For curating videos for one's own children, if the catalog isn't changing too often, you might be able to `youtube-dl` the videos, and put the files on kids' devices or your home media device/appliance.

I've been using `youtube-dl` successfully for lecture videos on my TV appliance (supposedly to watch while using the stationary bike). An example command line is in a script that grabs the videos from a conference: https://www.neilvandyke.org/racket/download-racketcon-2019-v...

I suppose one could automate the process, with a simple UI to approve or submit a URL for viewing, and then automatically youtube-dl it and make it available to the kids' devices.

That doesn't work. My kids are literally being assigned to watch specific YouTube videos on their Chromebooks and then answer questions as part of the ridiculous "distance learning" nonsense that the school district came up with. I can't review and approve each video. And downloaded videos won't be available on Chromebooks.

If you are up for it, you could host the videos on a computer on your network and serve them with Plex. Plex has a decent web-app for viewing your catalog. Chromebooks should have no problem with that setup provided they can get on the same network as the server.

There's also the added issue that the chromebooks are probably running through a VPN for the district filtering and monitoring. This at least the way my children's district runs things.

No the links from school assignments would be broken.

There's a button, "not interested". Click it. My youtube is mostly pretty nice. I get recommendations for cooking videos because I subscribe to and watch a couple of channels. I get recommendations for GDC videos, various programming videos. I mark videos as not interest often. And if there is something It think might give it the wrong idea I often right click and view in an incognito window. Have had very few issues keeping my youtube recommendations relatively clean, and I really enjoy some channels. Souped Up Recipes, Chinese Cooking Demystified, Coding Adventure, Veritasium, Kurzgesagt

I think you're maybe missing the point, just a bit.

The problem isn't that tech savy people can protect themselves, it's that most people can't and won't.

I think they were just offering advice to that particular person. I even forgot there was a 'not interested' option. I just keep good company on YT I guess.

I use this extension for Firefox, which does the job pretty well: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/remove-youtub...

> I also can't block it for my daughter because she has school assignments that involve watching YouTube videos.

Our school uses http://www.viewpure.com/ to avoid this.

Also, I agree you don't even need to watch a political video to see political garbage on youtube. Last night they showed me some bizarre political conspiracy ad saying Pelosi and Harris are going to invoke the 25th amendment on Biden to make Harris the president. YouTube was promoting this nonsense at the top of the feed.

I'm overall sympathetic to the schools and how much work they've had to do to get everyone set up for virtual learning. That said, if I'd been in charge these laptops would be locked down. I'd whitelist only trusted educational site, and I'd tell the teachers that they'd have to find a way to work with those.

I regularily see shady ads as well. This is the actual outrage IMO. Before going off and create a corporate censorship network, they should at least apply some "standars" to what they let through on the ad side. But I guess it is all too late. The Circle proofs to be a pretty prophetic book.

I never see ads on YouTube. I think my ad blocker is sufficiently good at blocking them for me.

You deserve better then to be shown ads.

Yes I totally agree. In this case I was using the ios app so ad blockers do not apply and I was also using YT without being logged in. I need to find a better solution for this.

I subscribe to Youtube Premium. It's handy if you use Youtube a lot and dislike ads.

Using this threads sidearm to promote YouTube Premium is pretty much beside the point. I wasn't trying to emphasis my particular dislike for ads. In fact, if the ad is haflway decent, or even interesting, I dont mind getting the occassional ad, especially since I see it as a way of supporting the actual channel owners. What I object to, and in particular in the context of this posting, is that I regularily see ads which never would make it through on more local media. Some of these are outright scams. And I wonder, what is the difference between someone spreading "misinformation" on their channel, and someone else paying YouTube to spread "information" which will ultimately be used to scam the user. Also, YouTube has channel which upwards of 1 mio subscribers which only consist of pirated content. I truely wonder how these slip through the cracks.

I agree but ideally I do not want to log in to youtube.

Yeah you can to some pretty dark corners of youtube when you put it on autoplay :)

Your kid will be corrupted by society anyway. What's this whole thing about protecting children from the reality of the real world anyway?

A bit off topic but a serious question. What's your logical reasoning for blocking the content now. It's just slowing down what he will be able to see (by deliberately going around you) within a couple years. I never understood this with parents.

> Your kid will be corrupted by society anyway. What's this whole thing about protecting children from the reality of the real world anyway?

> A bit off topic but a serious question. What's your logical reasoning for blocking the content now. It's just slowing down what he will be able to see (by deliberately going around you) within a couple years. I never understood this with parents.

Children are not little adults. They're still developing and learning things that you and I would consider basic. It makes sense to delay their exposure to certain things until they have the maturity and knowledge to process them properly.

You've never understood why parents protect children from things that they will eventually be exposed to as adults? If your goal is to give your children unfiltered access to "reality," parents are entirely unnecessary after birth.

>You've never understood why parents protect children from things that they will eventually be exposed to as adults? If your goal is to give your children unfiltered access to "reality," parents are entirely unnecessary after birth.

Hey I have a different opinion than you. I think you should respect that rather than say parents are unnecessary after birth. That's rude.

