Most of them have other revenue streams. Patreon, or being a division of PBS, or day jobs. I’m not worried about their survival.
One of those videos was “This Video Will Make You Angry”. Meme-based economics are not your friend.
For extremist or propagandist content, unfortunately both those things mean it will continue even without YouTube or a clone.
This Video Will Make You Angry was a good video. No idea why it specifically is being discussed here.
> For extremist or propagandist content, unfortunately both those things mean it will continue even without YouTube or a clone.
Yes, this has nothing to do with youtube. Again, you can propagate charged content via other mediums, especially on the internet.
If your primary concern is searchability, that is a surprise: YouTube is the second largest search engine after google.com, and I didn’t perceive any suggestion that the latter would be harmed by the copyright proposal. Even if it was, even rubbish search engines like iTunes’ Podcasts doesn’t stop me getting vastly more content than I have time for even if I took early retirement and listened at double speed.
How do you propose to prevent the disasters described in this thread? YouTube have loose standards and virtually no demonstrated ability for enforcement. I'm specifically worried about giving locked down PC to kid with my best effort and still kids getting exposed to content that they are not yet ready to process. How does YouTube enables me to to make sure that kids are protected?
It doesn't. I don't know why this expectation exists; youtube has not shown itself to be trustworthy in this sort of thing. Clearly an alternative needs to be used, like downloading youtube videos beforehand or using something else entirely.
YouTube Kids presents itself as specifically for kids. You don't expect weird fetish porn on daytime kids TV and it's completely reasonable to expect a similar level of moderation for an app that positions itself as an equivalent of that.
Blaming the parents really understates how much YouTube has fucked this one up. YT relies on a wonky algorithm and crowdsourcing to moderate its content at scale but their dirty little (open) secret is that this is error prone and exploitable. In a typical Google way they thought they could eliminate paid humans from the equation and still deliver quality -- they can't, and it's entirely their fault.
If a company misrepresents a product in a way that results it to cause harm when used exactly as advertised, it's the company's fault.
> This is basically the all-American argument of "sure, the advertising is a complete lie but it's the consumer's fault for being gullible".
No, it's your fault for believing advertising in the first place. I only judge youtube through my personal knowledge and experience of using it for the last 6+ years.
Just because someone, or a PR team, says "it's for kids!" does NOT mean it's quality programming or acceptable content. That is your responsibility to determine, as a parent or guardian. Do not blame youtube when you know that it is a website where anyone can upload anything. And it's run by a company that thinks ML algorithms can filter videos adequately.
No, this is lazy parenting, just blindly trusting a corporation to actually do things right, when they're not even regulated adequately.
Nothing is stopping you from downloading videos beforehand, or finding better content platforms or content producers, like PBS. This is you throwing up your hands in the air and wanting to shift blame to a corporation when you didn't take the time or effort to screen things before putting your kids in front of a screen + opaque algorithm.
Not everyone wants their content censored by dogmatists.
YouTube Kids is from YouTube and is advertised as a kids-friendly filtered version of YouTube. YouTube Kids however failed to filter tons of disturbing and inappropriate content. The entire raison d'etre of YouTube Kids is to provide a filtered YouTube experience -- it failed hard.
EDIT: I can't even begin to comprehend how you think any of this is about "dogmatists censoring YouTube". YT Kids only providing kids-friendly content is no different from YT Music only providing music. It's not censorship, it's filtering. You can still go to YouTube proper and watch everything.
Your entire argument is the filtration they tried failed. We agree. Great.
My point is that the conclusion you draw is that everything needs more censorship. We disagree. I think parents need to take responsibility and not blame a company for providing a product they don't like.
Its the equivalent of censoring the radio because think of the children. It was a dumb idea then, it's a dumb idea now, because everyone knows that's not where it ends.
Not sure what part of that you disagree with.
That claim about their conclusion I do not understand, since I don't see where they are saying anything like that.
My argument is that more censorship won't help, because not everyone agrees on what is, and is not, kid friendly. So the entire enterprise is doomed to failure. The only solution I see is parents taking responsibility.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/13/youtube-kids-adds-a-whitel...
I use OpenDNS and I have a few custom scripts so I can learn how often certain sites are being used. "Too much of a good thing is still too much."
I use history on my daughters YT account with a quick script that compares her computer's history on her computer. I don't run it all the time but I tell her trust but verify a lot. She is doing her school online and our biggest issue is she will watch videos and not do here work for a few hours.
