Completely banning all of YouTube feels like throwing out the baby—valuable educational content—with the bathwater—everything else. It seems more effective for YouTube to offer a dedicated educational platform, like education.youtube.com, with content filters built in. That way, students could access channels like 3blue1brown without exposure to unrelated or less appropriate content like MrBeast or Jubilee. Heck, I m…
Do you want mere children exposed to David Attenborough and Mister Rogers?
Oh, is that the majority of their content, traditional educational content? I must be mistaken in thinking they were funneling their audience into “shorts” and that kids obviously naturally recoil from “shorts” as much as they do green veggies and chores…
Completely banning all of YouTube feels like throwing out the baby—valuable educational content—with the bathwater—everything else. It seems more effective for YouTube to offer a dedicated educational platform, like education.youtube.com, with content filters built in. That way, students could access channels like 3blue1brown without exposure to unrelated or less appropriate content like MrBeast or Jubilee. Heck, I m…
The bathwater is not any specific piece of content but the YouTube discovery and recommendation algorithm. As long as that's in place, there will be incentive to create terrible "slop" content to get into "education.youtube.com" and collect ad revenue. The same thing happened with kids.youtube.com[1] and I don't see a solution other than hand-curating channels for inclusion. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate
Well put. I do not agree with the clumsy approach taken by countries like Australia, UK, and Texas, but I absolutely consider youtube and social media problems responsible for the tsunami of lowest-common-denominator slop. Free market/user choice idealists need to face up to the fact that slops is bad and lowers standards rather than elevating them, because the economic incentives tilt in favor of low quality, sensationalism, and so on. To some extent that's a reflection of the viewing/clicking population, but that doesn't mean that you should always just give people more of what they want. We tried that with high fructose corn syrup and the result is whole populations ravaged by obesity and diabetes.
Completely banning all of YouTube feels like throwing out the baby—valuable educational content—with the bathwater—everything else. It seems more effective for YouTube to offer a dedicated educational platform, like education.youtube.com, with content filters built in. That way, students could access channels like 3blue1brown without exposure to unrelated or less appropriate content like MrBeast or Jubilee. Heck, I m…
https://nebula.tv seems like it's basically that, just curated podcasts. Although 3blue1brown isn't on there.
Nebula is nice, but has a very specific ideological leaning. It's basically paid "breadtube".
It's not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I don't know what the right metaphor is. Throwing the scrap of edible meat out with the ton of rotten flesh? YouTube has got really bad in recent years. There are channels deliberately trying to get through to kids with horrific content. And of course the tobacco, gambling and sugar industries trying to turn our kids into addicts. They are often only one or two click…
That edible meat is close to being the only edible thing around though. Can you really name anything on the level of 3Blue1Brown available for free? Hopefully this forces Youtube to set up a limited educational version that the Australian government would be ok with.
Most (all?) top universities have free educational content, often including entire courses, available. For instance here [1] is MIT's open courseware site where you can download all the required media, including lecture video/notes/problem sets/exams/etc, for courses - completely for free.
Things like this are generally going to be orders of magnitude better than any YouTube video.
A couple months ago, I saw people everywhere online (including HN) saying they love the idea of social media bans for kids. They love the idea of keeping people under 18 safe from the dangers of porn and mature games and other unclean things as well. Now governments around the world are acting in unison to happily give those people what they want, and people are suddenly confused and pissed that these laws mean you n…
I think the concern about how this will be implemented (e.g. selfie and ID submission) is well-founded. I also think that letting tech companies make billions by feeding our youth mental junk food is a problem. I'm not sure where the middle path is, but I think it'll need some real thought to figure out.
A couple months ago, I saw people everywhere online (including HN) saying they love the idea of social media bans for kids. They love the idea of keeping people under 18 safe from the dangers of porn and mature games and other unclean things as well. Now governments around the world are acting in unison to happily give those people what they want, and people are suddenly confused and pissed that these laws mean you n…
Teens are old enough to find their way around any content bans. This seems like a good way to introduce teens to VPN's and skirting content regulations early. It's also dumb because YouTube can teach you almost anything, I'd say it's the "best of the worst" when it comes to social media on the internet.
Good, at least they'll learn a useful skill in the process.
Unlike what happens if they open the app and are pushed to doom scroll through dozens of videos on every 10 min school break.