Citation needed. I mean, they do use AI for lots of stuff, but let's not describe it as working. It has routinely caused massive aggravation for their biggest content creators, it has been one in a group of changes that has basically made Youtube an unsafe monetization platform and driven the creation of places like Patreon,

Sure, this is the only AI fuck up that is going to get them sued in federal court and face charges of exploiting children, but it's not like the other AI stuff is working well. Basically, their AI is doing a bad job everywhere, it's just that this area is where they face legal liability and so they can't pull out their usual "but the machines told us to!" defence.

But you have a point. YouTube and Google get a lot of flack for things that are emergent properties due to their lack of humans.

YouTube doesn't release many of the details of the methodology or even the content that they block because it can then be circumvented by the people who create and/or circulate it. It can create a streisand effect which only makes that type of content worse by drawing attention to it.

Some of what you can see is in the child sexual abuse material (CSAM) APIs that Google is now sharing to help other organizations detect CSAM material en-masse in their content. These services that were originally built to do so on GMail, Drive, and Youtube.

It's inevitable that in such an environment the system they come up with ends up making less and less sense over time. It's death by a thousand cuts, and I don't think there's a good way to really avoid it.

On the one hand because they are this large, they cannot currate content. On the other hand they are arguing because they are this large they are the only ones who can currate this content.

I would feel more sympathetic to your argument if the companies wouldn't argue both cases at the same time.

I don't really care about sympathy, so much as I care about reality. The companies will do as all companies do. Try to make money by garnering confidence in their product & abilities. Even if they have to lie through their teeth.

Reality is, there isn't a good system (currently) to really curate massive amounts of user submitted video content, in an environment where anyone anywhere can submit said video content.

The problem's scale is always going to lead towards either a compromise of being an open video platform, or a compromise in relation to curation.

100% agree. YT kids is not safe for kids. I wouldn’t show it to my kids. I instead download the videos I want and manually make a playlist. There is wayyyyyyy too much garbage in YT kids.

[1] https://theculturetrip.com/europe/sweden/articles/sweden-ban...

Is this the best they can do as parents? I mean, we all know just dumb sitting on couch and passively consuming whatever goes in TV ain't healthy mentally (and physically), and they ingrain this approach in their kids since very young age?

Parenting ain't easy, never was and probably never will be, but damn invest some proper human time in it, don't just offload raising of your kids to some stupid website which lives off ads. This is best invested time of your life.

I have a 2-week newborn, and damn he ain't getting close to TV/phone/tablets till much much later, and even that in limited manner.

After 1 she also got increasingly harder to feed. She would throw away the spoon with her hand and not open her mouth. Just a massive rebel in general. We were really stressed out. She was starting to fall off the growth curve. Pediatrician was concerned too.

Then while eating we once showed her ABC kinds wheels on bus go round and round rhyme video, not sure what clicked in her brain. It was a night/day difference. No rebel , eats well.

So we kinda use it as the last resort and feel a bit guilty.

You used something they wanted as a carrot stick (couldn’t not) to get mutually beneficial behavior, you’re still gonna feel guilt but this seems well done to me.

Parenting is not something you can automate

Full stop.

I'd rather judge and shame bad parents now than have to deal with their poorly behaved offspring later in society.

Right now my kids are small. I think PBS kids should be enough for them. When they want to find something else to watch, I know they just had too much screen time and they need to do something else other than watching TV.

It's impossible to satisfy everyone, regardless of the content rules, and no mater how curated. YouTube could spend a billion dollars curating content, along with surveys where 90% of parents have to approve a video before it is included, and the remaining 10% would still be the vocal minority ruining it for everyone.

Sure, YouTube probably doesn't do quite enough. But when you have parents looking to let YouTube babysit their 2-8 year old children without supervision, whose fault is that? YouTube's, I'm sure. /s

When I taught kindergarten one of the children in the youngest class at the time was terrified of the Eensy Weensy Spider video and of the Elephant in a Hickory Dickory Dock video. I told her to close her eyes when it was coming up. She did. Eventually she got over it.

The idea that a scary clown can be “damaging” is a testament to helicopter parenting. Up to 1900 it would be a rare person indeed that didn’t have siblings die before they were ten and basically no one would make it b that far without having a friend or family member die. That’s trauma. That’s damaging.

You seem to think emotional trauma isn’t real. It is. And studies of its effects show that it is just as harmful to the brain as physical trauma.

If nightmares and screaming is repeated over and over again, it can lead to some very traumatic experiences in their young brains.

