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YouTube Kids Is Going to Release a Whitelisted, Non-Algorithmic Version of App

182 points by pulisse 9y ago

psyc 9y ago
YouTube responding to users' serious concerns? And it only took about 3 years? Well, may wonders never cease.
mozumder 9y ago
Earlier I suggested YouTube start to use actual editors: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16758397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16758397 I guess this is their response. AI will never replace humans in judgement. Sorry Silicon Valley. It's not going to happen. Stop trying to make it happen.
- taeric 9y ago
  I would be surprised if AI doesn't assist in the near future. Now, even.
  - bobthepanda 9y ago
    Sure. But AI is notoriously bad at detecting edge cases of things. This is particularly true with user generated content, where new, unfamiliar cultural contexts come about all the time.
  - JeremyBanks 9y ago
    https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/30/16222850/youtube-google-brain-algorithm-video-recommendation-personalized-feed https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/30/16222850/youtube-google-b...
  - nostalgeek 9y ago
    "assist" is the key here. Often big companies such as Google believe than AI can "replace", because any process involving human interaction "doesn't scale".
    - taeric 9y ago
      Agreed. Apologies for keeping my first post too brief. I think, quite firmly, that what we call ai we'll be used to augment many techniques without replacing them. I share the scepticism that it will replace them. Though, I think it is prudent to acknowledge the progress that has been made. My self twenty years ago would be impressed with what we have. I suspect the same will be true in another twenty.
  - aspaceman 9y ago
    AI should definitely assist! I think that folks just don't want AI to be the final say in anything since it seems to be just as biased as its human counterparts. The issue with AI is it's a lot harder to question the black box than it is to question a human operator. Accountability will be especially important as AIs come into contact with more and more of our lives. Google et al. appear to have systems in place where AI makes the final say on your behavior, but then you can find a human reviewer if you really beg / you're important enough. I don't think that's sustainable from a social perspective
Overtonwindow 9y ago
This sounds good but I see another side: Targeted advertising to kids.
- dbasedweeb 9y ago
  Of course, most programming for kids has been just that for decades, with a few notable exceptions (Sesame Street, Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, others probably). The programs themselves when I was a kid typically took the form of a 22 minute toy advertisement, interspersed with more advertising. Of course, they didn’t have data on my particular viewing habits and a psych profile, but honestly it still worked pretty well. The best bet if you care about your kid is probably to try and curate yourself. That’s definitely doable if you’re well-off in a two parent home with one child at a time, but how many families does that describe on average?
  - InitialLastName 9y ago
    > they didn’t have data on my particular viewing habits and a psych profile I'd bet that 8-year olds (as a population), with their under-cooked brains and extremely limited autonomy have MUCH more predictable psych profiles and viewing habits than adults as a population. Anecdote for illustration: I, and everybody I went to school with, watched the same show when we got home from school. How much more predictable a viewing pattern can you get? Plus, you can bet that I wanted whatever toy they were advertising, and bugged my parents about it as soon as I could. Thinking about it, I'll never see data to confirm this but I'll bet childrens' TV advertisers have better conversion rates than Facebook, with all of its carefully mined and organized profiling data.
    - Larrikin 9y ago
      I have a friend at Bandai that says the US market actually has laws that prevent the situation that occurs in Japan. Shows like Power Rangers basically have their entire commercial blocks bought out by the toy company that manufactures the Power Rangers toys. This creates a very interesting relationship where the show runners and toy creators work together when creating the next season, where the two companies have veto power over ideas from the other. The toy companies come up with special guns or powers unique from the previous toy line, but the show producer can argue that it wouldn't translate well on screen or that there aren't enough good story lines and vice versa. In America atleast the toy tie ins are limited in the amount of advertising they can show. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the limitations on online advertising are far weaker than their television equivalents. This tracks with my own viewings as a child from what I can remember. I remember being bombarded with toy ads when I was young, but I also remember being excited about toy tie ins I didn't know existed when I got my parents to rent Power Rangers on VHS and having the first and last 5 minutes of the video tape consist of toy advertisements.
borne0 9y ago
Hmm, my nephew already saw pepa pig having her teeth extracted on YouTube kids so I'm gonna say this is too little too late.
- borne0 9y ago
  Downvotes right off the bat? Ok, parents are happy to give their kids a screen to give themselves a momentary reprieve but if that trust is broken good luck getting it back.
- dkoubsky 9y ago
  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.
  - Pulcinella 9y ago
    See the previous discussion on HN and it’s link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15637504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15637504 It’s very disturbing, especially once you have kids of your own and it hits home.
