[gpspake]

I took me a while but I finally figured this out. I think the difficulty is a dark ui pattern that hides the control behind an age selection. In the youtube kids admin settings, there's a part where you select your kids age 0-4, 4-9 etc... My kid is 4 so I never really looked at the later options but after probably 20 times on that screen, I noticed at the end (where my eyes glossed over the higher ages) there's something along the lines of "control content yourself". Once I selected it, I could whitelist channels and completely disable search and recommendations. This means the youtube kids app _only_ shows what I say it can. If I want to give him access to something like "smarter every day" or a specific video that's not on youtube kids, I can click share from my account and share with "kids" We've still pretty much banned youtube on all devices but, like you said, there's a lot of valuable stuff and I really miss the time when he would get in to "tornadoes" or "helicopters" or some other topic and we could watch a bunch of educational videos without being flooded with trash toy videos and subversive attention leeching ads. This at least opens the door back up for some of that good content without the garbage.

[bcoughlan]

I considered doing the same but in the end decided I don’t want to use a platform I have to fight against, while still letting them build brand recognition to my kid.

So I downloaded a bunch of the videos on our desktop and blocked the site. Works for my 3.5 year old, not sure the plan when they outgrow it.

[nonethewiser]

>I considered doing the same but in the end decided I don’t want to use a platform I have to fight against, while still letting them build brand recognition to my kid.

>So I downloaded a bunch of the videos on our desktop and blocked the site.

Downloading videos from youtube and blocking the site seems more like fighting against the platform (and more work) than turning on a whitelist mode. Seems like the end result is the same but with more work.

[onemoresoop]

I did the same and it’s great. At some point normal boredom kicks in and no bad habits are formed. I realized a while ago that many kids are primed early throug so many channels, it’s beyond despicable. At this point a big share of blame needs to fall on the parents turning a bling eye to it all.

[plussed_reader]

Is there a modern parent sysadmin reference?

I miss portability of settings; configuring restrictions for an mdm is soul sucking.

[alabastervlog]

It's practically fucking impossible to have a normal amount of tech in the house and keep it under control, while also keeping things not-annoying for the adults. It's so much work, all because the tech is bad at providing simple and powerful solutions.

Everything lacks the basics, and nothing reads system-level e.g. content rating restrictions, it's all per-service and per-device and it's maddening.

Worse, the single most-useful parental control possible, an allow-list, is often absent from TV interfaces and steaming services. Allow-list just the PBS app on AppleTV? Impossible, there is no way to do a case-by-case allow list. Allow-list only the handful of non-brain-rot children's shows on Netflix? Nah, it's just by age rating. Et c.

[EDIT] Our solution, after years and years of banging our heads against this? App-installation blocked everywhere, no YouTube on anything, all streaming services cancelled because they're such a pain in the ass, and the kids have a large curated set of pirated content served by Jellyfin that they can watch when they get TV time, including some things pulled from YouTube by yt-dlp. If we want to one-off stream something for the kids outside of that set of content, we "cast" it from a parent's device.

The non-piracy alternative would be to go back to discs for everything, I guess.

Standard ways of interacting with "modern" media services are just awful, if you're a parent. They're so bad that it's easiest to simply abandon them.

[basch]

Identity needs to be redesigned on the web.

A family unit should own all accounts in the family, parents should be able to reset any password to any owned account from a central dashboard without hunting down email links and 2factor. I don't want to set up a management account for each service. I want all any services management options exposed by api and displayed in my central dashboard. Of my choice.

[throwanem]

Would it help to do it with a kid on your lap, or otherwise actively involved? Perhaps you could put a laptop on the floor and make a game of it, and certainly in our line there's never any shortage of complicated words that can be said in funny ways.

I don't know. I didn't ever have kids, but if I don't mind letting a $3k laptop wear a few battle scars just for it participating in the life of a photographer, I have to suppose getting a little dinged up to help make a child smile must be at least as honorable.

For that matter, I recall a ferret - now long since gone to her reward, of course, this was decades ago - jumping on an Esc key just in time to cancel a Windows 2000 install, and that was funny enough to laugh about for years. How much more so with a cheerful, clever baby primate? Don't mind me, though. Just getting a little maudlin in my old age.

[citizenkeen]

My frustration is that you can’t add monetized videos to that list, so there’s a lot of great science videos you can’t add.

[philips]

I started running Pinchflat and a Jellyfin server after I outgrew the restrictions in YouTube kids.

[the_third_wave]

> My kid is 4 so ...

... there is no way in hell I'll give him or her access to the 'net. Right?

Right.

[Retr0id]

Unless you anticipate your child growing up to live in a world with no internet, it doesn't make much sense to raise them with no internet. Parentally-curated information sources seems like a more than fine approach to that.

[spacechild1]

I certainly don't. Occasionally we watch photos or music videos together. There is no unsupervised device usage.

Side note: Just a few days ago I witnessed a mom letting her ~2 year old daughter browse TikTok while shopping groceries. The kid mindlessly swept to the next video every few seconds. I was horrified.

[oblio]

They don't need internet access at that age, don't listen to what other people say (trust your gut on this one)

My first computer was at age 13 and I had internet (broadband, directly) at 20.

Now, obviously both of those are very late for 2025+ and social pressure would be overbearing.

But I think internet usage before, say, 7, is useless. There is so much to learn in the real world before that, anyway (outdoors activities including sports, books, card and boardgames, crafting, ...).

Thankfully I live in a place where they're introducing school bans for smartphones, total ones in primary and during classes in secondary. That should reduce social pressure massively.

If all goes well computers will be introduced around 7, supervised (probably with a locked down Linux and various educational programs, maybe some simple multiplayer games, etc). A dumb phone will probably appear in a few years and a locked down smartphone as late as possible, maybe around 12?

I expect mobile device mastery to happen almost instantly, instilling desktop computer usage is the real target, maybe some programming.

Unsupervised internet usage is a tricky thing. Not sure when exactly, they need to learn about NSFW and especially NSFL. And of course about the crack-manufacturers employed by FAANG.

[stickfigure]

I gave my kid the Youtube Kids app at that age. I curated the channels he was allowed to watch. It was pretty good. I loved it when my kid quoted random science facts to me that I didn't know.

YMMV.

[dismalaf]

There's a lot of good stuff on the internet. More information than we had access to as kids. Better to raise them to be responsible, well adjusted humans than to shield them from reality.

[angryGhost]

there must be a ReVanced alternative for web browsers, ever since cracking YouTube I find myself only using it when I want to search for a video because I have disabled the home screen and disabled shorts so I never see the slop

[netsharc]

I use https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/improve-youtube-%F0... and my YouTube start page is empty... it can also remove shorts from the search results.