Previous generations also used to “instil” a sense of fear in to children by beating them. It does make them listen as they are then ruled by fear-inducing trauma and yet I think we’re all clear on how it’s not the best option for their growth.

1. https://www.nationalgeographic.com.au/history/brothers-grimm...

And I never let the watch unsupervised. But at least with every other streaming service, I don't need to preview the content ahead of time.

I'll just use one of the many other services that does it for me.

"it's too hard"

which translated of course means, "the cost benefit analysis doesn't come down in favor of spending the effort".

Caveat emptor, informed consumer, personal responsibility, blah blah blah.

What the Freedom Markets™ advocates don't acknowledge is transaction costs. If consumers have to vet every single activity, the economy suffers.

If YouTube Kids is marketing themselves as kid friendly, it'd be nice if it was true. My skepticism budget is finite.

Forcing YTKids to only show PBS Kids content on every platform is a huge pain in the butt.

I'm just going to assume you are being sarcastic and making an ironic point about parents wanting to control what their child sees but then not putting any personal effort into it.

The harsh reality is that parents have to do work. I remember when I was a kid I hated that my parents looked through the books I checked out from the library to see if they were "appropriate" and that sometimes they would remove horror novels and other things that they thought were not age appropriate.

But the truth is at least they cared enough to check and at least they were consistent, and later on when I became a teenager they gave me more freedom. If you have opinions about what media your child has access to you have to do the work to curate...

Of course I want to review the content too, which is why I usually watch new stuff with them. But I want the service to take the first go at it. Like every other streaming service for kids.

Same thing at the library. When I get a book from the kids section, I can be reasonably sure that I won't be surprised by some adult content when I sit down and we read the book together.

I’m not arguing that YT is inherently bad for all purposes; just that, in this situation where you want to watch kid’s videos and be confident all the material will be age-appropriate, there are lots of apps that are simpler and better.

Rather than installing YouTube and whitelisting PBS Kids, why not just install the PBS Kids app instead?

Too much work. I'll just watch one of the many other services that do it for me.

It still can be someone else's problem.

Also, they still don't make it easy to lock down to just that content on every platform.

I don't have to worry about this with the PBS Kids app. I know that no matter where it runs it will be safe. My house, grandma's house, whatever.

Same with Netflix Kids. I don't have to worry about it having bad content anywhere my kid figures out how to use it.

I’ve never really understood how YouTube Kids was even a thing.

It's fine for Youtube Kids to be a much smaller selection of manually curated videos from specific partners, because Youtube Kids isn't replacing Youtube as a whole.

Given that their current solution basically kills ad revenue on those videos anyway, it's not like creators are going to be clamoring to be included on Youtube Kids in the first place. There's no harm in having a subset of Youtube that is highly gatekept, the same way that subsets like Youtube Red were.

Go ahead and let Youtube itself stay as a kid-unfriendly, algorithmically moderated wild west with hidden bombs of objectionable content spread around. That doesn't need to be gotten rid of, just have one corner on a separate subdomain that's nice and safe for kids.

That's exactly what the FTC fuss was about, though. It's easy to say that until a parent gives their kid access to it and suddenly YouTube is advertising and recommending stuff to a child, which the law doesn't provide a safe harbor from (not for the content uploaders, either, which is going to cause a lot of problems). The FTC guidance was to identify kids instead by the content they were accessing. Hence Google's complaint: https://youtube-creators.googleblog.com/2019/12/our-comment-... (tl;dr skip to the "Treat adults as adults" section)

edit: now I'm confused because your comment below (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21975870) indicates you already know your idea here isn't going to work for the FTC?

To be blunt, even the FTC's own proposal isn't going to work for the FTC (at least not to the degree they want) -- it's a bad solution with unintended consequences. I've brought up a few problems, but other people have brought up far more of them. At a certain point, beyond explaining the FTC's policy and showing the problems, it's not really worth spending the time trying to come up with a way to make it work. It's better to come up with solutions that would address the concerns of actual parents, like jedberg.

Importantly, the FTC's approach is the opposite of what parents like jedberg need. Parents need a highly curated feed that they can feel safe showing to their kids. The FTC's approach is going to lead to creators erring on the side of labeling too much of their content as kid friendly. It's also going to force Youtube to get more aggressive with its algorithms, which will inaccurate label objectionable content as kid-friendly.

Parents needs fewer videos more carefully classified as kid-friendly, and the FTC is making sure that a lot more videos will be carelessly classified as kid-friendly.

Like I said below, my assumption based on the FTC comments I've read/watched is that they just haven't thought that far ahead. They're mad about Youtube in general, and they see creators as an easy way to get at Youtube. That's maybe an overly-cynical take on it, but I'm not super-inclined to be charitable to them on this one.

