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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

#251

Post by Mz »

crooked-v wrote: post #247
Mz wrote: post #241

So, when tech giants fire employees en masse and talk about Basic Income as the answer because they don't want to be held responsible, you get people churning out this kind of shit to make a few bucks because you can no longer get an honest wage for honest work. Yay.

A business owner who supports a basic income is also implicitly supporting the greater taxes that would need to be levied on them to pay for that basic income. I'd call that being responsible, in the general sense.

They also implicitly support their "right" to fire people at will and say "not my problem because you have your UBI" even though the proposed amounts for it are far below wages of jobs that are being eliminated.

It is a known fact that countries with insufficient opportunities to sell legitimate exports are the highest exporters of illicit items. When people are desperate for money and lack respectable opportunities, they lower their standards or they starve.

Edit: In response to your added sentence, so many rich people do all they can to find tax loopholes, I am not convinced that your assertion holds any water at all.

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

#252

Post by vostrocity »

dalbasal wrote: post #47
reustle wrote: post #9

It's (un)surprising how fast YouTube responds to this somewhat mild criticism, while holding steady on their radio silence regarding the large amounts of huge creators who are getting demonetized and community strikes against their accounts. Nearly every big channel I watch has posted a video complaining about it in the past 2 months, with many just this week. Gives you some good insight on where their priorities are…

Based on who the complainers I’ve seen are, I’m sure that at the very least youtube threw out some baby with bathwater. But that said, their monetisation has not been successful. They do need to make big, hard changes. A lot of what monetisation did was encourage spam, or content quality just above the spam threshold. Meanwhile, patreon (though obviously which a much smaller footprint) seems to encourage the kind of…

I think an interesting question is whether kids raised on this content "barely above the spam threshold" have different cognitive functions and/or appreciation of content later in life. Maybe these kids raised on mass-produced low-quality content will care less about aesthetic integrity or NPR-type content as adults?

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

#253

Post by WalterBright »

socialist_coder wrote: post #211
WalterBright wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall some research that showed that very young children did not pick up language from watching TV. It required an adult to closely interact with the child to learn language.

http://vancouversun.com/news/staff-blogs/why-your-kid-cant-l...

Years ago, a friend of mine was thrilled with Sesame Street, because after watching it for a year his daughter learned most of her letters and could count to 10.

I replied that sounded like the most inefficient method of teaching ever devised. Not what he wanted to hear :-)

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

#254

Post by joe_the_user »

andrepd wrote: post #250
joe_the_user wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, contrawi…

Are you even trying to compare a Disney film or similar "saccharnine contentless" media to the sheer acid trip nightmare fuel that is videos like these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXjJdv5fj5k

The main different between this and say the "Road Runner" series is Road Runner is somewhat better quality. But either way you've a series of exploding cartoon figures - what age wasn't Road Runner appropriate for?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4JbWb5xVEU

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

#255

Post by colanderman »

joe_the_user wrote: post #238
2020-3030 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, contrawi…

Disney movies generally makes sense and have some logic rooted in the real world. Yes there are talking animals and magic but the stories ultimately relate to the human experience.

I think the problem with the crap the author finds is that – it is nonsensical. These videos addict kids by triggering their innate desire to seek out novel/scary situations and explore them. This instinct exists so kids learn about the real world around them, as quickly as possible. But when kids watch videos with no sense, no logic, and no relation to the real world, their brains learn and reinforce nonsense. It delays their development while reducing their attention for more wholesome – and more boring – exploration of the real world.

Kids' brains are amazingly plastic, they have amazing memories, and they ruminate sometimes for months on novel/strange concepts. Watching, say, Peppa the Pig eat her own father even once can have a profoundly negative effect on a young child.

Absolutely parents should not let YouTube babysit their children. But a child watching, say, Sesame Street, will tell you about how Oscar helped Elmo do such-and-such, or Grover had a bad day and Big Bird comforted him, and they'll apply that to their own life. A child watching Marvel character heads buried in sand will prattle on about random creatures' heads buried in things, and will fail to apply that lesson to anything in their real-life experience.

EDIT: Not to imply e.g. Disney is flawless – remember Dumbo's pink elephants?

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

#256

Post by Cpoll »

Unrelated to the news article, but I'm alarmed that the usual HN balanced-skepticism is largely buried in this thread:

Almost no-one has questioned whether these videos are indeed harmful to children.

The top comment is a Medium article that sensationalizes these videos to the point where I was afraid the video would destroy my brain a-la Snow Crash.

I'm picking up a lot of "please think of the children" and "you would understand if you had children," and comments that read like a call-to-arms for a moral outcry.

On the other hand, there's almost no introspection about what OTHER things (that don't make adults strangely uneasy) might still be detrimental to children. if I'm being uncharitable, I might quote Neil Postman's view of Sesame Street: “Parents embraced “Sesame Street” for several reasons, among them that it assuaged their guilt over the fact that they could not or would not restrict their children’s access to television.

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

#257

Post by colanderman »

ImSkeptical wrote: post #223
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.

I wonder how much of this is kids not realizing they can skip videos. I'd like to do an experiment to see how quickly kids change the video for different categories of videos. Maybe they just like videos, and clicking randomly on child's links at the end of videos will eventually drop you into this maze.

They 100% know they can. I've watched a 2-year-old with a phone skip through dozens of videos until they found a channel just saccharine enough to hold their attention for minutes until the phone was taken away.

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

#259

Post by naner »

Bromskloss wrote: post #201
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.

The article seems to never get to the point. What was the disturbing thing?

Algorithmic reward system within YouTube results in infinitely many nonsensical and non kid appropriate videos targeted at kid viewers.

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

#260

Post by Mz »

joe_the_user wrote: post #238
2020-3030 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, contrawi…

It is not just you, but my youngest is 27. I am not currently raising small kids. So I try to respect the fact that if parents are complaining, then it must be an issue for them.

My bigger concern is that we are happy to let automation take jobs while talking about UBI as the solution. Does no one but me see a connection here? This is a way for people to make money using automation in the face of fewer regular jobs being available due to automation. If people need money and can't make it some other way, duh, they turn to doing this stuff.

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