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

121–130 of 154 posts

Re: Algorithm That Makes Preschoolers Obsessed with YouTube

#121

Post by kpil »

Kenji wrote: post #55
Simon_says wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear what you're saying. As a kid in the bad old days, pre-Internet, I used to play outside with my friends for hours at a time. Is that not an option anymore?

No. Many parents are literally paranoid about their kids being harmed, even though many areas have an all-time low of crime in human history. Not to mention, police picking up children who are playing alone and parents getting into trouble for being "irresponsible". It is f'ed up. Many kids just end up choosing the computer because parents make it easier to access than outside playgrounds and it's just as interesting…

It's even weirder since we can give them phones, or watches with integrated phones and gps-trackers and what not.

When I was 12 I yelled a friends name while walking out the door, and was expected to be back by dinner. If I wasn't the best thing my parents could do was to call my friends parents (homes) and ask if I was there.

Re: Algorithm That Makes Preschoolers Obsessed with YouTube

#122

Post by sleazybae »

I read one of the first sentences of one of the paragraphs as "Kids’ videos are among the most wretched content in YouTube history," and went "well, yeah, Spiderman and Elsa and all that weird shit." Then I reread it properly and realized it said "watched content," and went, "yeah, that makes more sense, but it's definitely some of the worst stuff on the internet.

Re: Algorithm That Makes Preschoolers Obsessed with YouTube

#123

Post by Jenya_ »

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…

Do you also block Youtube download sites (like keepvid)? Otherwise this may result in her learning (from e.g. advanced friend in school) that she can download a lot of stuff to watch locally during 30 minutes.

Re: Algorithm That Makes Preschoolers Obsessed with YouTube

#124

Post by cjf101 »

wcummings wrote: post #114
cjf101 wrote: post #112

Have you seen the 2hour+ looping video phenomenon? My friends children introduced me to this. Their favourite videos are extended looping videos of the same 1-minute content. Songs, or funny moments, whatever. Their favourite YouTube activity is to see the same thing over and over and over for hours. They react nearly the same way to the same thing for the whole time. I'd never seen anything like it, but their recomm…

Jeez, that is kinda concerning, how old are your friends kids?

5 - 8. I was concerned at first. But there's so many of these on YouTube that have pretty high view counts, that my worry pretty quickly went from "my friend's kids are weird" to "kids are weird".

Re: Algorithm That Makes Preschoolers Obsessed with YouTube

#125

Post by utefan001 »

Jenya_ wrote: post #123
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…

Do you also block Youtube download sites (like keepvid)? Otherwise this may result in her learning (from e.g. advanced friend in school) that she can download a lot of stuff to watch locally during 30 minutes.

Parent has timeline that shows domains summary, and points earned. Parent can whitelist, or block internet sites.

If notifications are enabled, they will know when points are earned on education sites. Parents can easily figure out what's going on and react to it.

Re: Algorithm That Makes Preschoolers Obsessed with YouTube

#126

Post by PrimHelios »

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…

Soon your daughter will learn: it's always DNS

Re: Algorithm That Makes Preschoolers Obsessed with YouTube

#127

Post by PrimHelios »

ssharp wrote: post #15
RichardHeart wrote: post #5

Guess who they sell this awesome traffic to......I lost $1000 to this garbage. Every possible demographic option was enabled to prevent this from happening. Even better, foreign language learn your ABC's!

My kids were a little under 2 heading into election season. We watched very little television at that age but there was one YouTube show that would really help calm down one of them. Pretty much every time we watched that, we got a Trump ad. Yay living in Ohio! Thankfully they've taken to some PBS shows like Daniel Tiger and Thomas, so they're usually content with that and we generally don't watch them on YouTube, so…

Definitely get an adblocker, YT's ads are terrible.

Re: Algorithm That Makes Preschoolers Obsessed with YouTube

#129

Post by utefan001 »

PrimHelios wrote: post #126
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…

Soon your daughter will learn: it's always DNS

That's right! My other project is something I think is very powerful, but nobody so far seems to be to interested. Throwing it out in case someone wants try it.

If you pay attention to malware analysis you will see raw IP addresses and random domains are very common in malware. I think corps should enable their outbound firewalls. Problem now is whitelisting each IP is way too much work.

My tests show a C++ DNS proxy can be used to whitelist IP addresses to ipset hash in iptables just before the DNS proxy responds to client. Raw IPs are now blocked and firewall outbound is coupled to your trusted DNS provider.

This would massively reduce attack surface to domains your org regularly uses. Not resolving new / young domains is important here.

At this point we can blame DNS and the firewall!

Re: Algorithm That Makes Preschoolers Obsessed with YouTube

#130

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

megous wrote: post #103
fudged71 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The child might simply get desensitized. Try watching disturbing violence (war images/videos for example) for a while yourself. Empathic response will blunt itself within a week or two.

That's probably the scariest thing about disturbing violence. Ceasing to be disturbing is the bigger issue than being disturbing IMO.

But I'm weird and think that it's far better to let children see sex than even regular hollywood violence, and that things like US military recruitment ads and ISIS recruitment videos should be treated identically (restricted behind a warning that they're not for kids). The normalization of violence is a terrible thing.

Post reply on HN