YouTube has a treasure trove of creative, stimulating, enlightening, entertaining, and didactic content. There is more interesting stuff there than you could watch in many lifetimes: science from Veritasium to lectures from Stanford on every topic imaginable, thousands of hours of high-quality content on every topic from WW2 to the most niche retro computer you can thing of, the best orchestras in the world playing at your demand — all at your fingertips.
Unfortunately, it has 1000x more utter filthy trash.
Seriously, I dare you: open the default YouTube homepage on incognito. It's terrifying. The dystopia is already here.
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My advice for parents: curate a few channels or playlists yourself, manually, but UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES give them unsupervised unfiltered access to YouTube. So-called "YouTube Kids" included. Those turbo-consumerist hellscape videos make my stomach churn.
My child is not there yet, so I'm experimenting ahead of time with Jellyfin + downloading select content instead. The idea is to have sizeable content in there to explore in autonomy but no way out.
Not particularly doing this happily WRT the content creators but I just can't get myself to trust platforms such as Youtube to not have unsuspected ways around.
You should also look into alternate video sites. A couple of creators I like(Practical Engineering, others I can't remember) have promoted Nebula as having curated high quality educational content.
My library system offers streaming services that are high quality, might be something to look into. Same platform with videos offers e-books and whatnot, as well.
Even if kids watch only quality educational stuff on YouTube and plays non-addictive games, if that ends up being a lot of time and it replaces social interaction, it'll come at a cost (though they'll also learn a lot).
I understand that YouTube has zero incentive for this but this is the kids mode I would like to have. A white-list of channels that I could negotiate with my kids. A couple of their favorite streamers that I also know that release material every other day, some weekly, so that the content can run out. "oh you watched YouTube all afternoon and you watched it all? Oh too bad, go out and play". And when I think about why YouTube never will add this feature, I get angry.
Edit:sure I could also add a couple of education channels but my kids would sooner go out and play.
Just tried, and YouTube in incognito mode says "Try searching to get started" and shows 0 recommendations. That seems like a recent change. I remember it used to show junk.
That’s an improvement! I’m going to give it a spin and see what it does when you search a few mundane things. Probably still rabbit holes you into trash.
Ah yes, but then how do you actually enforce these curated playlists are the only things your kids have access to? Especially when your kids have Chromebooks at school, and friends with unrestricted access on their devices, and learn ways to workaround any screen time restrictions?
Feels to me like attacking the problem from the wrong angle.
You can’t 100% prevent them from accessing trash but you can limit it as much as possible.
We’ve had success so far but I am concerned with what happens as they get older and get social pressure to join social media.
I guess we have to parent. Paraphrasing something I saw elsewhere:
“Raise your girls or meangirl anorexia influencers will; raise your boys or Andrew Tate will.”
It’s always been important to keep your kids away from bad influences. It’s just that now they can get life guidance from sociopaths, creeps, unhinged ideologues, and self destructive losers in their pockets.
Unfortunately, it has 1000x more utter filthy trash.
Seriously, I dare you: open the default YouTube homepage on incognito. It's terrifying. The dystopia is already here.
---
My advice for parents: curate a few channels or playlists yourself, manually, but UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES give them unsupervised unfiltered access to YouTube. So-called "YouTube Kids" included. Those turbo-consumerist hellscape videos make my stomach churn.