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We used to let our 3 y/o watch youtube. She learned lots of things from there which was amazing. Colors, Numbers, the alphabet; all by the time she was 2. I'm

• deleted 9y ago
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• fallfriday 9y ago
  This revolting video involving a monkey and a frog has been bugging me for a very long time. I check it regularly (though not watch it) to see if YT has at least age-gated it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVE60zwXx1k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVE60zwXx1k But nope, not yet. Maybe now?
• EADGBE 9y ago
  We've had good luck with Netflix for Kids.
  • sbjustin 9y ago
    Yeah. She's only allowed on Netflix now. I've seen Sofia 10,000 times.
    • microcolonel 9y ago
      I never understood how it was possible for little girls to watch the same movie literally hundreds of times, sometimes twice in one day. Some day science will get around to the real mysteries like this. I think I've tried to erase the memories of torture I survived, hearing Horton Hears a Who played most days for almost a year.
      • MichaelGG 9y ago
        I remember watching Dumbo (with the Lambert The Sheepish Lion Pre-Show) off a broken cassette repeatedly. I have a very distinct memory of somehow hoping this time things would turn out differently. Like thinking OK, the mother elephant could just trample the guys this time. Nowadays I do not enjoy watching things a second time until I've really forgotten them, and only then if I'm introducing someone new to something great.
      • ansible 9y ago
        I've heard some plausible theories. For a young kid, the world is a strange and unpredictable place. Which means "scary" in some sense. Watching a video (that the kid has seen many times before) is actually comforting. The kid can predict what's going to happen next, and is happy when expectations match reality. There's possibly something similar going on with people on the autistic end of the spectrum, which may explain why they tend to get upset when taken out of their routine.
        • derefr 9y ago
          I find rewatching things I still remember the plots of intolerable... when I'm fully awake. When I'm trying to fall asleep, I will almost always put on an episode of a podcast I've heard 500 times. It's more soothing than one of those ambient-noise apps.
          • timthorn 9y ago
            Try the Shipping Forecast. Different every night, but just the same each time.
        • colanderman 9y ago
          Speaking as an adult, the videos that will captivate me to the point of repeatedly rewatching them are specifically the videos that are unfamiliar and weird. Like say Kitty City [1]. My brain can't comprehend the unfamiliar world logic behind the video in just one go; it crave rewatches to better understand what the heck is happening in that scary world. So my pet theory is that actually the opposite of the above theory is true. Kids rewatch movies that push the boundaries of their reality, in order to gain a better understanding of them. When the novelty wears off they'll move on. Probably the truth is some combination of both. I wouldn't be surprised if certain times of day, developmental needs kick in and kids want to rewatch movies they don't understand; while other times of day, comfort needs kick in and they just want to see Elsa sing for the 100th time. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jX3iLfcMDCw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jX3iLfcMDCw
  • lliamander 9y ago
    For really young ages, I don't really see letting my kids watch something I haven't previewed, or at least something that I am watching with them and I am able to stop it at a moment's notice. Even for slightly older kids, a curated platform is always going to be a safer bet than a moderated platform. It seems fairly easy to find good sources of curated content. And of course there's just making sure they don't spend too much time consuming media in general. It's hard, but the less they watch the easier it is to be picky about introducing new things.
    • DanielleMolloy 9y ago
      Thanks. It already seemed as if there are not many people left who see it as irresponsible to place kids in front of all YouTube. Even the "good" examples in the article are cheaply produced crap. Also very telling about parenting that they could optimize towards long videos. I remember intense discussions about whether it is ok to let two-year-olds watch the Teletubbies. This nursery rhyme in the article is way below this. Maybe our overall perception of quality has changed due to being exposed to crap on the internet, and now new parents believe the stuff on YouTube is fine. And they don't remember the whole world of Sesame Street and alike out there anymore.
    • bigbugbag 9y ago
      Exactly this ! Do not let young children unsupervised when online or watching tv or videos.
  • knz 9y ago
    The PBS kids website/app is also a good option. The kids can only watch a limited range of PBS shoes that are child friendly (everything from Sesame Street to SciGirls).
