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Our first building block in tech for tykes: YouTube Kids

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Re: Our first building block in tech for tykes: YouTube Kids

#41

Post by johnmcverth »

ashark wrote: post #28
coldpie wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On PC, AdBlock works great on YouTube. If you're using a mobile app, yeah, I think you're SOL for now. I also would pay a monthly fee for an ad-free YouTube.

Recently, I've seen two things change on YouTube: 1) (a few months ago) Adblock stopped working. Fine, ads were rare, short, and skipable, didn't bother me enough to try to fix it. 2) (a few weeks ago) The percentage of videos displaying ads increased significantly, and most of them are now unskipable. I even had one that lasted for maybe two minutes with no sign of ending the other day (it hadn't repeated yet, it wa…

What are you even doing on a tech site if you can't even reinstall an adblocker and select the proper lists?

Re: Our first building block in tech for tykes: YouTube Kids

#43

Post by amitparikh »

jjoonathan wrote: post #35
tremendo wrote: post #26

I have a younger-than-thirteen daughter who would love to be able to post her video creations to YT too, and have her own channel. I had created a gmail account for her before, then she tried to create her channel and was asked for her DOB which she answered truthfully resulting in… not only no channel, her whole email was blocked and, according to their statement, eventually deleted. Yes, mea culpa. YT for kids is w…

Lying about your age to get around a low-stakes boneheaded policy is about as white as a lie can get. I still use my fake birthday (Jan 1 1984) for online accounts even though I'm 25. It's not exactly Rosa Parks level civil disobedience but it seems like the least I can do. January 1 birthdays both allow the provider to cover their ass and allow you to register your contempt for the silliness in a measurable fashion.

I still believe that COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act) is, overall, beneficial legislation that puts in place the minimum rules for protecting children's PII. As the Internet becomes more accessible to a younger audience, we should be considering the societal benefits of such legislation and how it should evolve with the technology. It's shortsighted to fault Google for complying with the law.

Re: Our first building block in tech for tykes: YouTube Kids

#44

Post by VLM »

jonnathanson wrote: post #17
thorntonbf wrote: post #7

I realize that full curation probably isn't possible as this thing scales, but as a parent, this thing will live or die based on the content they allow into the stream. I love watching videos of people building stuff with my kids. Moreover, I love watching the creativeness that some of the videos inspire in my kids. Unfortunately, to date, I have had to preview most of the content my children see on YouTube so that t…

This will absolutely require some human filtering, even if only as a backstop. That parents feel safe and comfortable with the content -- and all "adjacencies," such as comments, ads, and so forth -- is critical. I'm not sure what their content strategy will be, but by way of inference from public record (job listings, this blog post, etc.), I would guess that they're priming the pump with content from established, k…

"kid-friendly publishers"

What does that mean?

I'm one of those minecraft weirdos and I can authoritatively say based on many hours of entertainment viewing that Direwolf20 and Pahamir have never said anything non-G rated, at least in their team video series so far as I've seen. So that's boring and no point discussing.

And my son has this unique skill to find "lets play" minecraft videos where basically every other word is "fuck" every time a player sees an aggro mob or their pick breaks or just for fun, which seems to be quite often. So again thats boring and no point discussing.

Whats interesting to discuss is in between. OMGchad is about 99.9% G rated but when he gets really, really frustrated, like once every ten episodes, out comes "damn it" and my wife says "language, change the video" and I laugh because my wife says worse stuff than OMGchad and my son is going to be driving a car in a couple years and voting in a couple more and probably on 4chan etc and from my own memory of being his age I suspect he is quite familiar with all the swear words yet behaves himself in public so all is well.

So video training a 3 year old to walk around the house saying "damn it" randomly is not going to fly, but how about a kid who's in his last months of preteen? Especially if the video is 99.9% G rated? And I can see differing opinions, like a extreme fundamentalist being alot more worried about some Dawkins video than mere straight pr0n or something...

Re: Our first building block in tech for tykes: YouTube Kids

#45

Post by jameshart »

amitparikh wrote: post #43
jjoonathan wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lying about your age to get around a low-stakes boneheaded policy is about as white as a lie can get. I still use my fake birthday (Jan 1 1984) for online accounts even though I'm 25. It's not exactly Rosa Parks level civil disobedience but it seems like the least I can do. January 1 birthdays both allow the provider to cover their ass and allow you to register your contempt for the silliness in a measurable fashion.

I still believe that COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act) is, overall, beneficial legislation that puts in place the minimum rules for protecting children's PII. As the Internet becomes more accessible to a younger audience, we should be considering the societal benefits of such legislation and how it should evolve with the technology. It's shortsighted to fault Google for complying with the law.

