Parent and long-time ex-googler. I'm baffled that the original YT Kids was not whitelisted, and in fact I uninstalled it from my little one's ipads a long time ago. They were watching a Trolls (Dreamworks) animation, and I thought "boy, the writing on this isn't very good, but whatever". Then the plot started to become kinda bizarre and I realized it was a fake. As a user, I felt duped by YT Kids, who had promised me a window into the internet I can safely hand over to my <6-year olds. But really, it's just random people around the world uploading junk.
As an ex-googler who saw the way some (a few) PMs made decisions with their own Impact (aka career) in mind, I can cynically imagine them choosing the algorithmic method because at Google you must scale, and you get promoted by launching a cool machine learning product and not a product with <200 channels that were hand-selected (that's boring!). But as a parent all I wanted was just a few channels. Some disney, some science, etc.
It seems strange to (implicitly?) blame "a few PMs" for building things the wait Google management and culture demands, instead of pulling a mutiny on their employers.
The safest way to use YouTube with kids is to download videos offline using youtube-dl or one of its front ends and use an app like VLC to play them.
Kids shouldn't be accessing YouTube directly. It really is bad. A simple example: looking for videos for a school women's history day thingamajig, YouTube kept recommending outright twisted videos which were sort of women's history but algorithmically generated and just plain wrong.
The other interesting thing I found with YouTube is that it's very hard to find good parent curated playlists. The bad stuff overwhelms the good.
The current prevailing non-tin-foil-hat theory is that some animators realised that they could game YouTube's suggestion algorithm, and that kids videos are an easy target. Kids also are very inquisitive when it comes to subjects you tell them are inappropriate. Over time the videos with darker themes got more clicks and it has spiralled out of control since. Throw in some bots to increase views and comment rapidly once videos are released to increase rankings and you've got a perfect ad-revenue scheme.
Of course there's nutjobs who think it's a pedophile ring normalising sexual violence to kids, but there's an equal likelihood of pizzagate being real.
I've heard Joe Rogan talk about this on his podcast. It sounds like there is an epidemic of cartoon styled videos with dark endings that wind up autoplaying after kids' videos.
The good thing for YouTube is that more kids are being born every day. They can sacrifice all existing kids and still have more new users going forward.
I don’t understand why YT a kids isn’t a completely parent controlled thing. I’d like to be able to simply choose the channels that my kids can watch any time, and let’s leave it at that.
I could ask the same question about other services like Netflix, Amazon Freetime, etc. I’m so tired of services completely missing the ball on what I want as a parent, which is really nothing more than presenting my child a locked down profile with access to content I have whitelisted - but everything operates on the curation+blacklist model instead.
Because in the modern walled garden, all decisions must be made by the benevolent corporation for benefit of the consumer. We're paid to think so you don't have to!
This will be awesome, same for Netflix. Another problem to fix is limiting watching to certain times and durations. I wonder if there are third party apps that aggregate across YT and Netflix and has these features in a legal manner.
One step closer to the only thing I ever wanted, an app that lets me whitelist the channels. Without having to create an account too. The list will be small enough to store locally and pass with every list request. I never want to see another video about colors wrapped in bible verses for the rest of my life.
Whitelisted by YouTube. Still no app to let the user whitelist channels or videos themselves. Only blacklist, which is useless with the amount of channels on YouTube.
Education google apps users can whitelist videos for student google accounts on their domain, but I don’t think it actually works because I’ve approved videos and my students still can’t access them.
Also google doesn’t officially consider youtube to be part of google apps for education even though it has the approval system for YouTube videos.
With white list for average users... how could Youtube recommend videos to people? They can't possibly give up the right to show you stuff they want, there is so much money to be made from this.
In this particular case, they will probably need local curators everywhere not just because of language but also because of what is considered safe for kids given the culture. So yes, it will probably take some time but I think that is understandable. After all, what's stopping someone in your (or my) country from making such a service themselves, even using Youtubes content?
