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YouTube says it will crack down on bizarre videos targeting children

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Re: YouTube says it will crack down on bizarre videos targeting children

#231

Post by strathmeyer »

lliamander wrote: post #181
hnzix wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just the latest iteration of how any website is only 7 Kevin Bacon clicks away from rotten.com. The net is vast and infinite and funnels the human id. Autotegenerated content will never be a clean feed until machine learning evolves. Or to put it another way, teach your kids to talk with you if they see or experience something icky.

And also don't allow access to an internet-enabled device without direct supervision until they are fairly mature.

You're not going to be able to convince people who benefited greatly from unfettered internet access in their youth to do that.

Re: YouTube says it will crack down on bizarre videos targeting children

#232

Post by blurbleblurble »

craftyguy wrote: post #217
lliamander wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And also don't allow access to an internet-enabled device without direct supervision until they are fairly mature.

Good luck with that one.

My niece's dad bought her a phone. She's 3. What the fuck. My sister is not happy with it, but I don't think she feels like she has much power over the situation.

Re: YouTube says it will crack down on bizarre videos targeting children

#233

Post by dawnerd »

schnevets wrote: post #156

This is just a bizarre level of incompetence on Alphabet's part. I can understand being an open platform and allowing people to post content without moderation, but don't sell a curated subsection without a human gatekeeper - especially not one geared towards infants. This could have been an ideal add-on to the YouTube Red brand. I hope instead their reputation takes a hit from this oversight.

For a company that has its roots in search, youtube is soooo easily taken advantage of by keyword stuffing it's incredible. You'd think that'd be the first thing they fixed when they purchased the site.

If they just fixed that a lot of the related video spam would go away. Ideally, related videos should come from the channel you're watching the video from. Really frustrating to be watching one video and find out you're not watching a clone account.

Example, Good account: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7wAJTGl2gc

What shows on related looks like content from the same guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwGnpaiepCM

Re: YouTube says it will crack down on bizarre videos targeting children

#234

Post by anigbrowl »

cowpig wrote: post #155

I don't believe in this kind of censorship and that medium article just reads like a bunch of alarmist nonsense to me. I was exposed to tons of super-weird stuff on TV an the internet (adult swim, fat-pie, etc) and so were most of my friends growing up. I don't think it was problematic for any of us. When you're a kid and something feels disturbing, you turn it off. Our society really doesn't give kids any credit for…

When you're a kid and something feels disturbing, you turn it off.

[citation needed]

Common-sensical dismissals of something are often just a way of declingin to address an actual problem. I find it really easy to think of contexts in which kids keep watching this stuff even though they don't like it an its scaring them. You might not have done it, but you might not have any experience of autistic spectrum disorders, for example.

It's like saying people should just ignore trolls on the internet or any of many other nominally helpful cliches that actually dismiss the concerns of people who are dealing with problems.

Re: YouTube says it will crack down on bizarre videos targeting children

#235

Post by seanmcdirmid »

crooked-v wrote: post #206
52-6F-62 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you watch long enough (I left it running on the side while at work, muted, out of curiosity) and some of that stuff will come up eventually. It gets weirder when you have the live action stuff with kids' favourite characters murdering and raping each other. Somebody put in actual effort to put some of that stuff together. Other animated pieces are just a bad accident. It seems kind of circular. Somebody writes an…

Purely algorithmic generation seems less likely to me than Southeast Asian video factories that use cheap labor to churn out a bajillion variations of the same thing with different keywords and characters slotted in.

You are probably right ATM, but the technology is improving rapidly. At any rate, it is entirely plausible that the story themes are autogeneratrd (using a neural net to identify hot topics, then curating what it can produce on its own).

Re: YouTube says it will crack down on bizarre videos targeting children

#236

Post by y2bd »

cowpig wrote: post #155

I don't believe in this kind of censorship and that medium article just reads like a bunch of alarmist nonsense to me. I was exposed to tons of super-weird stuff on TV an the internet (adult swim, fat-pie, etc) and so were most of my friends growing up. I don't think it was problematic for any of us. When you're a kid and something feels disturbing, you turn it off. Our society really doesn't give kids any credit for…

How do you know you and your friends turned out fine?

I don’t mean to be accusatory, but I wonder what scale we’re using when we’re saying that this sort of content is “harmful”. I doubt people are implying that watching these videos will turn kids into psychopaths.

Re: YouTube says it will crack down on bizarre videos targeting children

#238

Post by joe_the_user »

2020-3030 wrote: post #207
mattbeckman wrote: post #138

Also, in case you glazed over the link to the recent Medium article, here it is: https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-in... I read it last night after the wife recommended it ... and wow.

Thanks for posting this article and it is indeed disturbing. It looks like there is just an insane amount of mind scrambling content that nobody should let themselves or their children experience. Given the Medium author's informal but useful initial analysis, this seems like a ripe topic for a formal psychological and technological analysis by some poor dissertation student or group of students who could survive the…

I'm reading the article and trying to figure out exactly where the horrible "mind scrambling" is happening.

The article seems to say "back when I was a kid, my parent entertained me with contentless saccharine trip from sources we trusted (Disney et al) but now contentless saccharine trip is autogenerated (duh duh duh) and who knows what effect that is going to have on 'developing brains'"

And would suspect, contrawise, that if there's a problem, it began at the point when the TV became the primary babysitter for modern children and things escalating to youtube is a step but a less significant step than this.

Edit: OK, the complaint is video moving from simplistic saccharine junk to the same thing with violence. I get that this is the step that disturbs parents lazy/busy enough to consign child rearing to video but controlling enough to think kids will parrot whatever they see. I would still see consigning kid-hood activity to video as where the damage comes. But maybe "that's just me"

Re: YouTube says it will crack down on bizarre videos targeting children

#239

Post by kibwen »

blurbleblurble wrote: post #232
craftyguy wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck with that one.

My niece's dad bought her a phone. She's 3. What the fuck. My sister is not happy with it, but I don't think she feels like she has much power over the situation.

"Uh-oh honey, looks like little Alice dropped her phone in the toilet again. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"

Re: YouTube says it will crack down on bizarre videos targeting children

#240

Post by andrepd »

mattbeckman wrote: post #138

Also, in case you glazed over the link to the recent Medium article, here it is: https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-in... I read it last night after the wife recommended it ... and wow.

Jesus Christ, I just read that article and... wow, that is some Black Mirror shit. AI nightmares delivered at massive scale directly to the minds of infants, at a rate of tens of thousands (?) of views per second. I had no idea we were living in a dystopia already.
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