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YouTube has become the world's nanny

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91–100 of 403 posts

Re: YouTube has become the world's nanny

#91
post #5

The way children scream for my tablet time worse than they would for a bottle is terrifying. All those dopamine manipulation techniques made for adults are cleaning up with kids.

Frankly, kids want what you have. If it's bad, don't use it yourself! Having kids was the final trigger to make me get rid of my smartphone, although I admit this is an extreme step.

I'm gonna make a meme about a modern Harlow maternal contact experiment.

It was about how monkeys prefer to hug cloth wrapped wire frames rather than food.

https://www.psychologicalscience.org/publications/observer/o...

Re: YouTube has become the world's nanny

#92
post #64

I was raised on tech. A third generation computer user, started writing software at seven under my father’s guidance. A Luddite I am not, but this doesn’t bode well for our future. YouTube is basically an indoctrination engine for white nationalism. It’s more or less what the right claims the American higher education system is for the left, only there’s no conspiracy fantasy to it. https://www.theregister.com/2022/1…

Wikipedia also documents it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right_pipeline

Or if someone rather likes the article format:

https://bpr.berkeley.edu/2022/10/31/addressing-the-alt-right...

Re: YouTube has become the world's nanny

#93
post #60

To my grandparents / great grandparents generation at the time (70/80's) TV has become the world's nanny would have generated all the same comments as this. If you watched tv - the idiotbox - for more than 15 minutes your eyes would go square.

That is simply not true, with television you also had the panic of "brain rot" but at least you could still trust public television networks with not showing dubious content. Youtube for kids seems to be a rabbithole place where you end up with "Spiderman kisses Anna", very obvious advertisements or very trippy shows while on public television you had kid shows with educative touch on them (a visit to the forest, chi…

I don't know about you, but I spent a long time staring at cathode ray tubes when I was a kid and I think it certainly affected my cognition.

Re: YouTube has become the world's nanny

#94

what was surprising to me when I first accidentally stumbled into kids youtube a few years ago by accident was how, for a lack of a better term, fucking weird it is. For example this video from the mentioned channel in the article: https://youtu.be/D1LDPmYoYm4 I don't know what makes this so uncanny, maybe it's the budget animation combined with the nursery rhyme but I can't imagine wanting to watch this as a kid. It…

Anecdotally, my kids liked music videos like these a lot. And lol, this one is practically prison break.

Part of what drives huge view numbers tho is that small kids like to watch the same thing again and again and again. Easily, one kid can account for 1000 of views over few months. That is why stuff like "10 hours same song" exists.

Re: YouTube has become the world's nanny

#95

Yea I don’t have kids but I’ve seen it with all kids in my extended family. I like Youtube, there is content of tremendous value, for knowledge and entertainment. However, one thing I’ve personally observed is that too much of it can destroy your focus and motivation. There is some science in there about brain chemistry and reward systems, in line with what some pop scientists with Cal Newport and Andrew Huberman are…

I'd think a kid's brain's malleability is reason to limit bottomless pits even more strictly. As a father of three I know it's not always convenient. But kids usually find something else to do at some point. It's just really grating to wait that long.

[deleted]

Re: YouTube has become the world's nanny

#96
post #33

Re >> " Plenty of parents have the same debate in their own minds, or with partners and friends: Is letting kids use screens all right, and if so for how long? " As an anecdote, my mom would only allow me 15 minutes at a time of Tetris on the household GameBoy. My views on kids & screentime is pretty conservative, especially when they're younger, but my mom was down-right draconian!

Yeah kind of a similar story. We had our access to PC revoked when we were 10 because we did not switch off our Rollercoaster tycoon 2 session at 9PM.

Around that age i got my pc privileges revoked. "Grounded" was how it was referred. My parents both were tech savy. I managed to download a keylogger and swipe the login password before end of first week of punishment. I had access for HW, strictly hw. That's when i made a move. By 12 i had custom .exe made but god knows who with GUI capable of ddos among other nettools i shouldn't have had. Nobody taught those things to me. It just happened. Had the idea probably from a movie or tv..

Re: YouTube has become the world's nanny

#97
We've just had to stop our kids watching TV at all for a few weeks. They were getting addicted to YouTube. But their mood has been so much better without it. They've been playing more and talk to us more.

As a parent, regulating screen time is a battle of wits. The app is designed to you hooked. I would absolutely love them to have the option to "shutdown after the end of this video".

Re: YouTube has become the world's nanny

#98
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>My kid is 10 and still doesn't know a single Youtuber by name Authentic curiosity - does your child not go to a normal school? In my experience you can literally detach your home from the internet and live without electricity, but the second your kids go to school they instantly know all the latest fads and videos and what not. To make it to 10 without being at least somewhat familiar with youtube through that expo…

[flagged]

Terribly sorry that giving a shit about raising our kids is offensive to you.

I'd invite you to spend some time considering the difference between legacy childrens entertainment media and an algorithmically driven platform that has, at best, meagre ex-post-facto content moderation.

Re: YouTube has become the world's nanny

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My kids watch a bit of YT kids. I used to be dead against it. Two things happened: - One, my attention and energy is in fact finite. Perhaps I could work less, earn less, have more energy to give to them, but I just can't. - There is a lot of good stuff there, and I see positive aspects of it on my kids. They learn songs. One of my daughters knew the alphabet by the age of 2, the other could count to 20. The oldest o…

But why is YT necessary? Couldn’t you have given your kids access to a more curated and education-dedicated video platform instead? Heck, even Disney+ sounds better here.

> despite not having a good mechanistic explanation for why YT is OK even at small dosages

Do you have an explanation for YT is NOT ok even at small dosages?

Re: YouTube has become the world's nanny

#100
I physically removed our only television from the lounge to behind some furniture because our eldest (who was 6) was behaving more and more like a drug addict: alternating wheedling, begging, pleading, shouting, to get television.

Once I did that, and he saw it really wasn't an option, he changed quite quickly - after around 3 months - and we have it back now, although there's no screen time except weekends (or if someone's ill). Seems to be working so far.

Zero YouTube, though. Don't trust it. Might revisit at some point, but even then I'd want the paid version to remove ads.

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