First off think about it logically. Why indeed do parents have to protect children from things they will not only be exposed to as adults but things they will inevitably seek and successfully expose themselves to BEFORE they become adults.

Your job as a parent is to protect your kid from actual harm and to teach your kid and feed your kid and guide your kid. Your optional side job is to protect your kid from "reality" that's your own personal choice and there are actual scientific observations of the result.

The podcast below actually illustrates a scientific study on the subject:

https://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/378577902/how-to-be...

A part of it actually follows two blind kids with different parents and different parenting choices.

One parent chose to protect his blind kid from reality.

The other parent gave the blind kid a bike for a birthday present two weeks after the crazy blind kid lost his two front teeth from running into a wall.

Do you want to know the end result of sheltering a blind kid versus encouraging one to explore reality? Watch the podcast to find out. Very interesting if your a parent. Let's just say one blind kid (now adult) now walks around the world as if he can see and literally uses echolocation to navigate the world. The other blind kid walks the world as if he's a crippled blind man.

Here's another one: https://www.npr.org/2015/01/16/377517810/world-with-no-fear

Also about kids. Talking about how kids today only wander around their homes while kids in the 60s and 70s wander around the whole town by themselves. It's attributed to different parenting styles and fear of exposing kids to the real world.

Parents in the 70s were much less fearful about protecting kids from reality. Parents today are scared of everything. But the illogical difference here is that from the 70s to now, crime has actually gone down. Your kids today are more safe than ever before but parents are more restrictive and scared than they ever were before.

A handy rule of thumb I employ is that any hot take that includes the phrase "kids today" can be immediately ignored. Any generalization of that scope is laughable.

Doesn't make sense because kids today are exactly the same as kids in the past.

This is science and its about research that the scientist did to prove something.

( Edited after being fairly criticized for not contributing to the conversation )

It's problematic to say that scientists have 'proved' anything. Scientist's conclusions are always based on the available data, and at any point new data may come along that disproves their conclusion. Scientists know this of course, which is why reputable ones are never going to step forward and announce "I have proved..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_evidence

> evidence cannot prove a theory correct because other evidence, yet to be discovered, may exist that is inconsistent with the theory

Scientists can't prove anything. They can only make statistical correlations and establish causation to a degree.

When I use the word "prove" i don't mean like proving things in math. Nobody means this, it's obvious to everyone what they mean. Prove in this context means well established. For example if I say scientists have proved the theory of gravity.

What's going on here is extreme pedantry. Prove has meaning in different contexts, you have chosen the most technical pedantic context to suit some misguided purpose rather than the most obvious context. There's no point in taking this further.

I am not trying to be pedantic. There are many contexts in which 'prove' might be a reasonable term colloquially.

However you are referring to a social science when you talk about differences between kids of different generations. I think using 'proved' in that context puts you on pretty shakey ground.

Scientists can't prove anything. They can only make statistical correlations and establish causation to a degree.

What this means is that whenever you use the word "prove" with "science" it is colloquial. It is always colloquial.

The statistical methods used in social sciences are no different than the statistical methods used to "prove" things in physics.

Wow, A real life libertarian true believer, look at that. I didn't know there was such a thing

Whatever works is what I believe. I feel lots of parents just don't have the balls to not coddle their children, and they justify this fear with rude comments like this.

FYI the two blind kids actually knew each other when they were kids, and I "kid" you not the kid that was the "libertarian" bullied and beat up the other one because he was thinking "wtf, why is this other kid helpless."

Listen to both podcasts. Worth it for any parent as it gives a true more "scientific" perspective on the coddling going on with kids today.

I'll point up to the original topic. Do you think it's a good idea to let a young child watch anti-vaccine videos? What about political videos which claim that 'the other' side supports killing babies? Young kids don't yet have the context to understand lying and propaganda, and it's not clear when they'd have the mental maturity to understand it.

More specifically, I was raised in a generation where adults didn't worry particularly about children seeing violent or upsetting content and it brought me nothing but nightmares and a lifetime of insomnia.

I would explain the content to them. Explain all the different sides and my personal views on it as well as direct him to content with opposing views. Then I would let him form his own opinion.

My job as a parent is to help him understand. Not to build a bubble.

As for violent content I would tell my kid to just watch out for that and that the content is unpleasant. It's his choice whether he wants to see it. Usually at that age adult content or violent content is uninteresting or unpleasant so kids tend to avoid it anyway.

I will happily concede that your three year old is a more advanced thinker than mine is.

As for violent content, with YouTube specifically it is easy to watch it without being forewarned. I don't know if you are aware of Elsagate but the whole goal is to get kids to watch horribly disturbing content without warning.

6 year old.

At 3, he just had a playstation.

When he was 3, were you protecting him from the reality of the real world?

A baby can crawl in random directions. Of course I'll protect him from crawling off a ledge. But when he has the capacity to understand and judge I coddle as little as possible and expose as much possible. 5-6 is around the right time.

At 3 I don't let him run across the street. At 5 I tell him to look both ways and I tell him what happens to someone who doesn't, then I let him play outside.