This would allow a marketplace of editors. Someone who was making, for example, cooking videos, probably wouldn't have a couple of million dollars sitting around. Instead, their videos would be syndicated through an editor. An editor could make their own decisions on revenue share (if any at all) based on their own judgements of legal risk vs revenue opportunity. This could mean live streamers all have to go in to a closely monitored studio instead of doing it from home.
In a way this is similar to how the old network TV or print periodical marketplace worked, but adapted for the internet. Network TV had to pay big fines if someone said fuck or a nipple was broadcast live. Thus, they assumed legal liability for their guests behavior.
This still doesn't solve the core issue that the Youtube CEO described, which is when a bunch of people claim copyright on the same video. Solving that probably requires clawback provisions over lost revenue from making fake claims.
I don't think this approach would be ok in the United States, but it seems reasonable for the EU, China, and so on.
Unfettered access, or maybe you turn your head for 5 minutes and your kid clicks a recommended video next to the one you set them up to watch and now mickey mouse is running around cutting everyone's head off oh god what is happeni...
Youtube does need to address these videos, but they're not omniscient gods either. There is too much content to humanly (or algorithmically, seemingly) to police effectively.
Why do you put so much trust in random recommended videos? What makes youtube so trustworthy? I'm asking because I genuinely don't understand this mindset at all.
By YouTube; the choice to make the recommendation and the choice to use an algorithm (both in general and the specific algorithm chosen) as part of the recommendation process are human decisions made yb YouTube employees in the course of their duties.
> Youtube does need to address these videos, but they're not omniscient gods either.
While the second half is true, it magnifies rather than mitigates the firall it does is call out the hubris and irresponsibility at YouTube behind the current status quo.
> There is too much content to humanly (or algorithmically, seemingly) to police effectively.
The quantity of content on YouTube, and the fact that it is not constrained by their ability to effectively police it is also a product of human decisions made by YouTube employees in the course of job duties, not some kind for natural occurrence with which YouTube is beset. And the fact that any part of that corpus is subject to recommendation algorithms without being policed is also such a human decision.
You are putting way too much trust in an opaque corporation to provide adequate content for young children. Just because it's "Youtube" does not guarantee anything. In fact it makes it much more dubious of a site, knowing exactly how youtube functions and how google manages it (very badly—at least for children's content).
No one is forcing you to put your kids in front of youtube. Please stop shifting blame when it's your fault for trusting random recommendations from an opaque, broken algorithm to filter endless random content, run by an uncaring corporation.
FWIW, my brother and I grew up on old tom & jerry cartoons. I think they're great, other than the few episodes with plainly racist stereotypes.
Stop right there. You have no idea what you're conflating here. If you have a strong stomach and no history of being abused, look into it. If you don't, please, read good accounts of people who did... or at least have no opinion about it, but not "meh, it's prolly fine". It's not.
I checked the wikipedia page as the other poster suggested and doesn't look that bad to me.
What do you feel is so much worse about them that the coyote being crushed under a huge rock?
It's hardly a full list of the themes that are repeated over and over and over again. It involves rape, pregnant infants, (there was one live action thing with Spiderman drugging and raping Elsa and her little child (played by an actual child, though with Elsagate you will also find plenty of adults in diapers or with pacifiers, or otherwise playing a child) as they are unconscious, then delivering both their babies in the form of plastic dolls, and Elsa and her child and Spiderman all being super happy and clapping in delight at the end), a LOT of kidnapping and bondage, children left behind, parents being evil for denying them sweets or staying up late or other things, parents getting hurt by their children or even murdered so children can get something they want, people generally murdering each other out of anger, including with automatic weapons, hands coming out of mirrors or mobile devices, children crying at a graveyard, hands coming out of graves, getting injections to get "made better" regardless of how silly that is (like eating a toy truck and getting an injection because of that), generally eating things and that having some kind of effect, a lot of binge eating, objects or people being crushed underfoot or under cars, a lot of leering at someone who is in danger, throwing people off roofs, jumping off roofs or committing suicide, a lot of confusion or anxiety about pregnancy (e.g. what gender it is, or whose kid is is), a lot of adultery, people forcing others to do things via hypnosis, drugs, violence or even poverty vs wealth, product pyramids, objects floating in swimming pools (god knows why), and of course the whole "color learning", "daddy finger" (jumping on the bed, wheels on the bus) stuff, the same song repeated 20 times while persons swap heads or colors.
All these themes repeat across various cartoon themes, live action and 3d animations, including Minecraft-style animations, and modded GTA 5.