If we could restrict the app to just play videos of a single playlist, life would be great. But today it is very easy for kids to exit playlist mode, thus defeating the purpose of curating a playlist.
We deleted YT on our devices the kids use. Google policy and practice changes so frequently, I don’t trust them as a long term solution. And like I said the content is low quality for the most part anyway.
Netflix has plenty of quality kids content for us.
"Non-algorithmic"? It seems like the word algorithm is being bleached to the point of meaningless. I even saw a social media type service (I forget what) advertise it's self as having "no algorithms".
Feels a bit like people being scared of "chemicals in their food".
I hope we don't get to the point where "algorithm" has only a narrow popular denotation and only negative connotation.
Amazon has an excellent resource for Kids, where the content is curated by professionals. It's called Amazon FreeTime Unlimited. Why doesn't Google have the same already?
I have a love/hate relationship with FreeTime Unlimited. At $3 or so a month it’s a great value, but I really wish there was a whitelist option for parents instead of the blacklist they already have, my wife and I have grown tired of trawling though the lists every month to ensure we keep some of content we don’t care for blocked.
The bad parts of the internet has become too easily accessible, the greed of the 21th century is abusing childrens brains. That's what i can agree with, but employing first class espionage on your kids isn't nice either. It'll remove all trust between them and you, and they'll probably get used to it and not question spying governments and compaies either.
I wonder if there will be a quality filter too. When my kids (now 6 and 4) were allowed YT Kids, even the "appropriate" videos were mostly terrible toy reviews and things like that. I've no idea why kids like them so much. I uninstalled it. Now the only video app they're allowed is BBC iPlayer Kids, which is great (but I'm assuming UK-only).
I don't know of any apps that do this exactly, so maybe if you want to stay within YouTube you could try restricting to a playlist. But that still has the possibility of random videos playing at some point. I've also been looking for something that allows me to loop videos, although that's more for creating a TV-channel like loop for my grandparents.
To be safe in this situation I'd just use something like youtube-dl [1] and save filtered videos locally. Kids tend to watch the same videos over and over, so why not save bandwidth/battery life and store it locally when it's so cheap to do so. And since it's likely cartoons, the compression is better saving even more space. Tip: You can download playlists, so if you set a cronjob task to download a playlist you can add videos to it from anywhere you have access to YouTube.
ImprovedTube extension, hide suggestions, disable player end screen, subscribe to channels you want - you will only see videos from your Subscription feed.
Youtube regular is still very very busted. Why is Russia Today showing up in my top recommended? To answer the obvious follow up question, I have never liked, subscribed or watched a RT video.
Who do you trust to decide what your kid should be able to see?
Human editorial is certainly better than algorithm editorial, and YouTube Kids was a nightmare so I'm not complaining, but I'm sure the value judgements of a lot of respectable YouTube employees are very different to mine.
Are Christian and Islamic and Scientologist morality tales all acceptable or not? What about science and engineering videos with high safety requirements, or even history?
In Australia, I believe most parents are happy to trust other parents they know as well as teachers and the ABC (our national taxypayer funded broadcaster). Relatively speaking, I think we do reasonably well; although Finland is probably the world's model citizen when it comes to raising kids.
[+] [-] throwaway93192|8 years ago|reply
As an ex-googler who saw the way some (a few) PMs made decisions with their own Impact (aka career) in mind, I can cynically imagine them choosing the algorithmic method because at Google you must scale, and you get promoted by launching a cool machine learning product and not a product with <200 channels that were hand-selected (that's boring!). But as a parent all I wanted was just a few channels. Some disney, some science, etc.
[+] [-] gowld|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ReverseCold|8 years ago|reply
If you want a future without all this happening, stop giving your kids YouTube in the first place.
[+] [-] 77ko|8 years ago|reply
Kids shouldn't be accessing YouTube directly. It really is bad. A simple example: looking for videos for a school women's history day thingamajig, YouTube kept recommending outright twisted videos which were sort of women's history but algorithmically generated and just plain wrong.
