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

YouTube-dl can no longer download age-restricted videos

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 463 posts

Re: YouTube-dl can no longer download age-restricted videos

#121

Post by pbhjpbhj »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #36
noisy_boy wrote: post #28

Am I the only one who didn't even know that youtube had age-restricted videos? Somehow I have managed to watch it for years without ever getting prompted for age confirmation!

YouTube had to crack down on all kinds of videos because of some laws that congress passed under the pretense of "protecting children". For many content creators it's easier to mark your video as age-restricted than to try and comply with child-friendly guidelines. This is also why so many videos now disable the comments section.

That sounds fine to me; child friendly should mean 'beneficial to children' or at least designed for children and not 'no searching nor nudity [nor extreme violence]'.

Re: YouTube-dl can no longer download age-restricted videos

#122

Post by tomjen3 »

Spivak wrote: post #81
wyager wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is parents’ job, not Google’s. If you legally require Google to act like a parent, they have to do it to everyone.

Sounds good. Say I'm a non-technical parent that wants to give my child access to YouTube but not allow them to watch content that they're not old enough to consume on their own. How should I do this? I want to give them the freedom to explore topics they're interested in so downloading some pre-approved videos isn't going to work. And my kid is smart and will realize that any account-specific setting can trivially b…

Sit down next to your kid.

Or anything else that doesn't fuck with my ability not to be tracked by google.

Re: YouTube-dl can no longer download age-restricted videos

#123

Post by bsdubernerd »

noisy_boy wrote: post #28

Am I the only one who didn't even know that youtube had age-restricted videos? Somehow I have managed to watch it for years without ever getting prompted for age confirmation!

I've watched a few channels on retro-gaming where the authors intentionally marked the video as "age-resticted" with the usual disclaimer "the video might contain images that can be disturbing to some people". As in, 8bit gore.

Sadly, the authors need to do this preemptively to avoid getting flagged and potentially taken down.

Needless to say, I was using ytdl to bypass the limit, and I won't be able to watch these videos anymore. I'm not going to log in or give my ID to google.

Re: YouTube-dl can no longer download age-restricted videos

#124

Post by growse »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #98
wyager wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is parents’ job, not Google’s. If you legally require Google to act like a parent, they have to do it to everyone.

Well then parents should apply legislative pressure, which should arrive at Google as "fix this or we legislate", and bingo, Google need to do something. That is parents doing parenting. Parenting happens through societal structures.

When parenting your own kids isn't enough, but you feel you need to parent everyone else's as well.

Re: YouTube-dl can no longer download age-restricted videos

#127

Post by mrweasel »

manigandham wrote: post #99
gruez wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That totally makes sense from a software engineering point of view. The age check was probably implemented as a "verified_age" column somewhere, and they didn't bother backfilling it with your existing google account info.

It doesn't make sense for a trillion-dollar company known for some of the best software engineering. There are remarkable lapses in UX with Google products.

Someday I hope to read an article or watch a talk explaining Googles approach to UX.

The best UX in a Google apps seems to be Gmail, and that’s honestly not that good either.

Google is able to build insanely complicated infrastructure, design cool languages, they produced fantastic backend software and the they completely forget that people need to interact with it.

Re: YouTube-dl can no longer download age-restricted videos

#128

Post by bencollier49 »

macintux wrote: post #50
bencollier49 wrote: post #34

I've found YouTube increasingly unusable in general over the last few months. It seems to be pushing absolute rubbish at me. There's a gap in the market for a music-only video service.

Given the glut of music streaming services, it seems unlikely to me someone could make money trying to compete with all of those and YouTube simultaneously.

I honestly believe that there's a market for people who want to watch a series of related music videos, and not have "A Vocal Coach Reacts to Silk Sonic!" pushed onto them.

Re: YouTube-dl can no longer download age-restricted videos

#129

Post by sp332 »

tpxl wrote: post #112
moogleii wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, when does Apple ask for a cc for age verification? I don't think I've come across that UI. Edit: Looks like it might be an EU thing?

I set my age to about 3 months old in Skype and got locked out. They need my CC to verify my age because of COPA (child online protection act in the US) or something.

But other websites don't do this, so I don't think it's a COPPA thing.

Re: YouTube-dl can no longer download age-restricted videos

#130

Post by danShumway »

StavrosK wrote: post #54
jeroenhd wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK the age restriction credit card thing (inside the EU) is the result of some stupid law change (the Audiovisual Media Services Directive). Google probably doesn't want to validate users' age (because selling ads to impressionable kids is very lucrative) but they have to now.

> Google probably doesn't want to validate users' age (because selling ads to impressionable kids is very lucrative) but they have to now. I mean, I hate this age validation as much as everyone else, curbing advertising to impressionable kids doesn't sound too stupid to me...

Well, the devil is in the details. In practice, making sure that kids can't see certain content or making sure that they never get advertised to often involves age validation.

There's some stuff we can do with content that is targeted at kids, I don't think those laws are inherently bad. Although... last time we tried to expand laws around advertising in content directed toward kids, that resulted in a huge number of game streamers and animators getting demonetized, to the point where Youtubers were doing wild things like swearing more in their videos so they could prove that they weren't targeted at kids. We seem to have a lot of difficulty articulating legally what the difference is between "kid appropriate" and "kid targeted" is, particularly when it comes to stuff like video games or "wholesome" (for lack of a better word) content.

To me, it's very much a "who's going to bell the cat" policy. I don't want kids to be subjected to so much advertising, it's a great policy. In theory. But I have not so far seen any practical implementations of age restrictions online that haven't either been completely worthless or really problematic for both privacy and free expression.

Post reply on HN