They don't. The cost of providing the service they pretend to provide would greatly exceed the income on that service. Even with the most aggressive advertising one could imagine.

You can imagine how Google would automate some nightmares otherwise. Say they look at the age of the people viewing it and if enough people below a certain age view it, they automatically class it as content for children.

Of course ideally something in the middle would be a start, so they could see, what are children watching, let's check that out and see if it is in need of some 18+ filter or not.

Given they must be doing some checks, as in age for logged in accounts and making sure adverts are not something not for children.

>But YouTube Kids will never play in my house again until I know that every piece of content on there has been reviewed by a human before it goes live.

Yes, as it stands the systems Google have in place are not secure and by that, unsuitable content could find its way to your children when you have done all the right things to prevent that. Equally there is the accountability. If PBS drops a boob at the wrong time when children are watching, it will get dealt with and process in place. If YourTube kids do that, nobody else may know as nobody is checking an individual's stream over a network broadcast. Let alone the same level of accountability and process.

Yes we absolutely can. YouTube's business model depending on user generated content is their choice. Not being able to review all the content is entirely a problem for Google to solve. Maybe they should stop optimizing for growth and put up some hurdles to who can upload content? That's for them to figure out.

I'd be surprised if there weren't a bunch of kids who really wanted to see content from the latest Minecraft update.

Sure, it will start shifting once they want to watch something their peers watch. But at the time parents choose the media, how would they even know it's not the latest production, or some mix of old/new?

Peppa pig started in 2004. At the time kids are interested in it, if you show them ep 2, will they say "this is not from series 6 from 2019"?

Even with a more restrictive approach Google/YouTube could whitelist specific content providers, which could provide fresh content on a frequent schedule.

I was about to suggest that content creators pay a nominal fee for the content to be reviewed but if creators have no way to monetize the platform, that proposal is bijective with suggesting that Google just shut down YTKids. Or are parents paying already for access to YTKids and the reviews would come out of that?

The argument here is whether imperfect curation is better than none, and the history of television tells us that it is. We never had a TV channel that randomly showed kids pro-suicide messages.

This sentiment is so shocking that I had to say something.

Please no. Let's not encourage a world where people are even less free to share their ideas.

I get where you're coming from, but "Think of the children!" has been used to justify so many evils throughout history. It's an emotional appeal that should be resisted.

Putting up barriers would also be the first step towards losing dominance. But in the short term, it would suck not being able to share a video without waiting a long time or being approved.

But won’t someone think of the poor content creators who might have to wait or upload their content somewhere else!

"Think of the children" is equally bland.

somehow youtube became the parent that oversees what content your kids get. this to me is a dereliction of your parenting requirements.

I think the issue for here is the YT is trying to claim they are providing a YT kids offering, comparable and competing directly with Netflix, Amazon, PBS, etc - if they want to make this claim and have parents allow their children to view it then they need to back it up.

edit: I am sure there are more checks in place and that the above idea has been considered. My main point is that they need to take responsibility for whatever claims they are making. If they can't back up the claims, then that is fine - just stop making them...

Crazy idea - maybe no one should be operating at that volume until they can figure it out?

If you don't want your kids on a product, then supervise them. Don't ban the product for everyone who can use it responsibly.

I'm certainly not one to say everything should be as safe as possible for kids, but there's a limit to what a parent can reasonably be expected to understand. If I set my kid up watching a blues clues clip, and look away for 30 seconds and he's seeing a clown with its arm torn off which autoplayed, I feel like I'm reasonably kinda entitled to go hey wtf google, your shit is broken and its harmed my kid.

And then, of course, not let my kid use youtube anymore.

YouTube throws up videos to children that look good until you get to the second of the video some psychopath has spliced into it. It’s literally not possible to safely put your kid in front of YouTube unless you have pre watched every video YouTube might potentially auto services up to your 3yo

It won't stifle communication on the internet at all. Trust us.

The problem with excessive regulation is that complying with it can be extremely complicated and time consuming. If you don't have the money to pay for that, you either risk being fined or sued, you don't play.

It sets a bar that only already wealthy people can get over.

I hope someday someone will read it.

HN: parents need to stop being helicopter parents and kids need to have independence to grow in order to be functional adults, otherwise you're a shitty parent

Also HN: parents need to know everything their child does and know what they are watching at all times, otherwise you're a shitty parent

If they are honest about there lack of actually effective triage then this whole controversy is of a very different valence.

Stop pretending you’re triaging well if you’re not!

