The danger for kids also stems from this in my opinion, if the wrong kind of video creeps into autoplay everything goes down the drain FAST with almost no chance to recover for the better by itself. Cheap and almost copied content gets rewarded the most.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7...

"But taken together the cumulative effect is that of a giant refrigerator that freezes us, and those who govern us, into a state of immobility, perpetually repeating the past and terrified of change and the future."

That article makes the same argument about index funds and hedge funds, the Blackrocks and Vanguards of the world. Minimizing risk means trapping the world in a way that it never has a chance to gamble on changing.

"It has within its memory a vast history of the past 50 years - not just financial - but all kinds of events. What it does is constantly take things that happen in the present day and compares them to events in the past. Out of the millions and millions of correlations - Aladdin then spots possible disasters - possible futures - and moves the investments to avoid that future happening.

I can't over-emphasise how powerful Blackrock's system is in shaping the world - it's more powerful in some respects than traditional politics.

And it raises really important questions. Because its aim is to not change the world - but to keep it stable. Preventing any development thats too risky. And when you are moving $11 trillion around to do that -it is a really important new force."

Personalized tailored experiences prevent the future by making us relive the past.

YouTube also lets you easily add to your interests by directly searching for and watching videos about them. There is also the slow way where you have interest X and YouTube recommends you a video about Y since it noticed that it preformed well for other people interested in X.

I would never consider YouTube as trapping me as a frozen past as what kinds of videos it recommends are constantly changing as my interests in real life change.

That said, I don’t personally use auto play often. I don’t let YouTube just pick random things for me over and over, unless it’s music in a background. Even on a tv I browse suggestions and pick one vs letting it choose.

I don't know what happened or when, but it's impossible to discover new content there anymore.

This was also around the time I just turned off the entire thing via DF YouTube :)

I now view YT like a dumb video hosting service; can't be bothered to fight with its stupid UI or inexplicable ML background fuckery.

Maybe some day they'll equip users with the tools that are appropriate to browse the biggest video platform of all time. They could take a hint from Steam on how to do that (or just use common sense)

I tend to unsubscribe, or tell youtube to stop showing me this.

You can click here [1] to see your supposed 'interests'.

It's uncannily bad.

'Combat Sports' , 'Boating', 'Construction and Power Tools' and 'Cricket' (!) apparently among interests they think I haven though they are subjects which don't cross my mind.

I don't think I've even thought about 'Cricket' other than for them to tell me it's 'an interest'.

[1] https://adssettings.google.com/u/0/authenticated

It also deduced correctly that I'm married with no kids, while my work account is married with teenage kids, probably from watching videos linked here in HN.

  Parental Status : Not A Parent

  Parenting
  Nursery & Playroom
  Babies & Toddlers
  Baby & Toddler Toys
  Baby Care & Hygiene
  Baby Strollers & Transport 
  Child Care
  Children's Clothing

Maybe too many cat videos?

Too bad it's never going to happen.

Yes and no. From your own example, the censors and rules made it clear to parents what and when their kids could watch without the parents having to expend too much time and effort to double check everything. In theory, something branded 'YouTube Kids' would fit the same purpose and many parents probably assume it is fine based on their experience with offline media. The problem is there is no strictness or quality control like you mention.

That would be an interesting Kids mode. "Only allow videos from playlists that have been added/sunk to this account." Kind of a middle ground between making Google the content arbitrator and being able to watch every video before your kids do.

That's kind of the point of YT though is to completely bypass the network curation. Nobody has what you want on or won't put your stuff on? Screw 'em! We bring you YouTube. The You was the big deal that bucked the network concept.

So no, there's never going to be a human curator for all of YT. If channels want to curate themselves, then they may or may not be rewarded for that with a larger subscriber base.

Instead we have algoautoplay.

I'm describing opt in playlist producers. Why couldn't there be a level of "playlist curators" who exist not as channels. "Bob puts together really good playlists, whitelist all Bob approved videos." I subscribe to 10 curators and bobs my uncle. I want to follow bob for the videos he suggests not the ones he makes.

The idea of a channel curating itself is the anthesis of someone picking the best from many channels. Pop radio run by Taylor Swift would turn into her playing her album on repeat? How is that more useful than the album itself.

The evolution of the MTV VJ. It could even have an audio reaction track layered over the top of the playlist that can be toggled on off. They could add intro/outro commentary.

The other part is how to incentivize the creation of the playlists.

Unless you're letting a tablet, or the television raise your children, it's not because of the onslaught of content. The onslaught of content is nothing new - for the past century, mass media was producing more content than you could ever consume.

The problem is that parents aren't putting in the time and energy to curate the content their children consume. (I'm explicitly not going to go into the social reasons why, it's an interesting topic, but not really pertinent to this thread. Some people in this thread are bringing up technical reasons why, which I feel is more pertinent.)

In other words: If we want to break kids' screen addictions then we need to start with their parents.

I grew up with a handful of channels and I can't really say it was much of a hardship. When I compare to the endless doomscrolling of YouTube for yet another Minecraft video I see my boy doing I can't help but feel like the algorithms have got his mind in a vice already. The technology seems better in every way, but the negatives are also amplified.

