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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

#441

Post by bigbugbag »

anigbrowl wrote: post #229
squeaky-clean wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because the people complaining are not the same ones who are leaving their kids unattended with these videos. This thread is full of parents saying that they banned youtube for their child because these algorithmic videos have began to fill all youtube searches for kids. I think it's more of a "why did bots and inattentive parents fuck it up for the rest of us."

Enough with the victim blaming. I think this is a serious problem and I don't have any children to leave unattended.

I'm pretty convinced the victim here is the children and the perpertrators are the parents.

Think about it: scientific consensus is pretty clear that the content makes no difference there should be no exposure to any kind of screen for kids under 6, then maybe a tiny bit until 10-12.

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

#442

Post by bigbugbag »

I remember reading and seeing a demonstration of how the youtube recommended videos had significant tendencies to tend toward the worst, were it be fake news, click bait, dumb stuff, mindless conspiracies or else.

IIRC it was linked to the business model of youtube and that it was an effective way to keep the audience captivated longer hence shown more ads.

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

#445

Post by thomastjeffery »

anonymousab wrote: post #396
thomastjeffery wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, decent adblock on Android requires root, which most can't have, and most of those who can would still need to unlock the bootloader, flash recovery, flash supersu, install fdroid, and install adblock. That leaves us with a very small subset of users that can use adblock. This problem is exasperated by the fact that phones/tablets are particularly well-suited to, and popular with, young children. Childr…

uBlock Origin seems to work fine on Android Firefox.

I forgot about that. You can, in fact, use firefox with adblock on android, so long as adblock is distributed with the app itself.

Unfortunately though, it does not work globally.

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

#446

Post by [deleted] »

krapp wrote: post #405
leggomylibro wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly wouldn't be surprised if this wound up being some ML grad student's channel who was playing around with generating audiovisual content. If it started getting picked up by big algorithms and making money... Although actually, huh. Maybe it's a little more organized and is just a general memetic malware scam; con youtube's algorithms into putting your junk which was generated in 0.4 seconds onto a few millio…

I suspect that, at this point, it's a number of overlapping phenomena. I remember some time ago watching a video discussing weird flash games and videos with the same sort of pain-and-comfort themes that some of these videos have, also including Disney and other licensed characters, and also the oddly repetitious and low quality "children's videos" related to (and possibly spun off of) toys (lacking violent or otherw…

[deleted]

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

#447

Post by jagermo »

baq wrote: post #367
jimmaswell wrote: post #281

There's a subreddit about this called /r/ElsaGate. Some of them feel there's a more sinister meaning to some of the content of these strange videos, like here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ElsaGate/comments/6t754b/thank_you/

holy shit, as a father of young children this made me extemely uncomfortable.

Do what I do: if you can't watch it with them, download known safe videos via youtube-DL and only let them watch local copies.

This works until they should be old enough to know about strange and stupid content.

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

#449

Post by Karunamon »

nickodell wrote: post #416
Karunamon wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you could explain it rather than making an argument to incredulity?

I don't think it does have a story. Things happen in it, sure, but not for a reason. In one skit, the bad guys bring a tiny shark, then enlarge it with a magic wand. At first, it chases them in a pool, but after they get out, the shark flies after them. The shark eats punch and turns red. The Narrator says, "Red." They run into a room, and the shark phases through the wall. They run out of the room. They run outside,…

So it's nonsensical? I can understand that. But how do we go from nonsensical to harmful?

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

#450

Post by GFischer »

setzer22 wrote: post #369
worldsayshi wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, they could solve this problem in a heartbeat by having a mode where you can only look at your subscribed content.

This can even be done without google. In fact, this would require minimal work. For example, Kodi's youtube plugin, which lacks the recommendations and autoplay features (which is a feature in this case), could be easily restricted to only show the "Subscriptions" folder. On the other hand, a user-maintained curated list of channels for children is not something that unthinkable (think of GitHub model, with pull requ…

That's one of my favourite ideas to submit whenever people ask for startup ideas :)

I absolutely believe there's a need for curated content for online video.

I'd love a tv-channel-like browsing experience, with seamless switching (maybe some clever caching behind the scenes).

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