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YouTube's CEO limits his kids' social media use – other tech bosses do the same

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Re: YouTube's CEO limits his kids' social media use – other tech bosses do the same

#171
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>“We do limit their time on YouTube and other platforms and other forms of media. On weekdays we tend to be more strict, on weekends we tend to be less so. We’re not perfect by any stretch,” >He stressed “everything in moderation” is what works best for him and his wife, and that extends to other online services and platforms. >YouTube’s former CEO Susan Wojcicki, also barred her children from browsing videos on the…

My kids aren’t allowed on YouTube. I run a local system that mirrors approved channels to our home server and serves them through Plex. Creators lose ad revenue; that’s unfortunate. The alternative was nonstop ads on children’s content and a recommendation system pushing garbage. That trade-off was unacceptable.

> I run a local system that mirrors approved channels to our home server and serves them through Plex. Creators lose ad revenue; that’s unfortunate.

Have your home server note when the kids are watching one of your mirrored channels and launch a browser on a computer the kids cannot see that is watching the same video on YouTube without an ad blocker.

The video creators then get exactly the same ad revenue and view counts they would have gotten had the kids used YouTube.

Re: YouTube's CEO limits his kids' social media use – other tech bosses do the same

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My son has a friend that went the sports route. He is always trying to sneak Roblox screen time when he is over on a play date and when my kid goes over to his house, his parents are very strict about no screen time and they have a great time. It’s still up to the parent to enforce limitations even if you can distract them with other things.

Agreed, but at least they have those hours outside doing something physical.

He’s also very good at sports. My kid not so much but we have him in a couple of things.

Re: YouTube's CEO limits his kids' social media use – other tech bosses do the same

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, but at least they have those hours outside doing something physical.

He’s also very good at sports. My kid not so much but we have him in a couple of things.

Doesn't matter as long as he's having fun.

Re: YouTube's CEO limits his kids' social media use – other tech bosses do the same

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Careful. Waldorf schools have some great ideas but they’re also rife with crackpottery and are somewhat cult-like in many ways.

Curious about the crackpottery and cultiness? I’m on board with some of their rules, but no listening to prerecorded music is where they lose me.

All Waldorf schools aren’t created equal, but things I’ve seen are anti-vax beliefs, hard belief in mystical karmic stuff, a sort of groupthink that encourages conformity and obedience and shunning of people who question authority, and (and this one is really strange IMO) a prohibition on fantasy play among the children (eg you aren’t allowed to pretend you’re running a restaurant and your friends are guests —- for reasons of crackpottery).

Re: YouTube's CEO limits his kids' social media use – other tech bosses do the same

#175
post #58

All ages benefit from time-limited exposure to social media. We have a term for it now: brainrot. Fully convinced it is the cigarettes of our generation: ubiquitous enough to be pervasive despite negative externalities.

In schools there should be a class about safe internet use and it should be mandatory to write an essay about the benefits children get personally from using social media as well as the downsides.

Saying this as a current high school student: there should be as few mandatory classes as possible. Your maths, sciences, and Englishes make sense. In Ontario, we also have to take French (bit more iffy, but I guess it's an official language), Civics (fluff), careers (more fluff), and technology and the skilled trades (I like technology, but still fluff). The more classes you stuff into school that don't relate to what a student wants to pursue, the more disengaged they become. Ironically, if this were a class, I, and most others would be on our phones for pretty much all of it.

Re: YouTube's CEO limits his kids' social media use – other tech bosses do the same

#176
The world is going to be underwater in a couple decades and we're fighting the world's biggest companies from eviscerating children's public education. It's not looking good.

If there's any lesson to come from this (ha, learning) it's that we need to stop venerating successful business people. It turns out they're just people who like money and don't think about the consequences of their actions.

Re: YouTube's CEO limits his kids' social media use – other tech bosses do the same

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kids don’t stand a chance against decades of data/research and billions of dollars weaponized against human psychology to garner as much of your attention as possible at all times.

Kids should own a device with "adult" bit set to 0, so that they can only use government-approved applications and sites. Why government? Because parents are too lazy or dumb to configure anything and 90% will just let their children access whatever they want and the rest 10% will feel like losers who cannot watch the things all their classmates are allowed to watch.

What happens when the kid eventually becomes an adult? They have to buy a new device? That seems like an really great way to create a bunch of unnecessary e-waste.

Also, letting Big Daddy Government control what we show the kids has got to be one of the worst ideas I've heard. Propaganda machines that parents have no power over? No thanks. That seems like the most likely outcome of this sort of measure. Next thing you know, every computer will also have a "activist" and "journalist" bit; once you normalize role-based access controls, the catgories will only ever expand.

Re: YouTube's CEO limits his kids' social media use – other tech bosses do the same

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is exactly what hard parenting is all about. I do “as long as you under my roof…” bit (6 more years to go…) :)

I think the problem is that parents don't know that it's bad so they don't limit but this CEO apparently knows! Many parents are addicts themselves

honest question - do you really think that (most) parents do not know that it is bad?! This “CEO” stuff is not new, Steve Jobs famously said the same thing about his own devices…

Re: YouTube's CEO limits his kids' social media use – other tech bosses do the same

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Breaking: Willy Wonka execs don’t let their kids eat unlimited amount of candy. See how uninteresting and obvious that is?

Only if your mental model equates youtube to junk food.

And yet, would that be wrong?

Re: YouTube's CEO limits his kids' social media use – other tech bosses do the same

#180

This thread is person after person saying “oh wow, person who sells terrible thing for humanity doesn’t let their kids have unlimited access to terrible thing! It’s so obvious. This isn’t news.” The news is that the CEO of youtube is saying that Youtube is something that should be limited and he thinks harm will come to his children if he does not. This may be obvious to people on this site but a lot of normal people…

Seems like a pathetic appeal to authority to me. Why should I care what weird idiosyncrasies billionaires have? I'm sure they have tons of things they don't want their children learning that a lot of people would consider to be trivial. In my mind this goes back to whether you model children as property that you own or individual humans you're hoping to introduce to the world in the best way you understand how. It sucks that other people's children are going to youtube to turn off their brains. But my kids are excelling because of it and similar services. My girls are constantly trying new things because of what they see on social media and youtube. My 12 year old daughter already plays flute, violin and cello but wants to pick up the saxophone because of content she has consumed. We get everything from weird science experiments to a desire to try sewing or knitting. When people talk about the "dangers" of the internet and social media I struggle to understand what they mean because it's always been an enabler to me to excel. Somewhere along the way so called "hackers" wanted to create safe spaces to completely isolate their children from any variables the world can throw at them and I just cannot understand the mentality.
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