We really struggle with YouTube - for ex. You can’t block it because Kahn Academy uses YouTube. And quite a lot of kids content is really informative and great content. But I can’t tell you how many times we are watching and it literally spirals out of control. One second you’re watching an official frozen 2 trailer, the next you’re watching some jerk’s fan movie made of clips from the original frozen interspersed with wildly inappropriate dialogue and content from other non kid movies. A better scenario is simply to turn off the device and as a lifelong programmer this conclusion really saddens me.

Maybe this is a bit out there as a solution, but you could set up Streama (1) and set up a directory where the videos get loaded in.

Then you can allow your children to access Streama and they can watch without worry.

(1) https://github.com/streamaserver/streama

interesting solution but for now just turning it off seems to be much preferred. We’ve noticed our kids engage their imaginations and are much better behaved the less time they spend online.

We've noticed the same thing about out 9 year old girl. He behavior radically changes for the worst after shes been watching videos of her choosing from youtube.

Why dont they promote the use of user-curated playlists? Kids should be limited to a standard youtube curriculum; they re not for experiments.

Because every company ever (especially software companies) are all about making moneys and employing 1000s of new employees to curate contents isn't very profitable. They will try to automate everything even if it doesn't work because they know this is the future. Until we have perfected the art, we are stuck with this ridiculous misjudgement by the algorithm because its really, really, dumb.

Even if they do hire actual real human, they hire them as cheap labors, not as legitimate jobs (see Facebook)

> new employees to curate contents isn't very profitable

No i mean user-curated playlists

They can do it, Our g-suite side of YT lets me assign users that can approve videos or channels for the org.

It's useless because once you log into YT you can't make playlists or I think subscribe without making a channel, by default that's first name/last name. even if I could I can't stop them uploading content. So the tiny org proofing tools that are there I can't use anyway.

I swear YT don't even use their own product.

Do they still have the YouTube Kids app or whatever it is with whitelisted content?

Unless they’ve changed things, I thought the YouTube Kids app was still algorithm-driven?

It’s even worse. There were some articles awhile back about just how scary awful YouTube kids was...

> people who are targeting kids will almost definitely classify theirs as kid-safe.

That's the goal - if this is checked by the creator (for the specific video or for the entire channel), it will have personalized ads disabled for the video plus disable whatever tracking systems Google has for regular watching.