YouTube is measurably worse, especially for children’s content. There was amazing music and educational stuff in there, and it’s still there. But those creators are gone in the sense that there isn’t a lot of new content as the garbage you describe took over.

It’s reflective of the poor leadership of that part of the company. Based on conversations with fellow parents, YouTube is a no-go zone for them. The idiot who got a big bonus for “engagement” targeting kids will be long gone when the brand toxicity kills the growth.

Look at Netflix as a comparison of a company with similar product, but who has self-respect. Netflix has a ruthless focus on engagement, but you don’t see the type of vacuous content. Netflix never auto played by 3 year old to a creepy clown hiding in a kids video. If anything, they elevated television in many ways.

It's the opposite. Quality content goes viral where bad content will stop getting recommended to people.

>Cheap and almost copied content gets rewarded the most

What gets rewarded the most is entertaining videos. YouTube doesn't care if that video took 10 minutes to make or 10 months. It just sees how good the video is at entertaining people.

As someone who can't help but look for those narrative and visual tropes, I can indeed confirm that the bog standard reality TV show, and the vast majority of non-reality TV shows are about this intellectually un-engaging.

Then they're posted to dozens of YT channels in different languages with highly algorithm-optimised names and descriptions.

Boom, money.

There are all sorts of conspiracies from some psyop stuff to AI/ML generated content. I have not ideas what to even begin to think.

The easiest answer I suppose is just some companies found an easy way to mass produce videos towards an demographic that will not mind mindless clicking, and that that will translate to more views and more money. That still doesn’t explain the bizarre and disturbing content some of them put out.

My take was that it was crafted to be optimally engaging to a child of about four years of age. With no other purpose. Maybe even semi-automatically generated. The subject matter is a common fear of children. The video does not have enough to push it quite over the edge to any horror/revulsion response. Any particular frame would not be too out of place in a children's cartoon. As an adult, it disturbs mostly when you realize what's going on behind it conceptually.

Obviously worked as intended, given how many views it got. https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-39381889

There are thousands of video variations of that theme. Someone else here mentioned people cosplaying the characters in creepy ways. I think it started there and evolved rapidly into automated production of reptile-brain trigger material.

I do wish I could just whitelist channels, or get automatic recommendations for channels to block.

A single video would appear harmless. But hundreds (maybe thousands) of these? Horrible.

But if you put them on continuously in front of a young kid (or at least my kid) and you can almost see their gray matter being systematically obliterated.

I think its childhood equivalent of mindless doomscrolling.

If you think this concern is overblown, just look at what Wile E. Coyote did to a generation of children. People grow up thinking you can walk off a cliff and not fall to your doom until you look down. We were told it was just a joke, but look at the dire consequences.

As someone said below, even a show like Loony Tunes would be better, but preferably kids should be watching things such as PBS Kids.

I don't allow my kid to use youtube at all so it is preaching to the choir here, pinch of salt, etc.

No YouTube anymore. PBS Kids from there on.

The slack-jaw lobotomized YT Kids look is honestly scarier than the benzo loopies. I think we’re done with it.

https://imgur.com/a/8xPGPJ7

Thanks to people dismissing ElsaGate as "just weird videos", that issue never got the attention it actually deserved. Aside from the countless rationalizations, part of the blame is on YT in my books; mostly for saying "it's fine, we'll deal with it" instead of collecting data, analyzing it, and making the results public to warn parents.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKp2gikIkD8

I asked how often his kid watched SS. With a back of envelope calculation, I pointed out that it took SS several hundred hours to teach his kid the alphabet. I.e. it was the most inefficient, time-consuming teaching method ever devised.

(I was taught the alphabet in first grade by singing the alphabet song. This was before SS.)

No wonder it's popular.

For what it's worth, we found https://www.youtube.com/user/SuperSimpleSongs via the Khan Academy Kids app. They have select videos (from what we've seen) from this particular creator that they break up into the app and make responsive.

So for example they may play a bit of 'Do you know the muffin man,' then pause it and ask the child to tap on the ___. Or tap and count the ___.

Given how he's been developing, and that we'll break into random songs that we learned from the series, I've no complaints with a few channels.

(Although what I like most is to sit and watch crazy repair videos together with them: welding of excavator arms, disassembly and restoration of everyday items etc.)

However, credit were credit is due: one of my kid spent some time on those channels around age 4 to 5 and actually surprised me by having learned English numbers, and not superficially: I was totally amazed when that kid could not only count to 20 in English but also instantly translate between the language his mother talks and English. Compared to other kids I know just being able to consistently count to 20 in one language might often be a challenge.

A little more criticism: in addition to pretend-educational videos which I find mightily annoying there were also a number of kids-unboxing-box-after-box-of-expensive-toys which seemed to me to be the worst.

You sure? After watching a couple of 'em I ain't sure it's even physically possible for a human to come up with something so absurdly inhuman.

It's like if that "surreal entertainment" channel branched out into actual kids' content instead of parodies thereof.

One helpful thing was raising the age for their YouTube kids.. I don't want them just navigating YouTube alone.