Let's be serious. Between 3 to 7 years: smartphone == youtube.

... and not the good parts of it.

My kingdom for the ability to allow-list what my kids can watch on YouTube. I'd pay double what they charge for YouTube Premium just for that. Youtube-dl'ing the videos and putting them somewhere easily accessible is a giant pain. There's great stuff on there but YouTube makes it so damn hard to curate it.

Basically that. Quite difficult to leave them alone or they'll just watch bad stuff eventually because of the fantastic algorithms.

> My kingdom for the ability

Then, for your kingdom, you will be able to afford building an app that plays YT videos only if matching some regular expression based on your whitelist. You can apparently stream YT videos through the ExoPlayer library or other tricks, see e.g.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29607104/how-to-play-you...

Fuck Youtube. I fucking hate it.

My son can be interested in an animal, so he'll find some youtube videos of the animal to watch. This is ok because the videos he searches and clicks on are fine, usually some sort of documentary. But then the algo. within like 3 videos he's watching badly autogenerated X vs Y monsters fight bullshit videos and it just gets worse and worse.

I'm seriously tempted to set up some sort of network MITM proxy that blocks any YT URL where the HTTP Referrer is a previous YT Video, so that algorithmic suggestions can just fuck off. Searching for and watching a video would be fine.

Yep, noticed the same pattern. Starts with some really interesting and educational videos and then eventually degenerates to gunfights, loud yelling and needless violence videos for kids.