There is a strain of video (below) on there that is just like perceptual candy to kids. And there are LOADS of these videos in slightly different versions.
At first we were like "seems fine, colors and shapes...keeps him engaged". After a month or two he could just stare slack jawed at these videos for hours, it was like he was being lobotomized, and begged for them constantly. It was clear that they didn't actually teach him anything, and he couldn't even remember anything salient from watching them. We turned them off and haven't let him watch since. Even things like watching looney toons is infinitely better because there is some base narrative, characters, problems etc.
The people at Google/Youtube really make it hard for quality content to succeed most of the time and their beloved algorithms mostly just boil down to "If a person clicks X, bombard them with as much things as close to X as possible from now on". (Also their obsession with "engagement" which translates to outrage, but I hope this is less relevant in Youtube Kids...)
The danger for kids also stems from this in my opinion, if the wrong kind of video creeps into autoplay everything goes down the drain FAST with almost no chance to recover for the better by itself. Cheap and almost copied content gets rewarded the most.
All "customized for you"/"things youll like" algorithms are more about trapping you in a frozen past than expanding your horizons. Everyone together trains the algo what "more of the same looks like" and thats what it regurgitates. Every time I read a marketing copy about AI, that's what I think of first, is that someone literally designed a new mouse trap.
"But taken together the cumulative effect is that of a giant refrigerator that freezes us, and those who govern us, into a state of immobility, perpetually repeating the past and terrified of change and the future."
That article makes the same argument about index funds and hedge funds, the Blackrocks and Vanguards of the world. Minimizing risk means trapping the world in a way that it never has a chance to gamble on changing.
"It has within its memory a vast history of the past 50 years - not just financial - but all kinds of events. What it does is constantly take things that happen in the present day and compares them to events in the past. Out of the millions and millions of correlations - Aladdin then spots possible disasters - possible futures - and moves the investments to avoid that future happening.
I can't over-emphasise how powerful Blackrock's system is in shaping the world - it's more powerful in some respects than traditional politics.
And it raises really important questions. Because its aim is to not change the world - but to keep it stable. Preventing any development thats too risky. And when you are moving $11 trillion around to do that -it is a really important new force."
Personalized tailored experiences prevent the future by making us relive the past.
It's not though. For example I used to be in hobby X, so I watched a lot of X based videos. As I fell out of the hobby I stopped watching X videos, so Youtube stopped recommending them to me unless it thinks there is a REALLY good X based video it thinks I would like.
YouTube also lets you easily add to your interests by directly searching for and watching videos about them. There is also the slow way where you have interest X and YouTube recommends you a video about Y since it noticed that it preformed well for other people interested in X.
I would never consider YouTube as trapping me as a frozen past as what kinds of videos it recommends are constantly changing as my interests in real life change.
To thaw the freeze you almost have to be constantly fighting the suggestions true nature, constantly scolding it for getting stuck into too tight of loops. It only really works if you feed it lots of negative feedback.
That said, I don’t personally use auto play often. I don’t let YouTube just pick random things for me over and over, unless it’s music in a background. Even on a tv I browse suggestions and pick one vs letting it choose.
For me YouTube is almost always able to recommend me a video I want to watch. I don't even use the negative feedback. I don't ever feel like it's frozen because it's matching my interests. If my interests stay the same it makes sense for YouTube to recommend videos about things I like and from creators I like.
I've noticed that its basically impossible for Youtube to recommend me anything outside the bubble it has assigned me. I end up using guest accounts to find new content but even that doesn't work too well (the guest account also ends up in its own bubble) and generally only recommends the most popular videos in a region so I even switch regions sometimes.
And lord help you if you accidentally click on some drivel that's suggested. It'll take years of ignoring it before it and similar videos are no longer suggested.
These options are literally the only way for me to even get new recommendations. YouTube "helpfully" fills my recommendations with videos I've already watched, videos from channels I'm already subscribed to and watched, its own "mix" playlists of songs I listen to, and totally random "topics" it thinks I'm interested in. I have to "Don't recommend" every channel I subscribe to and "Not interested" every video I click on but don't watch fully, or they completely fill several pages of recommendations.
