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YouTube Kids a “vapid wasteland” say US lawmakers

bbc.com

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Re: YouTube Kids a “vapid wasteland” say US lawmakers

#41

Post by thebigman433 »

Sargos wrote: post #3

My kiddo uses YouTube Kids daily and I find it to be a great service with shows like Katie's Classroom which is like video preschool.

I work in a preschool and we love playing the kids yoga/movement based songs for the kids sometimes. During the winter when its too cold to play outside, we do some kids yoga and the kids love it. There are tons of good channels with this kind of content that are, imo, super beneficial

Re: YouTube Kids a “vapid wasteland” say US lawmakers

#42

Post by makomk »

One unintended consequence of the FTC settlement mentioned in the article is that almost no-one wants to create high quality kid-friendly content anymore, because doing so forces them to accept huge restrictions on how everyone interacts with it - now no-one can add those videos to playlists or leave comments on them, by FTC decree, even if they're adults on the main version of YouTube. So anyone producing content that isn't vapid trash and could actually attract a wide audience is incentivised to aggressively exclude kids from that audience.

Re: YouTube Kids a “vapid wasteland” say US lawmakers

#43

Post by wffurr »

Bellamy wrote: post #11

Bigger problem is the parents who let their children watch youtube or whatever way too much.

Sure, blame the parents, and not the society that leaves us all exhausted from working too much and the dopamine-optimized algorithmic engagement furnace that is YouTube.

Yeah just keep blaming parents. That'll make everything better.

Re: YouTube Kids a “vapid wasteland” say US lawmakers

#45

Post by theshrike79 »

drewcon wrote: post #21

Can confirm. There is a strain of video (below) on there that is just like perceptual candy to kids. And there are LOADS of these videos in slightly different versions. My own anecdote: Our 2 year old found these videos (3 years ago): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7IsNFDtG4U&list=PLHZrFxrJbt... At first we were like "seems fine, colors and shapes...keeps him engaged". After a month or two he could just stare slack…

Content farming at its best. Cheap assets and autogenerated computer voice, someone is churning a dozen of these every day with different subjects.

Then they're posted to dozens of YT channels in different languages with highly algorithm-optimised names and descriptions.

Boom, money.

Re: YouTube Kids a “vapid wasteland” say US lawmakers

#46

Post by 2pEXgD0fZ5cF »

drewcon wrote: post #21

Can confirm. There is a strain of video (below) on there that is just like perceptual candy to kids. And there are LOADS of these videos in slightly different versions. My own anecdote: Our 2 year old found these videos (3 years ago): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7IsNFDtG4U&list=PLHZrFxrJbt... At first we were like "seems fine, colors and shapes...keeps him engaged". After a month or two he could just stare slack…

The people at Google/Youtube really make it hard for quality content to succeed most of the time and their beloved algorithms mostly just boil down to "If a person clicks X, bombard them with as much things as close to X as possible from now on". (Also their obsession with "engagement" which translates to outrage, but I hope this is less relevant in Youtube Kids...)

The danger for kids also stems from this in my opinion, if the wrong kind of video creeps into autoplay everything goes down the drain FAST with almost no chance to recover for the better by itself. Cheap and almost copied content gets rewarded the most.

Re: YouTube Kids a “vapid wasteland” say US lawmakers

#48

Post by kube-system »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #31

What's so stupid is trying to avoid having humans in the loop. Paying an educator to find 100 hours of decent content per age level couldn't cost much. It isn't youtube, it doesn't have to be endless. But it needs to be good and appropriate. Human curation is the right thing to do.

That seems to be antithetical to Alphabet's core strategy: automate everything.

Re: YouTube Kids a “vapid wasteland” say US lawmakers

#49

Post by jariel »

US Lawmakers discover their entire culture is built around consumerism?

This is an Onion headline?

In Canada, we have 'CBC for Kids' which thankfully is not consumerist, but is bizarrely more ideological than anything else.

An series about 'violent dodgeball' in which the whiny teacher was adamant that "Children should not be targets!" - child after child interviewed indicated their love of the sport, that they enjoyed being targeted and 'dodging', the apparent enthusiasm and joy in their faces was a welcome bit of honest dismissal of some early stage priming. The poor narrative maker couldn't find a single child to back his meme.

I'm curious to know just how savvy YouTube kids are, and how early they find out they're being hustled - that would be an interesting study.

Re: YouTube Kids a “vapid wasteland” say US lawmakers

#50

Post by IAmWorried »

drewcon wrote: post #21

Can confirm. There is a strain of video (below) on there that is just like perceptual candy to kids. And there are LOADS of these videos in slightly different versions. My own anecdote: Our 2 year old found these videos (3 years ago): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7IsNFDtG4U&list=PLHZrFxrJbt... At first we were like "seems fine, colors and shapes...keeps him engaged". After a month or two he could just stare slack…

Am I the only one who doesn't see what's so creepy about this? It's a bunch of colors, and cars being dipped into the colors, with dumb music and sfx. Is it really so harmful? Honestly curious as I don't have kids of my own, so not sure.
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