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

YouTube Kids Is Going to Release a Whitelisted, Non-Algorithmic Version of App

buzzfeed.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 131 posts

Re: YouTube Kids Is Going to Release a Whitelisted, Non-Algorithmic Version of App

#121

Post by nikanj »

noir_lord wrote: post #64
jasonkostempski wrote: post #35

One step closer to the only thing I ever wanted, an app that lets me whitelist the channels. Without having to create an account too. The list will be small enough to store locally and pass with every list request. I never want to see another video about colors wrapped in bible verses for the rest of my life.

Same, I'm interested in Programming, Chess, History and Engineering. YouTube recommends "Secret Alien Spaceship you didn't know about" or some equally inane bullshit. It's so bad I used ublock origin to just filter out that entire vertical section. The recommendations are simply useless to an end user.

Spotify does similar things with its discover weekly-lists, but at least in their case, the motivation somewhat obvious.

I don't think payola is a think for Youtube videos yet, though it seems inevitable that there's a market opportunity there.

Re: YouTube Kids Is Going to Release a Whitelisted, Non-Algorithmic Version of App

#122

Post by nikanj »

fma wrote: post #41
romuloab42 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we could restrict the app to just play videos of a single playlist, life would be great. But today it is very easy for kids to exit playlist mode, thus defeating the purpose of curating a playlist.

My wife's business has a TV that plays some videos from YouTube of her company in the waiting room. At the end of the Playlist pops up videos from competitors. In the past it would autoplay those and it was embarassing but at least I turned that off. She pays for YouTube Red. There is no way for YouTube to not autosuggest, or to repeat the videos in a Playlist over and over. I decided for her to use YouTube because o…

In the past, I've used youtube-dl and VLC for a similar reason. It's nigh-impossible to make Youtube only play the content you selected to play.

Re: YouTube Kids Is Going to Release a Whitelisted, Non-Algorithmic Version of App

#123

Post by acct1771 »

jamra wrote: post #104
acct1771 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can. You just have to do it "the old fashioned way", aka, spending the time with your kids.

I spend tons of time with my kids. If I need to prepare food or feed my picky daughter, YouTube can be helpful. This kind of shaming doesn’t help and I don’t buy that you can watch your kids 24/7. Besides, have you ever had a bad day and wanted to finish dinner while your child decided to be a bit bratty? It’s not the best choice to put kids in front of screens and I do it very minimally, but this shaming tactic isn’…

My parents worked multiple jobs, still had the time to make selections of titles to give me - or not.

This is not a corporation's job. Multiple streaming services have kid sections, downloading actual files that are the ones you want your child to see, etc.

Curating content for your children has never been faster or easier, so...how'd our parents do it?

Re: YouTube Kids Is Going to Release a Whitelisted, Non-Algorithmic Version of App

#124

Post by nojvek »

sametmax wrote: post #101
77ko wrote: post #34

The safest way to use YouTube with kids is to download videos offline using youtube-dl or one of its front ends and use an app like VLC to play them. Kids shouldn't be accessing YouTube directly. It really is bad. A simple example: looking for videos for a school women's history day thingamajig, YouTube kept recommending outright twisted videos which were sort of women's history but algorithmically generated and just…

Children bellow 10 should not have access to internet without supervision IMO.

We’re visiting some friends in Australia and almost everyone has an ipad per kid with unrestricted YouTube access.

They feel kids keep themselves entertained with iPads and games. Some of them have glasses at a young age since they look at the iPad so closely.

I’m legit worried for the next generation of kids who grow up on YouTube consuming endless amounts of ads and crappy entertainment.

Add that to the fact that an iPad is a very poor creative device and mostly a consuming device. I learnt programming at a young age because I had a proper keyboard and programming was mildly entertaining. Flash and actionscript were my canvas of endless creativity in holidays.

It’s almost impossible to program anything relatively complex on an iPad.

For the parents of HN, how do you ensure your kids use tech appropriately and don’t develop mindless addiction to it?