Even all that isn't an exhaustive description, it's a joke compared to the content. But already I need to stop because hey, "who wants to read all that". Welcome to Elsagate, that's exactly what it is.
https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-in...
https://www.reddit.com/r/elsagate (as I said in another comment, there's a lot of crap there, but historically also posts that offer real information, compilations, reports of parents, and so on)
https://i.imgur.com/MziRRQw.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/HfsdvWo.jpg
That's just thumbnails, very few in comparison to what is there, not the millions of hours of video, the countless demented 3D animations. Plenty of those involving syringes, too.
And that's not even taking the deceptive stuff into account, how they describe everything as family friendly (I remember channel names with phrases like "day care" in them), and all about learning, also offering unused social media accounts as contact address, to seem all above board to anyone who doesn't actually look. Just how the the vile content is often padded in a lot of harmless content, so parents that just take a short glance (or you) might not notice, and so on.
Who knows, if you enter "learn colors" or "minecraft monster school" and click around (and I don't just mean once or twice), you might find a lot that's currently being uploaded, or never even was deleted. I genuinely don't want to look because I've seen enough.
Among other things it's a DDOS attack on our attention, it exploits our desire to ignore such things, or rationalize them -- so that it looks fine at "first glance", or similar to something benign you already know and therefore benign, especially when watching zero of the X thousands of hours that make up the body of Elsagate; that's in the nature of the subject.
That cannout outweigh Elsagate stuff. Educational content could be on smaller platforms, and there even could be platforms to find it on those smaller platforms.
> In the end, it's basically what you make of it.
No, it's thousands of channels and hundreds thousands of videos designed to mentally abuse children, and for months and months, while parents begged YouTube to even take notice, autoplay beelined to this stuff from cartoons. That's what you get from algorithms designed to maximize "engagement".
> You can find a wealth of diverse channels to watch and grow from, or you can watch drivel.
We're talking about things aimed at toddlers. Oh, and initially also YouTube for Kids. When you talk about "unfettered access" and simply blame it on parents, it just shows you are downplaying something you might not even have looked into.
Apart from the Elsagate subreddit, which has a lot of crap but also important posts buried among it, you probably can still enter "learn colors" or "Minecraft Monster School" or a lot of other things into YouTube, and maybe click on some related videos of videos in the search results. I promise, it won't take long to find something that can ruin your day.
I still blame the parents, especially after Elsagate. It takes some mental gymnastics to allow children to watch random videos on a site where anyone can upload anything, and a site run by a company that thinks algorithms can work by themselves to filter content correctly. There are other platforms that have content for kids. Youtube never was a correct option, unless you yourself download videos beforehand to ensure their quality.
Please don't blindly trust things just because they say "it's aimed at children". Its still up to you, the parent/guardian, to actually make sure that it's acceptable content. Trusting an internet titan of a company to actually care or get it right is an enormously stupid idea, in my opinion.
Heck, even the "trash pop" part of YouTube (e.g. drama channels) don't seem to primarily rely on ad revenue anymore. And most of the gaming channels seem to actually prefer Twitch (but either want to editorialise their content rather than upload raw streams or only still use YT because they want a more diversified revenue stream).
YouTube's initial appeal was that it was a "marketplace of ideas" and everybody could upload videos of pretty much anything and build an audience and (eventually) earn a few bucks from advertising. Recently that marketplace has increasingly shifted to promote what's already popular and YouTube has actively brought in established content producers from TV while also algorithmically demonetizing "lesser" channels (note: this doesn't mean less-viewed channels or channels with fewer subscribers) with little to no means of appeal. The gold rush when it was actually financially viable to make a living off the ad revenue and fund your video production are long gone for the vast majority of creators.
What makes it different is a recommendation engine that is deliberately designed to maximize the amount of viewing time and has no moral compass about doing so.
When a kid finishes reading Ranger Rick magazine, nothing prompts them to read anything else except their own interests and the pile of books their parents have purposefully made available to them. You don't have strangers popping in the window, tempting them to read something nasty, and if you do, you get that person arrested.
If you give your children unfettered access to youtube, that's your own fault as a parent. Youtube should be better about handling this but I think it's more of a communication issue.
Youtube is essentially a medium unto itself. A LOT of people use it so there's going to be good, and there's going to be bad. You can make the case of "radicalizing people" for just about any other medium that people consume.
In the end, it's basically what you make of it. You can find a wealth of diverse channels to watch and grow from, or you can watch drivel.
It isn't any different than the trash on tv or in pulp novels, except that individual people have more power and freedom to create things. If you think differently then you're just looking at older mediums with rose-tinted glasses.