1. it's from a trusted provider, send it on through. Add a complaint mechanism that makes it fairly easy for a trusted provider to be removed from this list (DMCA for content, if you will).

2. it sits in a queue until a human looks at it. Prioritize videos from those who were recently removed from the trusted provider list as a way to dampen the harm from abusive reports.

Suddenly, it's a much smaller problem.

The only way this works is to have a human review every piece of content before it goes live, like every other streaming service with a kids section does.

I don’t have kids, but this seems a bit over the top. Children live in the world with the rest of us, and are exposed to things every day that haven’t been reviewed and approved as child safe. Angry drivers on the road may flip you off or yell at you while your kid is in the car, or someone at a stop light may be blaring music that you find to be offensive and not approved for consumption by children. Both of these things would objectively be scarier than a clown on a computer screen, yet kids see and hear these things every day and somehow most of them don’t grow up to be serial killers. Sure, try your best to shield them from harmful content, but completely shutting down something that is 98% clean, educational, child friendly content seems like throwing the baby out with the bath water.

We are not talking about some mildly offensive or violent behaviour. We are talking about things that would be illegal to show on prime time TV (child and adult timeslots)

10 great child videos does not make up for 1 psychopathic murder scene spliced into video 11

Have you ever personally witnessed a “psychopathic murder scene” being spliced into a YouTube video? Do 10% of videos really have this in them? I have never seen it once, in well over a decade of relatively heavy YouTube use. Most of my friends are in the tech scene and have children, and none of them have ever mentioned this as an issue either.

wrt to piracy: keep in mind that parents are often relatively financially disadvantaged as well as being the most financially targeted group. Some parents turn to youtube rather than (say) disney+ for a reason. Those that can afford it do because it is less mind time and real time than having to do even community curation.

My complaint is the opposite: lots of good, sensible content (most recently I was trying to set up my youngest to watch drum cover videos) just isn't there because no one thought to put it there.

You have to whitelist a few channels, then it works ok. Though my daughter is only 3 now, and would be happy watching Blippi all day. Seems like it would be more complicated to whitelist channels as kids get older.

OK, that's just not true. There's a ton of great stuff on YT Kids (though as I mentioned not enough). But yes, you have to find it for them and show it to them yourself. Left to their own devices most kids aren't going to make good choices. They're kids, that's the point.

This is just the "be a parent" thing, really. There's absolutely no way to get around the need to educate your own children. Certainly Google isn't going to do it for you. And Google certainly didn't invent junky content; I remember staring at Hanna-Barbera garbage constantly as a child.

The funny thing is, I had to choose my child's age range (or enter the birth year or something) when setting up the app. Then, when I went to whitelist channel by channel, it had a bunch of recommended channels full of good/decent content. That should have been the default whitelist out of the box.

It isn't just about "being a parent". My daughter is very smart for her age. My wife used to be a teacher, but since we had kids, she stays at home with them. She has taught my kids a lot. She has learned a good amount from content on YouTube, Netflix, and Disney. I think it's good that she can use an iPad better than my parents (even though she can't read). She also can solve puzzle games on her own. Of course we guide her and limit her usage. My point is that an app marketed to kids should not be full of garbage content.

Ps: I'm not trying to change your mind, I'm trying to understand the reasoning behind it, coming from a more liberal raising and as a result a more relaxed attitude to what is banned and what is not banned.

As a big Leave it to Beaver fan I find this hilarious. And would pay anything to watch this episode if it existed.

The big tech companies are so far removed from real users that they'll just tighten a few screws on their machine learning and call it fixed. You're a roundoff error to them, unfortunately. These people are the real machines, servicing the electronic machines to make money for their masters, the execs and stockholders.

"As a parent" is one of my favourite phrases, by the way. It translates to "I know better than you, regardless of your parental status". Which is fine. I was only wondering about the reasoning, after all. :)

I sympathize with this. Lots of parents are vociferous morons, because lots of people are morons and becoming parents does not fix that. But: There is a real difference, at least for many people. Your brain rewires itself to be hyper-vigilant about child safety and child harm. I can't watch TV or movies anymore that involve harm or the threat of grave harm to children, but these wouldn't have bothered me before. When I enter a room, I subconsciously scan it like Jason Bourne if he were a toddler's bodyguard. Slippery surfaces? Sharp table corners? Unfenced stairs? I've compared notes with friends and this is a common, if not universal, change in parents. They spend a lot of time thinking about child safety.

Yes, if you are worried, the smart thing to do is not to expose your kids to YouTube at all. Wishing that YouTube could be better is independent of whether you choose to expose your kids to it.