I don't know what happened or when, but it's impossible to discover new content there anymore.
There's also the option of going into your Youtube history and deleting things from it. More than once I've clicked on something out of curiosity and regretted it, only to have youtube recommend more of the same, but removing the original videos that caused it from my history seemed to do the trick.
My theory is that some video categories have a highly addictive nature to certain groups of people. Youtube's algorithm picks up on this, and notes that people who watch x are likely to want to watch y and z etc. It could be conspiracy videos, pickup artist things, young women, or something feeding off of an insecurity. The algorithm doesn't care, but it can pick up on these patterns of viewership and entices you with more.
This started a couple of years ago. I remember quite distinctly when suddenly the suggestions were injected with things I already watched instead of actual on-topic suggestions. Tried disabling the watch history with mild success.
This was also around the time I just turned off the entire thing via DF YouTube :)
I now view YT like a dumb video hosting service; can't be bothered to fight with its stupid UI or inexplicable ML background fuckery.
Maybe some day they'll equip users with the tools that are appropriate to browse the biggest video platform of all time. They could take a hint from Steam on how to do that (or just use common sense)
Where is don't recommend channel? I saw a video about this when searching how to block specific channels but it doesn't appear in the UI of my YT android app...
It's uncanny how bad the major players are at this.
You can click here [1] to see your supposed 'interests'.
It's uncannily bad.
'Combat Sports' , 'Boating', 'Construction and Power Tools' and 'Cricket' (!) apparently among interests they think I haven though they are subjects which don't cross my mind.
I don't think I've even thought about 'Cricket' other than for them to tell me it's 'an interest'.
Hah. For a job I had for a while I had to routinely search for movie names to make sure I got the spelling correct. Now google thinks I enjoy all the genres known.
I recently looked up car tires because mine were old and leaking air. It was a single day, but now it says I'm interested in "cars" and "car tires". No wonder why Seat started insistingly showing ads on my phone.
It also deduced correctly that I'm married with no kids, while my work account is married with teenage kids, probably from watching videos linked here in HN.
Jeez how many do people usually have? There are just shy of 200 'interests' in my list. I'm not particularly interested in helping them out by editing it though. From what I saw the list is accurate in that it doesn't really contain anything I hate, but it's inaccurate since it's only a broken impression of all the things I like with many gaps.
Historically, that human was called a parent. Parents today have no chance at the on-slaught of content and the delivery mechanisms for it. When I was a kid, there were 3 networks with a handful of UHF channels. Cartoons only ran on Saturday morning, most channels went off the air at midnight, and the TV censors were much more strict with would could be on the air. My parents had it easy. When I became a parent, the internet was still small, and YT wouldn't be a thing for another 10 years. I feel for my kid becoming a parent though, or others dealing with it now.
Yes and no. From your own example, the censors and rules made it clear to parents what and when their kids could watch without the parents having to expend too much time and effort to double check everything. In theory, something branded 'YouTube Kids' would fit the same purpose and many parents probably assume it is fine based on their experience with offline media. The problem is there is no strictness or quality control like you mention.
There was also a network level curator like PBS, Nickelodeon or Disney. Are there people/teams making vetted youtube playlists of content that surpasses a certain level of quality?
That would be an interesting Kids mode. "Only allow videos from playlists that have been added/sunk to this account." Kind of a middle ground between making Google the content arbitrator and being able to watch every video before your kids do.
>There was also a network level curator like PBS, Nickelodeon or Disney.
That's kind of the point of YT though is to completely bypass the network curation. Nobody has what you want on or won't put your stuff on? Screw 'em! We bring you YouTube. The You was the big deal that bucked the network concept.
So no, there's never going to be a human curator for all of YT. If channels want to curate themselves, then they may or may not be rewarded for that with a larger subscriber base.
>That's kind of the point of YT though is to completely bypass the network curation.
