Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Algorithm That Makes Preschoolers Obsessed with YouTube

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 154 posts

Re: Algorithm That Makes Preschoolers Obsessed with YouTube

#91

Post by athenot »

bdamm wrote: post #25
thatswrong0 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed this myself watching my friends young cousin browse Youtube.. his feed was half clickbait 20-something white guys yelling at you to subscribe Minecraft videos, half perverted (such as Spiderman kissing Elsa from Frozen) or oddly gory children videos like the ones described in the article. If I ever have kids, there's no way in hell I'm letting them run free with an iPad or iPhone. I know it's the "easy way…

You may make a different choice after years of being unable to do anything but give 100% of your attention to the child. Someone needs to cook & clean, or go to work, after all. In the "old days" you'd just cut your kid loose into the environment. Well, these days, TV and iPads are part of the environment, and YouTube along with it. I'm not saying you wouldn't make boundaries. Boundaries are important. But that may a…

As a father (who does the cooking), I can relate to that difficulty. However I'm not allowing youtube access precisely because of the unpredictably of the content. I prefer my child to go on a Netflix or Disney Channel binge of her favorite show, rather than let her brain get hacked before she's able to understand what's going on.

But turning the TV off (mobile isn't allowed) usually results in solo play with toys. It took a bit of coaxing but now when sitting down, we agree how many episodes will be watched before the screen goes dark.

Re: Algorithm That Makes Preschoolers Obsessed with YouTube

#92

Post by [deleted] »

spraak wrote: post #88
utefan001 wrote: post #85

This is how my 11 year old daughter uses YouTube now... After 30 min, DNS no longer works for entertainment sites. In order to fix that she has to do 5 Khan problems or read thoery.com, Duolingo, prodigy math, code monkey, splash math, Xtra math, or typing club. It takes her 5 to 7 mins to earn points. My server detects points and re enables DNS replies for YouTube, etc. Best result so far is she now understands how…

Yes! I've been doing similar manual/analog solutions but it's hard to keep up with

[deleted]

Re: Algorithm That Makes Preschoolers Obsessed with YouTube

#93

Post by [deleted] »

strictnein wrote: post #7
option wrote: post #2

Kids aged 2 and 3 should watch any content together with their parent. Or at the very least, the content that parent watched and approved before. No 2 or 3 year old should be mindlessly browsing Youtube

I did, and now this is permanently burned into my brain: "Daddy finger, daddy finger, where are you? Here I am, here I am, how do you do?"

[deleted]

Re: Algorithm That Makes Preschoolers Obsessed with YouTube

#94

Post by Sleeep »

fudged71 wrote: post #26
corysama wrote: post #16

In the past couple of years there has been a huge uptick in YT content targeting very young children. The feedback loop is so tight that many of the creators have converged on designing some of the most visceral (and disturbing) material that appeals to kids at a reptilian level. Think about how genuinely weird little kids are. Sometimes they do stuff that would be scary if it wasn't just a minute of innocent pretend…

My wife is a teacher and one of her students in grade 2 has somehow been seeing beheading videos (apparently on youtube but that seems nearly impossible) because they are left with an ipad for so long. I can't even begin to comprehend what that would do to the brain of a child. TV for children is very restricted and regulated for a very important reason.

How did your wife know that the kid was watching beheading videos? Were they cartoon beheading or real?

Re: Algorithm That Makes Preschoolers Obsessed with YouTube

#95

Post by [deleted] »

AlexC04 wrote: post #89

I absolutely loathe youtube's suggestion stream. It is clearly designed to be exploitative of children's media-illiteracy. Clickbait, misleading and outright deception in the headlines and thumbnails. For lack of a better term "trend-whoring" (a couple weeks back, a number of the video game streams suddenly had fidget spinners in all their thumnails) I'm planning (hoping) on becoming a parent in a couple years, and i…

[deleted]

Re: Algorithm That Makes Preschoolers Obsessed with YouTube

#96

Post by 24gttghh »

utefan001 wrote: post #85

This is how my 11 year old daughter uses YouTube now... After 30 min, DNS no longer works for entertainment sites. In order to fix that she has to do 5 Khan problems or read thoery.com, Duolingo, prodigy math, code monkey, splash math, Xtra math, or typing club. It takes her 5 to 7 mins to earn points. My server detects points and re enables DNS replies for YouTube, etc. Best result so far is she now understands how…

This looks very cool, I'm gonna get at least one of my friend's with kids to try this!