Also, it has nothing to do with being liberal or conservative, at least with me. I will let my kids watch a lot of stuff, if we intentionally pick it out. If you saw random baby shark or finger family between whatever videos you wanted, you'd be right to complain and no one would blame you.

There is zero product design behind the way kids are exposed to scary things. No product manager decided it should be that way. It just is that way because it's not prioritized by the business or it's too expensive.

Imo if YouTube markets at kids they should be accountable. They should clean it up.

My kids are too young to have unrestricted access to the internet. That's why they are limited to specific kids apps.

But YTKids is different than all the other kids apps. All the other apps have a human check all the content before it goes live.

So I can be reasonably certain that the content will be ok without watching it all first.

With YT, I can't have that certainty. So they just don't get to use that platform anymore.

Yeah, bad things happen, and when they do I talk to my kids about it.

But I don't want to purposely subject them to such things if I don't have to.

We let ours decide what to watch / play out of a handful of things we've hand-picked as OK (such as Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood or Super Simple Songs), and iOS's guided access mode has been a godsend for this.

Super Simple Songs is on YouTube and has great content for kids, but I refuse to use YouTube Kids as we tried it once and couldn't control it well enough—weird videos started creeping in almost immediately. So, we use regular YouTube and disable autoplay, which we have to manually check every single time, because YouTube has randomly re-enabled it for us a couple times which led to the weird videos again).

We do limit her screen time (and consequently, ours), but trying to keep her away from them 100% of the time? That's honestly not realistic, nor fair.

At our daughter's previous day home, the provider started letting her watch a YouTube channel called babybus (against our previous agreement of no TV, which was the straw that caused us to quit her service). At first glance the show is innocent enough, it's just a bunch of cartoon characters singing and going on adventures. But if you actually pay close attention to some (not all) of the episodes, its a weird fear-based morality show from China that threatens death if you don't behave a certain (rather authoritarian) way.

The frustrating part about it is that there is a ton of really great kids' programming on YouTube that simply wouldn't be possible without it. It just takes an order of magnitude more effort to sort it out than pretty much any other service that provides content because you have to curate everything yourself.

I ask out of curiosity and personal learning, not out of any sort of judgement. I do not have children and if I did would likely not have had so in time for this to occur.

You don't realize just how much free time you really have until a toddler demands it all away from you. Meanwhile, dinner needs to get cooked, dishes need to be done, laundry has to be washed and folded, the house needs to get cleaned, etc. And your kid wants / needs attention every few minutes (at least ours does—she can only colour or paint or play with toys for so long by herself before she wants to play with you).

First thing I do on a kids device is ban the YouTube and similar apps and set web to a whitelist. Check the screen time settings.

My solution has been to curate specific videos then embedd them in html pages and turn off the suggestions that would normally run at the video.

Yes, it’s more work, but I see real benefits in this approach.

They're children, not small adults.

Or if it is, they need better hands, because they're terrible at it.

The word for this is "parent".

Many kids do not follow these rules. They get punished and have valued things taken away. Some learn a lesson and will follow the rules and others do not.

The ones who still don't listen have to be with you when you cook and clean. If you go out another parent/babysitter/old children will watch them.

What rules can you set in place such that your kids don’t accidentally see something explicitly targeting them with gore or other traumatic content?

The only rule that seems to make that possible is “don’t use YouTube Kids”.

It is not Youtube's responsibility to raise your children.

I think this is where you lose me - why is allowing a child access to have un-tethered access to a content portal appropriate? i.e. why is the responsibility on the content portal (YouTube) and not the parent or supervisor?

I might be a tad too much on the individual responsibility side of the spectrum here, but just like the old argument from the 90's ("The TV ain't a replacement for a babysitter...") I'm not sure the responsibility necessarily needs to be on the platform here over the parent/supervisor.

One suggestion: You can create a white-list or playlist of pre-approved content creators and/or videos, and offer access that way.

That’s parenting - avoid the shitty services that can’t put out a good product so you can focus your effort on something more meaningful. Or YouTube can fix the problem and it will be allowed in my household.

The same trust cannot be extended to YouTube.

If YT can't and won't do it, they shouldn't label it as kids content. They have a separate product/brand for it, so it should be what it claims to be.

because given how easy it is to access content on the user side there's no other way to do it feasibly. You can take the tv remote away from your kids, and that only turns the TV off. Tablets, pcs and so on are general-purpose computers with plenty of workarounds, it's extremely hard practically to stop kids from accessing content that they can technically access without greatly diminishing the value of the device or service.