COPPA doesn't ban Google from providing services to kids. It just means they have to put additional precautions in place if they do - which obviously costs money, so their default position has been to opt out of servicing kids at all. This youtube announcement obviously represents a realization that that cost may be worth bearing... presumably because raising a generation of youtube-savvy kids is going to build their market for the next generation.

Re: Our first building block in tech for tykes: YouTube Kids

#46

Post by j_s »

coldpie wrote: post #12
famousactress wrote: post #3

I can't find mention of whether or not there are ads. Ads are a deal-breaker for me with the kidlet. Currently whenever she asks to "See ostriches" or "People throwing fish!" (we brought her to Pike's Place market in Seattle and the kid was oddly obsesseed) it's a dice roll whether we sit through a Lexus ad. I'd happily pay a modest amount for a product like this one provided she doesn't have to see ads (regardless o…

On PC, AdBlock works great on YouTube. If you're using a mobile app, yeah, I think you're SOL for now. I also would pay a monthly fee for an ad-free YouTube.

As of Jan'2014, stopping YouTube ads requires blocking the following domains:

  ads.youtube.com
  s0.2mdn.net
  s1.2mdn.net
  googleads.g.doubleclick.net
Many routers include functionality to blacklist by domain, eg. Netgear: http://kb.netgear.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/20483/~/set-up...

Re: Our first building block in tech for tykes: YouTube Kids

#47

Post by ChrisOstler »

amitparikh wrote: post #43
jjoonathan wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lying about your age to get around a low-stakes boneheaded policy is about as white as a lie can get. I still use my fake birthday (Jan 1 1984) for online accounts even though I'm 25. It's not exactly Rosa Parks level civil disobedience but it seems like the least I can do. January 1 birthdays both allow the provider to cover their ass and allow you to register your contempt for the silliness in a measurable fashion.

I still believe that COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act) is, overall, beneficial legislation that puts in place the minimum rules for protecting children's PII. As the Internet becomes more accessible to a younger audience, we should be considering the societal benefits of such legislation and how it should evolve with the technology. It's shortsighted to fault Google for complying with the law.

For me, that's where it gets interesting: as I understand, it is perfectly legal for Google to provide services to children, but they must obtain parental consent, first [1]. The problem is that isn't something they're interested in doing.

[1] http://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/comp... Parental

Re: Our first building block in tech for tykes: YouTube Kids

#48

Post by VLM »

avalaunch wrote: post #16
thorntonbf wrote: post #7

I realize that full curation probably isn't possible as this thing scales, but as a parent, this thing will live or die based on the content they allow into the stream. I love watching videos of people building stuff with my kids. Moreover, I love watching the creativeness that some of the videos inspire in my kids. Unfortunately, to date, I have had to preview most of the content my children see on YouTube so that t…

I don't watch much on YouTube so they may already do some of this but it seems to me like this would be an easy problem to solve if they so desired. Add a rating system where the content creators rate themselves and an easy way for viewers to flag them as incorrectly rated. Add to that a confidence rating of how likely a video is correctly rated (based on number of views without flagging) and you could confidently le…

Whats it rating and how badly will it get abused?

Imagine a youtube video of President Obama's October 2nd 2002 speech on Iraq policy (not making this up, there is one...)

Or there's a classic nuclear winter / climate change-ish interview with Dr Carl Sagan right before he died in the early 90s.

Or any video that presents atheism or islam in a non-negative light. Say, a BBC interview with Richard Dawkins WRT his biographical book.

I suspect they'll be more than a little political gaming going on here, although theoretically a kid doing schoolwork could stumble upon them as a legitimate primary(ish) source.

Re: Our first building block in tech for tykes: YouTube Kids

#49

Post by VLM »

ChrisOstler wrote: post #47
amitparikh wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still believe that COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act) is, overall, beneficial legislation that puts in place the minimum rules for protecting children's PII. As the Internet becomes more accessible to a younger audience, we should be considering the societal benefits of such legislation and how it should evolve with the technology. It's shortsighted to fault Google for complying with the law.

For me, that's where it gets interesting: as I understand, it is perfectly legal for Google to provide services to children, but they must obtain parental consent, first [1]. The problem is that isn't something they're interested in doing. [1] http://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/comp... Parental

When this happened to my son, rather than deleting everything and losing all his contacts and emails with his auntie etc etc, google just demanded I pay a bribe of 50 cents on a credit card, on the hilarious assumption that the only people in a family with access to CC are parents. At least this is how they did it back in the good old days.
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