The other interesting thing I found with YouTube is that it's very hard to find good parent curated playlists. The bad stuff overwhelms the good.
[+] [-] sametmax|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|8 years ago|reply
it's almost something i could use the social graph to do ...
[+] [-] borne0|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mayniac|8 years ago|reply
The current prevailing non-tin-foil-hat theory is that some animators realised that they could game YouTube's suggestion algorithm, and that kids videos are an easy target. Kids also are very inquisitive when it comes to subjects you tell them are inappropriate. Over time the videos with darker themes got more clicks and it has spiralled out of control since. Throw in some bots to increase views and comment rapidly once videos are released to increase rankings and you've got a perfect ad-revenue scheme.
Of course there's nutjobs who think it's a pedophile ring normalising sexual violence to kids, but there's an equal likelihood of pizzagate being real.
[+] [-] dkoubsky|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pfarnsworth|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] borne0|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] djrogers|8 years ago|reply
Why does this not exist?
[+] [-] snuxoll|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gowld|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] innagadadavida|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nition|8 years ago|reply
I see one YouTube Whitelist app on the Play store already but it's got in-app purchases and just generally doesn't look that great.
[+] [-] acct1771|8 years ago|reply
You just have to do it "the old fashioned way", aka, spending the time with your kids.
[+] [-] jasonkostempski|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noir_lord|8 years ago|reply
YouTube recommends "Secret Alien Spaceship you didn't know about" or some equally inane bullshit.
It's so bad I used ublock origin to just filter out that entire vertical section.
The recommendations are simply useless to an end user.
[+] [-] fredguth|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gowld|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nition|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0x00000000|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pulcinella|8 years ago|reply
Also google doesn’t officially consider youtube to be part of google apps for education even though it has the approval system for YouTube videos.
[+] [-] tanilama|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josteink|8 years ago|reply
I guess for us outside the US we’ll just have to wait another 5 years for google to flip the switch to make this worldwide. Again.
At stuff like, Google really systematically sucks.
[+] [-] kristiandupont|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lawik|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gowld|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nightcracker|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] romuloab42|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] annamargot|8 years ago|reply
We deleted YT on our devices the kids use. Google policy and practice changes so frequently, I don’t trust them as a long term solution. And like I said the content is low quality for the most part anyway.
Netflix has plenty of quality kids content for us.
[+] [-] afandian|8 years ago|reply
Feels a bit like people being scared of "chemicals in their food".
I hope we don't get to the point where "algorithm" has only a narrow popular denotation and only negative connotation.
[+] [-] intopieces|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snuxoll|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] psyc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] magoon|8 years ago|reply
It’s amazing how high & dry parents are left without options for their kids to use a Chromebook. You wouldn’t believe it until you see for yourself.
[+] [-] lillecarl|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ascorbic|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spraak|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomstockmail|8 years ago|reply
To be safe in this situation I'd just use something like youtube-dl [1] and save filtered videos locally. Kids tend to watch the same videos over and over, so why not save bandwidth/battery life and store it locally when it's so cheap to do so. And since it's likely cartoons, the compression is better saving even more space. Tip: You can download playlists, so if you set a cronjob task to download a playlist you can add videos to it from anywhere you have access to YouTube.
[1] https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/
[+] [-] rasz|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jgalt212|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acobster|8 years ago|reply
https://www.eff.org/missing-devices
[+] [-] AndrewOMartin|8 years ago|reply
Human editorial is certainly better than algorithm editorial, and YouTube Kids was a nightmare so I'm not complaining, but I'm sure the value judgements of a lot of respectable YouTube employees are very different to mine.
Are Christian and Islamic and Scientologist morality tales all acceptable or not? What about science and engineering videos with high safety requirements, or even history?
[+] [-] coatmatter|8 years ago|reply
Do you trust anyone?
[+] [-] gowld|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fudged71|8 years ago|reply