Re: Algorithm That Makes Preschoolers Obsessed with YouTube

#97

Post by vkou »

euroclydon wrote: post #76
jackhack wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All television from the 60s and 70s had extremely long shots by today's standards. Just for fun pick any show on any channel with modern content. Drama, comedy, even news broadcasts -- the average shot duration is only 3.5 seconds. SECONDS! Not only that, but the weird camera angles, and the infuriating "shakey cam" (handled camera being purposely jiggled) is predominant in children's programming, and used to keep ou…

What's with the extremely short shot duration? I noticed that in some movies too. It was incredibly frustrating. Is is some film technique to make me feel what it's like to be OCD? I just assumed the movie was so poorly directed that they were left with stitching together a bunch of crap.

Let's say we have a sixty second shot, where two actors throw ten lines of dialogue back and forth at eachother. Let's say that one out of ten takes on a line is good.

It will take far more then ten minutes to film this. The actors may nail line #1 and #2, but flub #3 or #4, or #7 or look at the wrong thing, or the director won't like something about their emotions, or whatnot.

You have to do an entire re-take, whenever one little thing doesn't go as you want.

Compare that to a short-shot film. Have each actor fire off twenty takes of their four second line. If they got tongue-tied on the pronunciation of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, they didn't waste an entire take.

Hell, with short shots the two actors don't even need to be in the same building for filming a scene, let alone on the same set at the same time. Do takes for one on Monday, do takes for the other one on Tuesday. It works better for everyone's schedules, and we can't afford to pay Scarlett Johansson to hang out on set any longer then she has to. Three months later, the director will decide that they really hate one of the shots, and it can be re-filmed during post-production.

The reason that this happens is because filming is expensive, budgets are bloated, celebrity actors command multi-million dollar salaries, editing is easy, and audiences will happily lap up action schlock like Michael Bay's Transformers (With its average of 3.2 seconds per shot.)

My SO works in musical theater. They don't have the privilege of stitching together a show from perfect four second intervals. They have to perform it right from start to finish - a two hour ordeal. This requires many, many weeks of grueling rehearsals... And each performance has many, many mistakes.

Re: Algorithm That Makes Preschoolers Obsessed with YouTube

#98

Post by Retric »

watwut wrote: post #75
pmoriarty wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People should read the old, original Brothers Grim stories. Plenty of that was pretty, ahem, grim. Over the centuries it's been sanitized and Disneyfied, but the primal drives that fascinated by that sort of thing have not gone away.

German censorship around books for children was quite tight actually. Not all of that was for little children, a lot of it effectively scary stories for older ones. Also half todays cartoons would not pass neither comic code nor restrictions at early movies.

Comic code was a reaction to early and very gritty comics, US comics are still very tame by comparison.

Re: Algorithm That Makes Preschoolers Obsessed with YouTube

#99

Post by dev1n »

utefan001 wrote: post #85

This is how my 11 year old daughter uses YouTube now... After 30 min, DNS no longer works for entertainment sites. In order to fix that she has to do 5 Khan problems or read thoery.com, Duolingo, prodigy math, code monkey, splash math, Xtra math, or typing club. It takes her 5 to 7 mins to earn points. My server detects points and re enables DNS replies for YouTube, etc. Best result so far is she now understands how…

This is an awesome product and congratulations for sticking to this for 12 months.

How have you been trying to market it? What marketing avenues have you been trying? Facebook ads etc?

Re: Algorithm That Makes Preschoolers Obsessed with YouTube

#100

Post by defen »

ashark wrote: post #21

Are there any good medium- to long-form recent works with valuable insight into the modern phenomenon of hyper-availble multimedia? Psychological, sociological, political effects, any of that? I'm reading DFW's part-literature-review part-independent-thesis "E Unibus Pluram"[1] and read his "Host" a little while back, and find myself wanting more recent examinations/criticism of our media culture of similar quality.…

The eponymous Infinite Jest in the DFW book of the same name is a piece of content (film) so compelling that people watch it over and over until they die.
Post reply on HN