Instead we have algoautoplay.
I'm describing opt in playlist producers. Why couldn't there be a level of "playlist curators" who exist not as channels. "Bob puts together really good playlists, whitelist all Bob approved videos." I subscribe to 10 curators and bobs my uncle. I want to follow bob for the videos he suggests not the ones he makes.
The idea of a channel curating itself is the anthesis of someone picking the best from many channels. Pop radio run by Taylor Swift would turn into her playing her album on repeat? How is that more useful than the album itself.
The evolution of the MTV VJ. It could even have an audio reaction track layered over the top of the playlist that can be toggled on off. They could add intro/outro commentary.
I would expect the people that would be good at doing that would not actually be interested in it since they would not really be able to monetize the viewers. The original owners would get the ad sales. Now, if they added ads to view while viewing the channel, maybe they could earn from those ads, or some smaller portion of the ad sales go to the list curator while the main still goes to content creator?
This is actually a brilliant idea and Youtube almost supports it. Channels can have playlists that have any videos, not only their own. All that's missing is to be able to restrict an account to certain playlists.
The other part is how to incentivize the creation of the playlists.
And a way to rank, score, sort, browse playlists. Currently the only way to stumble upon a playlist is to get linked to it from elsewhere or from an authors page?
Might break a little once Bob is popular enough to be offered money (or some other reward) for featuring videos they wouldn't otherwise pick. I do think it's a good idea though.
>
Historically, that human was called a parent. Parents today have no chance at the on-slaught of content and the delivery mechanisms for it.
Unless you're letting a tablet, or the television raise your children, it's not because of the onslaught of content. The onslaught of content is nothing new - for the past century, mass media was producing more content than you could ever consume.
The problem is that parents aren't putting in the time and energy to curate the content their children consume. (I'm explicitly not going to go into the social reasons why, it's an interesting topic, but not really pertinent to this thread. Some people in this thread are bringing up technical reasons why, which I feel is more pertinent.)
It was a slippery slope. I'd like to claim that if parents spent less time staring at a screen in front of their children, there would also be less children staring at mind-numbing content online. The fact is, however, that many simply dump their kids in front of Youtube just so that they can spend time on social media themselves.
In other words: If we want to break kids' screen addictions then we need to start with their parents.
As a parent now going through this the whole thing I can't help but think of the "worse is better" essay. The conclusion I've come to is that we dove headlong into the promises of "better" technology and that worked for a long time, but since the rise of social media and smartphones we've crossed this threshold where "better is worse".
I grew up with a handful of channels and I can't really say it was much of a hardship. When I compare to the endless doomscrolling of YouTube for yet another Minecraft video I see my boy doing I can't help but feel like the algorithms have got his mind in a vice already. The technology seems better in every way, but the negatives are also amplified.
Ehh, it's not quite that unidimensional. Kids also used to roam freely around the neighborhood, and find the stash of porn mags in the local hobo camp.
I watched the decline in phases between my oldest nephew’s birth in 2007, my sons in 2011 and my nieces more recently.
YouTube is measurably worse, especially for children’s content. There was amazing music and educational stuff in there, and it’s still there. But those creators are gone in the sense that there isn’t a lot of new content as the garbage you describe took over.
It’s reflective of the poor leadership of that part of the company. Based on conversations with fellow parents, YouTube is a no-go zone for them. The idiot who got a big bonus for “engagement” targeting kids will be long gone when the brand toxicity kills the growth.
Look at Netflix as a comparison of a company with similar product, but who has self-respect. Netflix has a ruthless focus on engagement, but you don’t see the type of vacuous content. Netflix never auto played by 3 year old to a creepy clown hiding in a kids video. If anything, they elevated television in many ways.
>really make it hard for quality content to succeed
It's the opposite. Quality content goes viral where bad content will stop getting recommended to people.
>Cheap and almost copied content gets rewarded the most
What gets rewarded the most is entertaining videos. YouTube doesn't care if that video took 10 minutes to make or 10 months. It just sees how good the video is at entertaining people.
