[byronic]

Speaking as a parent of young children, I don't see any point in going back to YouTube. It's been blocked in our household basically since our oldest was six, and I don't see any way they could ever lure us back into that ecosystem.

Save perhaps allowing access only to specific, curated (self-controlled) channels.

If anything, YT's announcement here suggests they're going to take an already terrible platform covered head to toe in schlock and say "y'know what, we can add on a few more buckets"

[kranke155]

No it’s worse. The US government is making them reinstate people they don’t believe belong in the service at all.

[AnonymousPlanet]

I'm curious, could you be more specific as to what exactly you mean by "schlock"? The ads? Product recommendations? Political content? Opinions?

For something that has a massive amount of videos added to it every minute, it's a surprisingly sanitised place.

They could introduce a kids friendly subdomain that would make it easier to filter at a proxy level. But then parents all over the world will be pulling their hair out about what is deemed to be kids friendly. The staunchly atheist might balk at content that is open towards Religion, the religious extremists will balk at content that is open to things like homosexuality, and the dietary extremists will complain about endorsements of the wrong choice of food. Humans like to make up lists of purity rules. But those lists rarely match.

So I'm curious, what does your list look like?

[trenchpilgrim]

I'm guessing they left right around the time of Elsagate. Youtube Kids (a separate "kid friendly" version of YouTube) was almost entirely bizarre permutations of software-assembled videos. I hear it still is, but most of my friends banned unsupervised youtube for their young kids around this time.

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

[arccy]

kids friendly subdomain: https://www.youtubekids.com/

[UltraSane]

That is foolish. YouTube has some of the best educational content ever made. I suppose you could use yt-dlp to download all of 3Blue1Brown or other excellent educational channels.

[abstractbill]

This is the approach I've settled on. My kids get a very small amount of actual youtube time each week. If they find a new channel they really like, they pitch it to me. If I think it's good enough, I download the whole thing with yt-dlp for them. It works pretty well for us.

[tjpnz]

The majority of the "kids" content is just random slop with zero educational or even entertainment value. We noticed our three year olds were less prone to acting up when we took it away - now they'll typically watch Curious George and Paddington on Netflix or the various free to air kids shows on TV.