YouTube Kids a “vapid wasteland” say US lawmakers • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by wffurr » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 8:16 PM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #79

wffurr wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem with society is that we've gotten to a point where everything is always somebody else's fault. No one is ever responsible for anything, it must be the fault of social conditioning, corporations, religions, upbringing, or literally anything else you want to blame. Sure those things play a part, but ultimately people are responsible for what they do. If someone is letting their 3 year old spend hours in fro…

Come back to me when you've come home from a long workday to deal with the results of telling a small child "no" yet again. It's not pretty, and you gotta save your "nos" for what matters.

Setting up some parent to believe that letting their kid explore YouTube Kids on their own is a good idea through your marketing and then having the vast majority of the content on the service be low quality dreck with no redeeming value is setting up parents for failure.

YouTube Kids either needs to curate a lot better (as if) or back off on their marketing claims.

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

#112

Post by allworknoplay » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 8:16 PM UTC

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…

Let me get this straight -- a commercial ad-driven marketplace supplies a very substantial amount of content consumed by children and markets it as educational (and/or allows such marketing), parents are not educational experts, and you think it's problematic that the government might see a need to step in, starting with some basic fact-finding?

Nobody is shutting the service down, dude. Maybe we find that nothing is really wrong. Maybe we challenge the company to more appropriately rate content that's marketed as educational, or do better ad filtering, so that parents can make informed decisions. Right now there are pretty clearly no requirements and lots of obviously false pedagogical claims, and parents can't afford to pre-vet all the content their kids might watch (and the marketing tells them they shouldn't have to).

I don't see what your problem is. This is a major new phenomenon facing parents, it's super weird that you think some fact-finding is nanny pearl clutching.

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

#113

Post by vkou » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 8:17 PM UTC

c3534l wrote: post #63

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…

Having never seen any of these videos, that video is weirdly engaging. It has something logical to it, but its way more abstract than a true story. Its actually really fascinating that there is some thread to follow along with and a certain amount of surprise even if it is largely meaningless. It makes me think that once you've memorized all the narrative and visual tropes of western media, your bog standard reality…

> It makes me think that once you've memorized all the narrative and visual tropes of western media, your bog standard reality TV is probably as intellectually engaging as videos like these.

As someone who can't help but look for those narrative and visual tropes, I can indeed confirm that the bog standard reality TV show, and the vast majority of non-reality TV shows are about this intellectually un-engaging.

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

#114

Post by wffurr » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 8:17 PM UTC

HideousKojima wrote: post #78

wffurr wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Being a parent is about sacrifice, lots and lots of it. That includes working yourself beyond exhaustion to provide for, feed, play with, give attention to, and talk with your kids. It isn't easy, but it's the moral responsibility of everyone who becomes a parent. I realize a huge percentage of parents fail at this (some more than others), and the amount of work that must be done to make a living and the ease with wh…

Yeah and the issue here is the marketing claims behind YouTube Kids are straight up false. It's setting up parents for failure by piling onto the already-exhausting burden.

It's just plain wrong.

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

#115

Post by corysama » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 8:18 PM UTC

stefan_ wrote: post #96

theshrike79 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Who is paying money to target kids that young?

Advertising to kids has traditionally been profitable since the invention of cartoons. But, this is pretty much entirely poorly-managed advertising money being sucked up by content farmers. YouTube makes huge profits directing completely useless ads to tens of millions of rapt toddlers watching reptile-brain videos for hours a day.

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

#116

Post by trentnix » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 8:18 PM UTC

allworknoplay wrote: post #112

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…

Let me get this straight -- a commercial ad-driven marketplace supplies a very substantial amount of content consumed by children and markets it as educational (and/or allows such marketing), parents are not educational experts, and you think it's problematic that the government might see a need to step in, starting with some basic fact-finding? Nobody is shutting the service down, dude. Maybe we find that nothing is…

This is a major new phenomenon facing parents

No. It's not. That's the whole point.

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

#117

Post by abhishekbasu » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 8:20 PM UTC

spicybright wrote: post #64

abhishekbasu wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think YouTube is at its heart fundamentally incompatible with providing only high quality enriching content. I think this is in some ways similar to reddit. While there are some great threads from time-to-time, it is a way for people to quickly vent/amuse themselves.

Once I un-subscribed from all the defaults and main stream subs, content got wildly better for me. I still appreciate being able to pick what subreddits I see, instead of a big prediction engine pulling from different subs I may like. Huge ones like /r/askreddit are like tabloids. Same with any big /r/*advice. Niche subreddits are so good though. Ex: https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberDeck/

That's a great point, and is in fact something I wanted to touch upon in my previous comment. Being able to choose great subreddits is a big plus, and to be fair there are great YT creators who create great niche content. But a common theme has been that they usually start small in size (hence niche) but the moment they grow big, they start to "look" similar to the large channels/subreddits: for YT, they start getting bombarded with clickbait titles, sponsored videos (not just an ad/video). For reddit, "funny"/"flaming" comments hijack every discussion.

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

#118

Post by indymike » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 8:20 PM UTC

My kids HATE YouTube kids. It's utterly devoid of actual content, and I suspect it's sole reason for existence is to force parents to help their children lie about their age so they can access actual content on real YouTube. Google's family features really are quite terrible... For example, with Google Family, kids can't log into Google Play Games which blocks most games on Android, once again giving parents the choice to lie about the kids age, shut off all parental controls or basically tell your kids, "no games until you are 14". Likewise with YouTube Music, kids under 14 cannot even use it. So if you buy a family subscription, your kids can't use it unless you tell Google your kids are 14. The whole experience is shabby, and I think they could do a lot better. It is almost as if they design family features to suck so completely and utterly that you have to bypass them... Also, for kids over 14, there's no way to block them from making purchases with the family payment method...

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

#119

Post by duxup » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 8:20 PM UTC

briga wrote: post #110

duxup wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I agree so much that I'd argue in a very general sense that PBS is also better content for adults... everyone ;)

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

#120

Post by freetime2 » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 8:20 PM UTC

Both of my kids watched YouTube kids on their iPad from around 2-4 years old. There is definitely some garbage on there (I'm looking at you surprise egg unboxing videos), but there is also a lot of content on there that I found pretty clever. Anyway - the point in our house was never to be educational, it was to give our kids (and us) 30 minutes to just chill out and relax. And it was extremely good in that capacity.

The worries about commercialism turned out to be unfounded in our case. Yes - there were a few times that they wanted a toy they saw on YouTube, but they soon realized after getting their hands on them that in reality most of that stuff is crap. They pretty quickly grew out of watching/coveting toys they saw there, and in fact, I have found that they seem to be far less interested in toys than I was at their age.

I also always got the feeling that a lot of content on PBS kids was more geared at parents than children. "Little Einsteins" for example isn't a bad show, but feels a little heavy handed to me in the degree to which it moralizes and pushes things like classical music appreciation on small children. Honestly, I really don't see a lot of value in teaching a three year old the theme to Beethoven's 9th symphony vs. Baby Shark. And it never held my kids' attention like YouTube kids could.

A bigger concern for me now is just the addictiveness of the iPad/iPhone in general. They both lost interest in YouTube Kids around 4 years old, but they haven't lost interest in those devices. Our older son in particular could spend a whole day clicking mindlessly around iOS if we didn't limit him. So could I, for that matter.