You clearly haven't seen some of the horrifying stuff that slips past the filters. We're not talking about the episode of Leave it to Beaver where Wally smokes a joint. There is a category of malicious amateur cartoons that look kid friendly in the thumbnail and in the first few minutes, and then become sick. The Elsagate stuff was part of that. I have seen, on YouTube Kids: an ice cream truck driven by a cartoon animal, who poisons and kills the other cartoon animals; and a knock off Mickey Mouse cartoon where Mickey rips his own head off unexpectedly with full blood and gore. This is not "have a discussion with your kids" territory, it's nightmares and trauma. As a parent, the risk of that happening obliterates the value proposition of YouTube for kids.

> We're not talking about the episode of Leave it to Beaver where Wally smokes a joint.

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

Well, that does not sound more horrifying than say Itchy & Scratchy from The Simpsons.

That is not a cartoon for young children though. It is rated TV-PG and even TV-14 on some episodes.

> This is not "have a discussion with your kids" territory, it's nightmares and trauma.

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.

I have seen it, yes. The sudden gore is obviously unfortunate for a toddler to stumble across, even for an older child. I understand that you would like to shield your children for such content, but I also strongly believe that it's possible to do so with communication, rules and strict guidelines on how to look up content and suggested videos.

"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. :)

> "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".

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.

I think the OP is saying the same thing you are, which is that smoking a joint is not the problem: it’s the random gore.

I sure did miss that "not".

You seem to have misread the parent comment.

I think it's pretty fair to expect that a product or platform like YouTube delivers a consistent and predictable experience instead of blaming users.

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.

> Dare I ask why you put your guards up against YouTube instead of either deciding that your kids are too young to use a tablet/smartphone/PC in general, or that sometimes contents is scary but it's OK to talk about?

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.

Dude the stuff we're discussing freaks me out just looking at it, and I'm a grown adult. If I'm watching a horror/gore movie I'm fully prepared for everything thats coming, if this kind of thing randomly appeared while watching a video about how to make spaghetti and meatballs with no acknowledgement (as it tends to happen in these kids videos) It'd fuck with me big time.

Not the OP, but we tried that with my daughter. It turns out that’s only a viable strategy if you’re willing to absolutely never use a phone or tablet or computer or tv in their presence, ever.

Why is that? My daughter has an extremely restricted access to screens. I code for a living. She understands that is my work. She understands we consider she is too young to decide the contents she watches. And even when she doesn't understand, she understands it's not her call.

You have a very understanding kid then, I'm jealous.

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.

This. I was also not allowed to watch certain TV shows if they happened to air at a time where I wasn't put to bed yet. And don't get me started on magazines in the supermarket. I didn't understand why not, but I knew that disrespecting the rule was not worth getting my curiosity satisfied.

You were still allowed to watch TV shows then, I presume? Just like pretty much everyone I know? Our daughter is too, and we absolutely control what she can and can not watch. But in HN terms, YouTube is a massive foot-gun compared to other services. Auto-play very quickly leads you to trouble, and you can never quite trust YouTube to not re-enable it, or show thumbnails for inappropriate content at the end of a video.

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.

Honest Question: If you did use a device and disallowed the same for your daughter, did your daughter "freak out" in some manner?

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.

It's not quite as simple as you've laid out, but sometimes it can be, depending on everyone's moods. Sometimes she's perfectly fine playing in her play kitchen while we watch a 20 minute show, other times she wants to watch a nursery rhyme and sing and dance along, or watch Lucas the Spider while she cuddles her stuffed version of him.

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).