I also think that the way the DisneyCollector sound is recorded plays a role. It sounds a lot like binaural audio - http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/12/8021733/3d-audio-3dio-bina...

These things are seriously blowing up! I've talked to so many parents who mention that their kids are hooked on these things. These kids just watch some random toy be unwrapped then hit the next suggested video for hours. I also hear stories about how then they beg their parents for the toy. They're just really long commercials.

My kids don't seem as interested but it might be they're a bit old for them now. I have noticed that they watch less and less Netflix and more and more weird cartoons on YouTube instead. I have to watch them closely.

Ya, I don't mind the unboxing videos, but the other day my 5 year old had somehow gotten from Frozen sing alongs to a weird manga-version of Let it Go. I figured from that point she was probably only a few clicks a way from really weird videos and made her go back to the eggs...

Medium and artstyle are no particular indication of content; you get "really weird" videos in every form and style.

My daughter isn't much into YouTube now but went through a phase of watching about an hour a day and, boy, she watched some bizarre stuff! I think she watched more obscure Russian and Slavic cartoons from the 70s than anything in English. None offensive, but certainly weird. I'm kinda hoping it rubs off in terms of being generally progressive and a weird arty person though.. we shall see ;-)

(And before anyone asks, being exposed to hours of non-English language content appears to have had zero effect in either a negative or positive way, alas.)

same here - we love masha and bear and some weird south korean cars-as-people thing

My son (3) became obsessed with watching these Kinder adverts, to the point where I had to delete the YouTube app and put him in cold turkey until he regained interest in the (brilliant) BBC CBeebies content.

If this app/service can strip out all of that crap I'd pay significantly more than I do for most apps. Easily.

My 3 year old son loves these videos as well (especially the toy car unboxing videos on Youtube). I'm glad someone linked to an article about it. It seems really odd to me that he loves them, but he finally seems to be over them after a 4 month stint of always seeking them out, trying to spell out the words to find them, etc

Cant believe some of these toy unboxing videos have +70 million views, insane

Same for my nephew. He can watch hours of these unboxing some random toy video. But then I too like watching walkthrough/gameplay and sometimes unboxing of some gadgets. :) I think we all watch such vids.

"Cant believe some of these toy unboxing videos have +70 million views, insane"

My son watched the same skylanders unboxing every day for ... weeks? It adds up.

Kids viewing habits are not like adults. I saw the movie "sorcerer" (a tolerably good movie from the 70s, although its timeless) and its pretty cool but I'm probably not watching it again until my next reincarnation. Kids will watch the same thing over and over.

same experince here also playdo mini burgers & fries and other weirdnes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LazzJtxNz4c

The YouTube Blog[1] has better description of the product.

[1]: http://youtube-global.blogspot.in/2015/02/youtube-kids.html

The links to the App Store and Google Play weren't showing up for me. Here's why:

    <a href="https://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/288696178;115706119;v">Google Play</a>

This is a great start! Ultimately, I'd rather my kid just have a 'kids account' (similar to Apple's model) and my wife and I would be the curators. In that setup Google could just expose a bunch of themed, kid friendly aggregate feeds parents could choose to include or not. For now I would settle for the ability to allow specific channels regardless of rating. For instance, I see Stampy is already in there but he swears occasionally, not enough for me to care but likely enough to get hit by an automated filter.

Don't get too excited, global Youtube audience! This is US only.

While I do think this is a good move for YouTube, it isn't enough to win my family's viewership, because the age-appropriate issues of YouTube are not their only problem (quality of content is still an issue), and there are other video sources if I want to educate my children via online videos. Khan Academy is the most obvious one that comes to mind, but we also will watch documentaries on Netflix, and watch the Smithsonian channel on our Roku.

Have waited too long for you guys to grow up, have family, kids...so you can make web usable for kids. This is better be good and without crapAdwares. Will give it a try.

In case you're curious, here are two existing apps that also curate and list only kid-friendly videos:

Cakey (from the creator of HotOrNot):

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cakey/id906087656

Wimp:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wimp.com-family-friendly-vid...

I want to know if it will have caching for offline use. Don't care if it is like Spotify and needs to check in occasionally but would really like to be able to have something for the kid on long haul flights.

Curious to know how many of you with children are going to use the time limit feature? I have a kid on the way and I have concerns about my child spending his formative years glued to youtube...

As a parent of three young children, we've established weekends (Friday evening, Saturday, Sunday) as video and screen time. This is pretty easy criteria for the kids to understand which makes it easier to enforce no video Mon-Thu. The weekends are nice because the kids get the equivalent experience of Saturday morning cartoons and it lets us parents sleep in a bit.

Even so, we notice that too much video (more than 40m-1h in one session) makes at least one of our kids pretty cranky. So, we might consider the time limit feature.

To keep them off the screen, we just have lots of clay, crayons, scissors, construction paper, tape, legos, books, puzzles, etc. And playground visits.

We often find that by the end of the day on the weekend, if it was one of those days where they watched a little more video than less, they complain that there was still [some craft project thing] that they wanted to do. So, providing a bit of structure to limit screen time ultimately is letting them get to do other things that they really want to do.

Nope. Both of my kids have used YouTube since around 18 months' old and I don't plan on ever enacting any limits on "screen time."

I guess it varies by the kid, but neither of my kids seem able to stay stuck on the same mind-numbing task for long and they naturally progress to wanting to do more interactive stuff anyway. I think placing artificial limits instead provides a temptation to use their "quota" and makes the activity seem like a treat they have to use instead of just a normal part of life.

Thanks guys, appreciate the responses.

What if your parents limited your screen time?

I am trying to download from play store (from India), it shows "This Item not available in your country"

try downloading it from apkmirror.com

Good. Kudos. Too many times my kids surf their way to something weird starting from Peppa Pig or something ;-)

thanks Google.

Wow, it looks really good, especially the old school Sesame Street giving me some memories. Lego channel is cool too but damn App Store search is not even showing it yet I had to download to the desktop and find it in Purchased.

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