You said it yourself, it isn’t quality content that gets rewarded, it’s entertaining content or, more specifically, content that gets you engaged. So it isn’t the opposite, it’s their point exactly.
The parent implied that quality content was at a disadvantage by the algorithm when that is just not the case. I believe that quality content is correlated with its entertainment value.
Having never seen any of these videos, that video is weirdly engaging. It has something logical to it, but its way more abstract than a true story. Its actually really fascinating that there is some thread to follow along with and a certain amount of surprise even if it is largely meaningless. It makes me think that once you've memorized all the narrative and visual tropes of western media, your bog standard reality TV is probably as intellectually engaging as videos like these. Which isn't to say its okay for kids, but that you probably shouldn't be watching daytime TV any time soon if you value your own brain as much as you value your kids'.
> It makes me think that once you've memorized all the narrative and visual tropes of western media, your bog standard reality TV is probably as intellectually engaging as videos like these.
As someone who can't help but look for those narrative and visual tropes, I can indeed confirm that the bog standard reality TV show, and the vast majority of non-reality TV shows are about this intellectually un-engaging.
I also wonder if it's somehow specifically engineered to keep your attention. The alternating yellow and black lines specifically seemed like a weird feature, and it made me wonder if the whole thing wasn't somehow calibrated, rather than low-effort and arbitrary.
It's very common for multiple version of these videos to be uploaded with only aesthetic differences, presumably for the next round of engagement optimization.
Advertising to kids has traditionally been profitable since the invention of cartoons. But, this is pretty much entirely poorly-managed advertising money being sucked up by content farmers. YouTube makes huge profits directing completely useless ads to tens of millions of rapt toddlers watching reptile-brain videos for hours a day.
That channel, OKKYDOKY, has 1.2 MILLION views. Who makes that stuff? WHY? It even purports to be from the USA. It's just some weird anonymous garbage. How do the people that make that stuff sleep at night? It's like they're trying to exploit glitches in the brains of toddlers.
I’ve wondered too. I remember looking into the various conspiracies / scandals from a few years back (Elsagate and similar things) and some of it was just extremely bizarre (and likely frightening to some kids) and just had such a mass of content.
There are all sorts of conspiracies from some psyop stuff to AI/ML generated content. I have not ideas what to even begin to think.
The easiest answer I suppose is just some companies found an easy way to mass produce videos towards an demographic that will not mind mindless clicking, and that that will translate to more views and more money. That still doesn’t explain the bizarre and disturbing content some of them put out.
This stuff doesn't require corporate conspiracies. Imagine being a tech-literate person in some very poor country. You discover that if you churn out Flash videos of pregnant Spiderman pulling thorns out of a kitten's paws while spiders crawl down the walls and Elsa is vomiting in the background, you can make a pretty good living for your area without leaving your apartment. You might object to the idea. But, it only takes a few people who say "Fuck it. I need money." to churn out huge quantities of this stuff.
I could believe it. There was one that went around enough to make the news a few years ago. Peppa Pig goes to the dentist. Starts off as you might expect if it were wholesome. Then it begins. Everything is in constantly shifting perspective. A giant syringe comes out. The shadows grow long. Peppa Pig then has her teeth pulled out. The audio has children crying, but not closely synced to the video.
My take was that it was crafted to be optimally engaging to a child of about four years of age. With no other purpose. Maybe even semi-automatically generated. The subject matter is a common fear of children. The video does not have enough to push it quite over the edge to any horror/revulsion response. Any particular frame would not be too out of place in a children's cartoon. As an adult, it disturbs mostly when you realize what's going on behind it conceptually.
There are thousands of video variations of that theme. Someone else here mentioned people cosplaying the characters in creepy ways. I think it started there and evolved rapidly into automated production of reptile-brain trigger material.
I expect that there are whole networks of channels that put out this stuff. The channel in question hasn't been active in a year. The "content creators" probably don't depend on any one channel to deliver their "creations".