Re: YouTube Kids Is Going to Release a Whitelisted, Non-Algorithmic Version of App

#125

Post by jamra »

acct1771 wrote: post #123
jamra wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spend tons of time with my kids. If I need to prepare food or feed my picky daughter, YouTube can be helpful. This kind of shaming doesn’t help and I don’t buy that you can watch your kids 24/7. Besides, have you ever had a bad day and wanted to finish dinner while your child decided to be a bit bratty? It’s not the best choice to put kids in front of screens and I do it very minimally, but this shaming tactic isn’…

My parents worked multiple jobs, still had the time to make selections of titles to give me - or not. This is not a corporation's job. Multiple streaming services have kid sections, downloading actual files that are the ones you want your child to see, etc. Curating content for your children has never been faster or easier, so...how'd our parents do it?

Your parents had youtube? The internet?

Have you seen what kind of bait and switch content is on youtube? It can look like a children's show, but turn out to be something really creepy.

If you think it's the job of parents to curate content, that's also fine, but youtube should allow for a feature that lets you whitelist content.

It sounds like you had lovely parents, though. Congratulations.

Re: YouTube Kids Is Going to Release a Whitelisted, Non-Algorithmic Version of App

#126

Post by jstanley »

sintaxi wrote: post #77
pdpi wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unlike the other posters, I'm not going to pretend I don't know what you're talking about. And now something for those of us genuinely out of the loop?

TL;DR - Thousands of extremely unpleasant videos have been published to Youtube for Kids where they have got billions of views. In many cases the videos have expensive production methods such as stop motion. Youtube has been aware of the videos since 2015. Here is an informative video on the topic. Just a heads up, there are disturbing content and themes here. This topic is not for the feint of heart. https://www.you…

The part we're "out of the loop" on is how this is any way related to MKUltra.

Re: YouTube Kids Is Going to Release a Whitelisted, Non-Algorithmic Version of App

#127

Post by jasonkostempski »

gowld wrote: post #112
jasonkostempski wrote: post #35

One step closer to the only thing I ever wanted, an app that lets me whitelist the channels. Without having to create an account too. The list will be small enough to store locally and pass with every list request. I never want to see another video about colors wrapped in bible verses for the rest of my life.

Like a Google Reader for videos!

Hmmm... Yes! I just realized that's exactly what I do for myself, I subscribe to YouTube channels using RSS and I have no YouTube account. For kids though, it would need to be able to display the thumbnails and play the video directly in the client (probably not possible with YouTube's API and probably not legal to do another way). They like playing things (a lot) more than once too, so it would probably need some features like keeping track of what they watch for more than a few seconds and keep those video hovering around in the lists for a bit. But, yes, it should basically just be a specialized RSS reader, however, I don't think we're ever going to get that from Google.

Re: YouTube Kids Is Going to Release a Whitelisted, Non-Algorithmic Version of App

#128

Post by faostb »

I had the same issue (bad content for kids on Kids Youtube) so I built http://kiddotube.com/ for my kid (be careful: it is just a micro ec2 instance) with only best youtube channels for kids. There is a "parent mode" in which I can disable channels, playlists or videos that I don't like.

Re: YouTube Kids Is Going to Release a Whitelisted, Non-Algorithmic Version of App

#129

Post by mcphage »

nojvek wrote: post #124
sametmax wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Children bellow 10 should not have access to internet without supervision IMO.

We’re visiting some friends in Australia and almost everyone has an ipad per kid with unrestricted YouTube access. They feel kids keep themselves entertained with iPads and games. Some of them have glasses at a young age since they look at the iPad so closely. I’m legit worried for the next generation of kids who grow up on YouTube consuming endless amounts of ads and crappy entertainment. Add that to the fact that a…

> I’m legit worried for the next generation of kids who grow up on YouTube consuming endless amounts of ads and crappy entertainment.

That's what we grew up on, too. I was hoping that streaming video would let me cut ads out of my kids' lives, but... they just changed form.

Re: YouTube Kids Is Going to Release a Whitelisted, Non-Algorithmic Version of App

#130

Post by mcphage »

username223 wrote: post #75
tzahola wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excuse me, but AFAIK it was 4chan who started calling out these videos in the first place.

Both can be true at the same time. 4chan is basically about pointing and laughing at things on the internet, right? So it doesn't matter much whether they're gaming YT's algorithm to show disturbing things to kids, or pointing to other people doing it. (Also, I find it weird to give a kindergartener unsupervised access to any internet device. They don't understand the threats they're confronting.)

> Also, I find it weird to give a kindergartener unsupervised access to any internet device. They don't understand the threats they're confronting.

That was the selling point of Youtube Kids—it wasn't supposed to be unsupervised access to the internet. It was supposed to be curated.

Post reply on HN