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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

#101

Post by trentnix »

Someone1234 wrote: post #87
trentnix wrote: post #67

sigh Government nanny pearl-clutching over children's entertainment is a time-honored tradition. They said comic books rotted kids brains in the 50s. They said He-Man was too violent in the 80s. They said video games were training killers in the 90s. They said animated shows had too many advertisements, introduced regulations to limit how much time could be allocated to commercials for animated shows, and ultimately…

That's all well and good, but YouTube Kids lacks the TOOLS that parents need to help protect their children from the junk. The problem is that there's no money to be made from curation and high costs in doing so, therefore Google/YouTube simply does the bare minimum to avoid critique. You can ban individual videos and even channels, but this "solution" scales poorly with near infinite videos/channels, much of it unsu…

I have no interest in Youtube (or the government) deciding what is suitable and unsuitable. They've both failed miserably at similar efforts elsewhere.

I can get behind the idea that I'd like better tools to monitor and curate the video content being streamed to my kids. I'd even be willing to pay for it! But I am not compelled at all that government needs to do something.

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

#103

Post by banana_giraffe »

jariel wrote: post #65
2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 opin…

It's uncanny how bad the major players are at this. You can click here [1] to see your supposed 'interests'. It's uncannily bad. 'Combat Sports' , 'Boating', 'Construction and Power Tools' and 'Cricket' (!) apparently among interests they think I haven though they are subjects which don't cross my mind. I don't think I've even thought about 'Cricket' other than for them to tell me it's 'an interest'. [1] https://adss…

Hah. For a job I had for a while I had to routinely search for movie names to make sure I got the spelling correct. Now google thinks I enjoy all the genres known.

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

#104

Post by basch »

dylan604 wrote: post #94
spicybright wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kids should only be able to view content vetted by a human. Full stop. Too bad it's never going to happen.

Historically, that human was called a parent. Parents today have no chance at the on-slaught of content and the delivery mechanisms for it. When I was a kid, there were 3 networks with a handful of UHF channels. Cartoons only ran on Saturday morning, most channels went off the air at midnight, and the TV censors were much more strict with would could be on the air. My parents had it easy. When I became a parent, the…

There was also a network level curator like PBS, Nickelodeon or Disney. Are there people/teams making vetted youtube playlists of content that surpasses a certain level of quality?

That would be an interesting Kids mode. "Only allow videos from playlists that have been added/sunk to this account." Kind of a middle ground between making Google the content arbitrator and being able to watch every video before your kids do.

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

#105

Post by the_only_law »

crispyambulance wrote: post #57
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…

That channel, OKKYDOKY, has 1.2 MILLION views. Who makes that stuff? WHY? It even purports to be from the USA. It's just some weird anonymous garbage. How do the people that make that stuff sleep at night? It's like they're trying to exploit glitches in the brains of toddlers.

I’ve wondered too. I remember looking into the various conspiracies / scandals from a few years back (Elsagate and similar things) and some of it was just extremely bizarre (and likely frightening to some kids) and just had such a mass of content.

There are all sorts of conspiracies from some psyop stuff to AI/ML generated content. I have not ideas what to even begin to think.

The easiest answer I suppose is just some companies found an easy way to mass produce videos towards an demographic that will not mind mindless clicking, and that that will translate to more views and more money. That still doesn’t explain the bizarre and disturbing content some of them put out.

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

#106

Post by oceanghost »

makomk wrote: post #42

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 th…

This is infuriating as a parent. My daughter likes certain videos, and I have to write down the titles of her favorite videos to search for them every time she asks for them. (We watch YouTube on an nvidia shield).

I honestly don't understand how this restriction makes sense, it all seems punitive.

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

#107

Post by ModernMech »

IAmWorried wrote: post #50
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.

This video needs to be taken down immediately. For one, it normalizes a bloated police apparatus. The concept of a Ferrari police car is an abomination. Secondly, it presents a distorted view of fluid dynamics, Newtonian physics, and material science. Why does the paint move like that? Why is the reflective car absorbing paint like a sponge? Why doesn't the car follow a ballistic trajectory? Kids need to be protected from these things.

If you think this concern is overblown, just look at what Wile E. Coyote did to a generation of children. People grow up thinking you can walk off a cliff and not fall to your doom until you look down. We were told it was just a joke, but look at the dire consequences.

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

#108

Post by ASalazarMX »

plank_time wrote: post #36

My kid had a great experience with YouTube kids. He learned so much from it, it shocked me. At one point he memorized all the presidents and very detailed minutiae about the dwarf planets, most I had never heard of. My friends had a worse experience. Their daughter started watching cosplay videos where actors would dress up like Elsa and the Joker, and the Joker would kidnap Elsa and tie her up. Borderline porn and p…

> Then she got fixated on makeup videos and they couldn’t stop her from watching those.

If the kid has the last word on what she watches, the parents have their own problems. A family is more like a monarchy than a democracy, children can't outvote parents.

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

#109

Post by vkou »

dylan604 wrote: post #94
spicybright wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kids should only be able to view content vetted by a human. Full stop. Too bad it's never going to happen.

Historically, that human was called a parent. Parents today have no chance at the on-slaught of content and the delivery mechanisms for it. When I was a kid, there were 3 networks with a handful of UHF channels. Cartoons only ran on Saturday morning, most channels went off the air at midnight, and the TV censors were much more strict with would could be on the air. My parents had it easy. When I became a parent, the…

> Historically, that human was called a parent. Parents today have no chance at the on-slaught of content and the delivery mechanisms for it.

Unless you're letting a tablet, or the television raise your children, it's not because of the onslaught of content. The onslaught of content is nothing new - for the past century, mass media was producing more content than you could ever consume.

The problem is that parents aren't putting in the time and energy to curate the content their children consume. (I'm explicitly not going to go into the social reasons why, it's an interesting topic, but not really pertinent to this thread. Some people in this thread are bringing up technical reasons why, which I feel is more pertinent.)

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

#110

Post by briga »

duxup wrote: post #16
briga wrote: post #5

I would agree with the assessment, but isn't your typical kids TV channel just as vapid? Are US lawmakers worried about the ads and commercialism we bombard our children with on conventional television?

Depends on the channel. We have a dedicated public television channel where I am and the content is significantly better than YouTube: https://pbskids.org/ My kids will tell me about history and science that they pick up from those shows. I don't think I've ever heard anything from them that I liked when it came to YouTube content.

PBS and similar publicly funded channels seems to be the exception rather than the rule here. Apparently taking market forces out of the equations is a good way to make better content for kids
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