I'd recommend blocking the entire channel each time you see a video like this, and also go through the top hundred recommended videos or so and block all the channels with content you don't like. I've only blocked a few dozen channels, and we barely see any of this stuff now. The UI might be a bit confusing, because you can only block a channel if you're currently viewing a video from it.
I do wish I could just whitelist channels, or get automatic recommendations for channels to block.
Yes. We have noticed these too. And there were videos of silly kids doing silly things (like pretend fighting / chasing). And characters just walking inside video games (like Minecraft). Totally pointless and meaningless videos. Constantly and automatically play one after another.
A single video would appear harmless. But hundreds (maybe thousands) of these? Horrible.
Am I the only one who doesn't see what's so creepy about this? It's a bunch of colors, and cars being dipped into the colors, with dumb music and sfx. Is it really so harmful? Honestly curious as I don't have kids of my own, so not sure.
I thought the same thing when we initially put them on. I thought "hey they're a bit weird, but this is the internet! What isn't weird here!?!?"
But if you put them on continuously in front of a young kid (or at least my kid) and you can almost see their gray matter being systematically obliterated.
I think its childhood equivalent of mindless doomscrolling.
There's nothing on the surface that seems bad, but it's weirdly creepy and unsettling, not to mention low production values. Doubly so when you see a two year old completely zoned out while watching it - staring, hardly breathing, insensate to the rest of the world.
Well, we know that childhood is extremely important to the development of humans, but we don't know what kids turn out to be if all they watch for years is just a bunch of colors that trigger dopamine and serotonin release constantly. Almost all adults in the U.S. today grew up with some form of media as T.V.s have always been pretty cheap one-time purchases (until recently with cable TV), so if you replace TV content (which at least always had a plotline or other educational content) with YT Kids they might turn out to be worse at problem-solving or other daily tasks that you need to perform for most jobs. It's definitely a subject that should be studied.
I'd make a guess that the video in question hijacks the reward system in the brains by showing repetitive, almost identical, but slightly different events: kids still learn to predict the world and when they see their prediction as correct, their brains produces dopamine. It doesn't work on adults because for an adult brain there's nothing to predict there.
This video needs to be taken down immediately. For one, it normalizes a bloated police apparatus. The concept of a Ferrari police car is an abomination. Secondly, it presents a distorted view of fluid dynamics, Newtonian physics, and material science. Why does the paint move like that? Why is the reflective car absorbing paint like a sponge? Why doesn't the car follow a ballistic trajectory? Kids need to be protected from these things.
If you think this concern is overblown, just look at what Wile E. Coyote did to a generation of children. People grow up thinking you can walk off a cliff and not fall to your doom until you look down. We were told it was just a joke, but look at the dire consequences.
It’s not content that kids are learning anything from. It’s the same reason why so many parents use a tablet as a pacifier for toddlers - it keeps them quiet, but it’s just adding nothing of value.
As someone said below, even a show like Loony Tunes would be better, but preferably kids should be watching things such as PBS Kids.
Not sure what others feel, but the video feels particularly lifeless to me. Combined with the effects mentioned by the grandparent post. Mentioned it seemed ok for a while.
I don't allow my kid to use youtube at all so it is preaching to the choir here, pinch of salt, etc.
I can’t tell if you’re also saying no to PBS kids or not, but based on my own observations as a parent I have to say PBS kids (and PBS in general) is the best kids programming out there. Full stop.
With my 1 year old, we used YT Kids videos in the hospital in place of benzos during central line dressing changes (a relatively painless but annoying and time-consuming procedure that they need to remain very still for).
The slack-jaw lobotomized YT Kids look is honestly scarier than the benzo loopies. I think we’re done with it.
Thanks to people dismissing ElsaGate as "just weird videos", that issue never got the attention it actually deserved. Aside from the countless rationalizations, part of the blame is on YT in my books; mostly for saying "it's fine, we'll deal with it" instead of collecting data, analyzing it, and making the results public to warn parents.