• ashark 9y ago
  > We used to let our 3 y/o watch youtube. She learned lots of things from there which was amazing. Colors, Numbers, the alphabet; all by the time she was 2. I'm not a teacher by any means so it was awesome to see this happen. It's entirely possible the videos made this happen, or at least helped, but some kids just develop that stuff crazy-early. My daughter saw little video content before age two, and very little Youtube, but achieved all the same in the same timeframe with only basic work on our part. It was natural for her—she broke a 200-word working vocabulary by 14 months, could already count sets of things under ten, could name most letters of the alphabet, and so on. By age 2 she sounded like your average 4-year-old. Youtube had nothing to do with it, and we barely had anything to do with it. That was just her. My son, on the other hand...
  • sbjustin 9y ago
    Yeah. It's pretty amazing the speeds at which kids learn but seem to "even" up as they get older. My son is doing this completely different than my daughter. At 3, I can barely get my daughter to eat and my son at 7 months flips out if we don't feed him real food when we're eating now.
    • wickawic 9y ago
      I know your children are younger, but there is definitely something about school that brings out the lowest-common-denominator in all of us
      • rebuilder 9y ago
        IIRC, one tidbit broughr up in "The genius factory" was that while preschooling seems to result in accelerated development, any such differences are erased after a few years if school. The conclusion made in that book seemed to be that specialized teaching programmes don't provide long-term benefits, but maybe it's just that a one-size-fits-all schooling system will force more advanced kids to conform to a lower standard...
  • Danihan 9y ago
    It's almost as if genetics are king.
• ceejayoz 9y ago
  Same situation here. My daughter sought out phonics and sign language videos, and could count in three languages because of YouTube. It's disappointing and saddening to see it take such a quick turn to a harmful, dangerous place for kids.
  • Karunamon 9y ago
    Harmful and dangerous?
    • ceejayoz 9y ago
      You don't think small toddlers easily stumbling across disturbing videos of grown men in thongs and Spiderman masks is potentially harmful and dangerous?
      • krapp 9y ago
        Why would it be? Honestly - the image of grown men in thongs and Spider Man masks is disturbing to adults only in a certain context, you could just as well be describing modern wrestlers, whose content is targeted to slightly older children. But how would a toddler be damaged by it?
        • ceejayoz 9y ago
          Have you seen these videos? Spiderman peeing on Elsa? Come on.
          • krapp 9y ago
            I have seen some of them, but I'm not a toddler. How would seeing this content actually be harmful to a toddler (1 - ~3 years old?) I'm not a child psychologist so I may be wrong but I think you need a certain awareness of cultural norms to be disturbed by deviations from those norms, and toddlers might not even recognize what they're looking at, much less know that it's wrong, or why. I suspect these particular videos are more meant to disturb parents than kids.
• leggomylibro 9y ago
  I honestly wouldn't be surprised if this wound up being some ML grad student's channel who was playing around with generating audiovisual content. If it started getting picked up by big algorithms and making money... Although actually, huh. Maybe it's a little more organized and is just a general memetic malware scam; con youtube's algorithms into putting your junk which was generated in 0.4 seconds onto a few million screens and pocket the ad revenue. The point is, it might not be any more malicious than anything else that advertisers do on a daily basis, if they were just auto-tweaking the videos to optimize for revenue and hey, presto, colorful crap topped the list. After all, it's just an impartial algorithm. Kinda makes you think about all the other stuff we happily let advertisers get away with, huh?
  • vostrocity 9y ago
    Correct. I don't see this as different than content farms that generate low-quality webpages to monetize with ads. I think the real issue is that online advertising platforms are allowing this to happen and charging advertisers for it (even though these views/clicks are often not valid – whether they're people who click a fake 'Download' by mistake or kids under 13).
  • krapp 9y ago
    I suspect that, at this point, it's a number of overlapping phenomena. I remember some time ago watching a video discussing weird flash games and videos with the same sort of pain-and-comfort themes that some of these videos have, also including Disney and other licensed characters, and also the oddly repetitious and low quality "children's videos" related to (and possibly spun off of) toys (lacking violent or otherwise disturbing content,) likely just attempts at clickbait. These would pop up in compilations of "weird Youtube channels" from time to time, no doubt driving traffic to their channels, and making them aware of their potential virality. So it may be impossible to know, at this point, what the reality is behind this content because a lot of it may well be attempts to cash in on a meme.
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• robteix 9y ago
  Same thing happened to us. My daughter learned a lot from YouTube. Then one day I saw her watching this video of My Little Pony (badly drawn) cutting each other with machetes. The recommendations started including lots of these things. SpongeBob committing suicide and stuff. She has no access to YouTube anymore, which is a bit sad because again there's a lot of good stuff there.
