Live data from Hacker News

YouTube Kids a “vapid wasteland” say US lawmakers

bbc.com

241–250 of 261 posts

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

#241
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How was Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood political?

https://www.biography.com/news/mister-rogers-officer-clemmon... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKy7ljRr0AA https://www.fredrogers.org/2021/03/12/daniel-tigers-neighbor...

I am still not clear how including black people or autistic people is political?

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

#242
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>It's not pretty, and you gotta save your "nos" for what matters. Yes, but I'd argue that this matters.

Sure but you don’t even need to use a “no” once you realize that YT Kids is hot garbage and make it not even an option anymore.

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

#243
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious of the long term effects. Like you, I also think it's a disgrace. I had a friend who to me basically seemed like they didn't like dealing with kids, so just gave her daughter a tablet she was glued to at all times. I mean, young, I don't remember the age now but less than 2? She never made eye contact or any noise, just messing with the tablet. I can't help but think there's going to be a whole generation…

I can't be the only person here who spent their youth glued to a computer, can I?

There are arguments made for and against that as well, but having a toddler glued to a tablet definitely doesn't seem right.

Also (assuming you were born in the 80s/early 90s), the internet of our childhood is VASTLY different from what it is today... Both in good ways and bad, but mostly bad ways.

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

#244
It's been interesting watching the slightly slippery slope of YouTube with our children (now 7 and 10). A lot of good stuff isn't on YouTube Kids - to give an example off the top of my head, the Royal Institution channel with its Christmas lectures and lots of other really good content isn't on there. They also got very much into building things with redstone with Minecraft and many of the videos explaining things related to that are only on the adult version. As a result, we quickly gave up on YouTube Kids.

There isn't any way to turn off recommendations that I could find and it's not realistic to pre-watch every video they watch and it's not easy to come up with good criteria for what it is ok for them to watch or not watch. I guess all you can do is keep half an eye on them while they are watching things. I think we've been lucky in terms of not hitting anything too terrible.

Not sure what the solution is. There's a difference between low-quality content and unsuitable content and every parent will have different options. I'd really like to be able to add and remove particular channels to YouTube Kids and to turn off the recommendations.

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

#245
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not though. For example I used to be in hobby X, so I watched a lot of X based videos. As I fell out of the hobby I stopped watching X videos, so Youtube stopped recommending them to me unless it thinks there is a REALLY good X based video it thinks I would like. YouTube also lets you easily add to your interests by directly searching for and watching videos about them. There is also the slow way where you have…

To thaw the freeze you almost have to be constantly fighting the suggestions true nature, constantly scolding it for getting stuck into too tight of loops. It only really works if you feed it lots of negative feedback. That said, I don’t personally use auto play often. I don’t let YouTube just pick random things for me over and over, unless it’s music in a background. Even on a tv I browse suggestions and pick one vs…

For me YouTube is almost always able to recommend me a video I want to watch. I don't even use the negative feedback. I don't ever feel like it's frozen because it's matching my interests. If my interests stay the same it makes sense for YouTube to recommend videos about things I like and from creators I like.

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

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't be the only person here who spent their youth glued to a computer, can I?

There are arguments made for and against that as well, but having a toddler glued to a tablet definitely doesn't seem right. Also (assuming you were born in the 80s/early 90s), the internet of our childhood is VASTLY different from what it is today... Both in good ways and bad, but mostly bad ways.

I suppose, but I'm not sure it was that much more salutary obsessively reading GameFAQs or Something Awful forums.

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

#247

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.

Many if not most people aren’t sitting over their kids as they watch YouTube. And it’s hard to get a 4/5 year old to comply to anything.

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

#248
It's interesting how quality has changed over the years for children videos.

This is what I watched when I was growing up (it came out in the late 70s, so it was already around for a while by then though): Schoolhouse Rock, Interplanet Janet [0]. This is really how I knew the planets growing up. "Mars is red, and Jupiter's big, and saturn shows off its riiiiings, uranus is built on a funny tilt, and neptune is its twiiin, and pluto little pluto is the furthest planet from the suuuun, whoo hoooo"

When my brother was growing up (around 2001, so I was 11 at that point), they had this song [1]. Kind of jazzy and relaxing. It went over the planets a few times in the verses, slowly taking the time to walk the children through it, and the way Nick Jr worked back in the day, the same episode would be on 3-4 times in a row every day, so the kid could really take it in. I could recite it from my head to this day.

A couple years later (2005) you start getting songs like this [2], I'm glad I didn't have to rely on this for memorizing the planets? Still, it's only a minute long, I think this is when kids started to hit lower attention spans.

I was trying to see what kids have these days. Since I'm basically seeing children as early as 5-6 months given an iphone/ipad to watch youtube, I figured I'd start there.... 99% of children's programming online is really crappy garbage shovelled out for dirt cheap with usually disturbing imagery subliminally thrown in. For example, this video [3] (I couldn't get through all three minutes, it was too monotone, repetitive, and the mouths on still frame were buttholes)

Jumping away from YouTube (originated content), I did find a shorter video by "Netflix Jr." [4]. It came recommended by reddit parents. Fastpaced rapping, jumping around, but not badly animated but I do wonder if children would grasp all of the concepts from it.

Trying to find the latest one that came out, was this [5] that wasn't hard for me to get through like the second-to-the last one (and hey it mentioned pluto lol)

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGgajx1pGPU

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zA8olJuyTyc

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgGbOrz3Bqk

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQrlgH97v94

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHAqT4hXnMw

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCxjuDePdCI

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

#249

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.

YouTube Kids has a setting for that, at least: https://www.techlicious.com/blog/curated-content-youtube-kid...

I’m unable to find that setting in the YouTube Kids app on my iPhone. Is it on yours?

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

#250
The solution is blatantly simple: don't let your children log into Google. Set their browsers to incognito mode and/or to accept - but delete - cookies on exit. The whole world wide web (including Youtube!) will be available to them, just with a severely crippled ability to suck them in using AI recommendations. Don't let young children watch unsupervised, and don't let Alphabet (or anyone else) track your children!
Post reply on HN