My opinion on this isn't popular. One time I was discussing Sesame Street with a friend who said how great it was at teaching kids - his kid knew the alphabet when entering school.
I asked how often his kid watched SS. With a back of envelope calculation, I pointed out that it took SS several hundred hours to teach his kid the alphabet. I.e. it was the most inefficient, time-consuming teaching method ever devised.
(I was taught the alphabet in first grade by singing the alphabet song. This was before SS.)
It's completely passive. It's not how people learn. It looks like it should be educational, but let's face it. It's a great way to distract the kids so the parents can take a break. Parents need make no effort, just push a button.
You don't think he remembers the numbers and colors? He might, he's just not saying it. When my kid first recited their 1-10 or ABC. They didn't recite a few. One day out of the blue they went from beginning to end. You might think they are not learning but they are soaking up and just might take some time before they start expressing their knowledge. That said, I would be annoyed to have that play on repeatedly.
This, a hundred times. YouTube kids has content addiction to a science. My kid still asks for YouTube at age 6. It’s been banned from our house since he was 3.
Whew. I was afraid it was going to link to Super Simple Songs.
For what it's worth, we found https://www.youtube.com/user/SuperSimpleSongs via the Khan Academy Kids app. They have select videos (from what we've seen) from this particular creator that they break up into the app and make responsive.
So for example they may play a bit of 'Do you know the muffin man,' then pause it and ask the child to tap on the ___. Or tap and count the ___.
Given how he's been developing, and that we'll break into random songs that we learned from the series, I've no complaints with a few channels.
Generally agree and I loathe those (and many educational videos generally) so much that I far prefer that my kids watch Grizzy or Tom & Jerry, that is at least really funny sometimes and contrary to pretend-instructional so far out that it is obviously not real.
(Although what I like most is to sit and watch crazy repair videos together with them: welding of excavator arms, disassembly and restoration of everyday items etc.)
However, credit were credit is due: one of my kid spent some time on those channels around age 4 to 5 and actually surprised me by having learned English numbers, and not superficially: I was totally amazed when that kid could not only count to 20 in English but also instantly translate between the language his mother talks and English. Compared to other kids I know just being able to consistently count to 20 in one language might often be a challenge.
A little more criticism: in addition to pretend-educational videos which I find mightily annoying there were also a number of kids-unboxing-box-after-box-of-expensive-toys which seemed to me to be the worst.
I feel like those videos could be generated without human intervention, by hooking a neural net up to some video software and pre-made assets and optimizing for views. And, while that's not literally how they're made, the difference feels increasingly academic.
Sorry, but that’s smoke not steam. My pots don’t make that sound when boiling water. I’ve heard other “pots” in pipes that sound exactly like that though.
I thought you were going to link to one of those “egg opening” videos. They’re the reason I don’t turn on youtube. The terrible thing is that one of them made it on to Netflix... now I have to get rid of Netflix because its all she’ll watch if she sees its icon. I wish there was a way to block specific shows on Netflix.
The worst thing is as a parent you are not in control of what is recommended or what kids can watch. I wish they allowed flagging videos through history but yt has other priorities I guess
our kids also have found things like this which lead to YouTube bans in the house - now, they 1.5 and 4yo both seek content that is far more engaging than the above video.
One helpful thing was raising the age for their YouTube kids.. I don't want them just navigating YouTube alone.
There is a strain of video (below) on there that is just like perceptual candy to kids. And there are LOADS of these videos in slightly different versions.
My own anecdote:
Our 2 year old found these videos (3 years ago): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7IsNFDtG4U&list=PLHZrFxrJbt...
At first we were like "seems fine, colors and shapes...keeps him engaged". After a month or two he could just stare slack jawed at these videos for hours, it was like he was being lobotomized, and begged for them constantly. It was clear that they didn't actually teach him anything, and he couldn't even remember anything salient from watching them. We turned them off and haven't let him watch since. Even things like watching looney toons is infinitely better because there is some base narrative, characters, problems etc.