• fulafel 9y ago
  Those color learning videos were also targeting children, no? I presume there's something bad about the new videos but it's not obvious for the rest of us.
• tudorw 9y ago
  Agreed and YouTube could do a lot better, my child does not need a library of 30 million videos, I would rather have a well curated whitelist of 10000.
  • Steko 9y ago
    > YouTube says it typically takes at least a few days for content to make its way from YouTube proper to YouTube Kids, and the hope is that within that window, users will flag anything potentially disturbing to children They’ll use the computing power of a small nation to train their Go-Bot and can instantly identify anything that might belong to Big Content ... but when it comes to basic decency Google throw up their hands.
  • worldsayshi 9y ago
    Yeah, they could solve this problem in a heartbeat by having a mode where you can only look at your subscribed content.
    • setzer22 9y ago
      This can even be done without google. In fact, this would require minimal work. For example, Kodi's youtube plugin, which lacks the recommendations and autoplay features (which is a feature in this case), could be easily restricted to only show the "Subscriptions" folder. On the other hand, a user-maintained curated list of channels for children is not something that unthinkable (think of GitHub model, with pull requests and that sort of thing). Join both things and you get a better alternative to Youtube Kids for concerned parents. I'm even surprised nobody has done something like this, it would be a nice project.
      • worldsayshi 9y ago
        However, as krapp pointed out, the main argument against limiting to subscribed content would be that it undermines youtube's business model. If such project got a lot of users youtube might start to work against it.
      • GFischer 9y ago
• worldsayshi 9y ago
  I don't get why they can't just implement a way to just show content that you have subscribed to. That way you can exactly control what you let your kid look at.
  • krapp 9y ago
    That would undermine their revenue model. Youtube isn't intended to be a walled garden for children, it's intended to be a viral social platform that targets consumers with advertising (or offers to upgrade to the paid tier) through the lure of content discovery. I find it difficult to believe Google never knew these videos existed, since they appear to be an entire industry based on copyright infringement and gaming their algorithms, one would expect Google to want to kill them with fire. That they are allowed to proliferate can only mean they serve Google's interest for the site - they drive clicks and views. Whatever other motives there may be for them (personally, I think they're nothing more sinister than monetizing clickbait) I think it's important to remember that Youtube is a business driven by clickbait, and the design of the site reinforces this everywhere it can.
    • worldsayshi 9y ago
      > That would undermine their revenue model That makes sense of course. In my mind I thought that doing this wouldn't stop them from running advertisements. But I guess it would undermine recruitment of new content creators.
      • krapp 9y ago
        The safest solution would be to download a list of videos from Youtube and run them locally as a playlist. Of course, that's not a solution that would work for most parents, or Youtube, or content owners, or probably the law. Second best solution would be curating a personal playlist of videos and to make certain children are always watching under supervision. Third best solution would be, ironically, preferring children's television over the internet. As I understand it, Youtube isn't profitable for Google, and a lot of their decisions wrt their algorithms seem focused on increasingly desperate attempts at wringing some semblance of solvency out of the platform, so I wouldn't expect them to be very willing to work against their interests right now.
• chrido 9y ago
  My 3 year old loves excavator and robot videos. Suddenly all this strange videos were recommended. Search "bad baby" to see what I mean. They also pop up in youtube for kids and they have thousands of views, unbelievable!
  • microwavecamera 9y ago
    I did a search for "mickey mouse" and found a bunch. Two of them, Super Mickey TV and Kids Toon TV, have been up since 2009 and gotten over 350M views combined. https://www.youtube.com/user/CaluMMaCL1/about https://www.youtube.com/user/CaluMMaCL1/about https://www.youtube.com/user/lovepersonified19/about https://www.youtube.com/user/lovepersonified19/about
• astura 9y ago
  I don't know about 3 year olds but parking infants in front of "educational" videos does the opposite: http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1650352,00.html http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1650352,0...
  • KarlAuer 9y ago
    incidentally, I have a similar opinion on school.
    • astura 9y ago
      There's a difference between "opinions" and "facts."
    • bigbugbag 9y ago
      you have a similar opinion on the specific broken school system you have in mind. Not all school systems are broken by design and aim at shoehorning kids in a mental mould to have them integrate the system society wants them to be a part of. https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_cre...
• bigbugbag 9y ago
  Scientific consensus has been reached for quite a while saying that exposing a 3 y/o child to screens actually impairs his/her personal development and has long term consequences. Getting your kid off of youtube is probably a good thing.