    - musage 9y ago
      https://imgur.com/a/Hpds1 https://imgur.com/a/Hpds1 What disturbs me is how no explanation other than "copy cats out for ad money" is allowed. The abusiveness of it might even get be allowed to be seen if only it could be tied to profit motive. But just targeting children at scale to fuck them up, maybe not even for ads, not even to groom them -- too nasty, can't be, Pizzagate tinfoil yadda yadda. Not that it would take more than a single multi-billionaire with a brain tumor or something; let's simply not even look into it, and make up revisionist narratives once the source material is all gone. But the material was/is there, not much about the nature of the content is mysterious. Nothing about the denial is mysterious either, except those in it. They prefer to talk about the people talking about the supposed intent of the people who made the videos, rather than the videos thoroughly. And even when it's well meant, "disturbing" is too much of an umbrella to be useful. It's pretty fucked up that the whole conversation ranges from "is this disturbing or can it be rationalized neatly". I guess that's called framing. To me it's "disturbing" because it seems to be reading from a script, and because some of it focuses on abuse, gleefully so. And that borders on stuff like toy videos (thousands and hundreds of thousands of them, it seems) which are just hands of an adult... shoving dolls around, making shrill voices. Or those endless wastelands of generated 3D animations playing with heads or tying identity to color, putting things in blenders and microwaves. And so on; there are two bottlenecks, the attention span of listeners/readers, and the energy it takes to look at and then recount all this stuff -- but the amount of fucked up shit is NOT a bottleneck. Even as a collective we don't muster the attention span required. It's an ocean, and we're the people skirting it saying it's a puddle anyway so there isn't even a need to measure its depth. And that itself, the overwhelming of the attention span, is another abusive aspect in all this. And we're not really discussing this or other aspects, using the "nutjobs" as a fig leaf for not doing so. But that's not nutty, and turning a blind eye to abuse is not documented behavior of a deeply sick society. Whatever helps them sleep. ElsaGate made also me less tolerant of stuff that isn't outright abusive, but simply very shit. That's not fair, but it did sensitize me to "just" sloppy and lazy children's entertainment, too. It's better kids entertain themselves and each other than be entertained by crap adults, I bet you they learn more from that. And frankly, when I look at what goes for adult entertainment, I see ElsaGate as the latest, ugliest achievement in a long line of normalization of abuse. It's no wonder the reaction is so limp and mostly focuses on sweeping it under the rug. We made this, ultimately; but we won't see it for what it is, nor the connection to what we accept.
spraak 9y ago
Are there any apps that just let you select specific videos or playlists? That is, I'd like something even more customizable.
- tomstockmail 9y ago
  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. [1] https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/ https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/
  - romuloab42 9y ago
    That was my conclusion as well. I didn't get fancy about setting cronjobs. I just run a script every now and then, and it is enough for my case. I'm still looking for a good player that would behave somewhat like Youtube Kids (auto play, fullscreen, no volume/brightness controls). All players I've tried have controls that kids don't understand and, accidentally or intentionally, end up ruining everything.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      For what platform? On Android, MX Player has a lock functionality, and a Kids Lock plugin (makes a bit harder to unlock).
  - spraak 9y ago
    Cool, thanks for your help!
  - 9y ago
nightcracker 9y ago
Wow, a whitelisted, non-algorithmic feed of videos! Oh wait, do you mean... a playlist?
- romuloab42 9y ago
  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.
  - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
    So it's just a playlist of playlists then? A meta-playlist.
  - fma 9y ago
    My wife's business has a TV that plays some videos from YouTube of her company in the waiting room. At the end of the Playlist pops up videos from competitors. In the past it would autoplay those and it was embarassing but at least I turned that off. She pays for YouTube Red. There is no way for YouTube to not autosuggest, or to repeat the videos in a Playlist over and over. I decided for her to use YouTube because of the auto caption. Will need to find some other solution...
    - rasz 9y ago
      Its trivial on the desktop with one of the extensions/userscripts, both hiding suggestions and autoplaying what you select.
      - fma 9y ago
        Yes, actually you can do it on a computer easily. You can even use like ListenOnRepeat.com and control the playlist. The problem is when she opens her retail location she wants to do it from the app on the tv, or app on her phone and do a Chromecast. I'd rather not install a computer there just to show some videos...and I don't know why YouTube forces the suggested videos to paying customers without giving an option to turn it off.
fudged71 9y ago
Finally, it's YouTube Kids, for Kids!
Nition 9y ago
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.
- Pulcinella 9y ago
  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.
- 0x00000000 9y ago
  Blacklisting doesn't even work. I blocked a channel and clicked "not interested" on about 10 videos and still keep getting videos from that channel
- tanilama 9y ago
  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.
magoon 9y ago
But not for Chromebook. 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.
- adorton 9y ago
  A few months ago, my Chromebook was updated to support Android apps. YouTube Kids should be available on the Play store assuming your Chromebook is updated to support it.
w-ll 9y ago
What ever happen to Yahooligans?
77ko 9y ago
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.
- lifeisstillgood 9y ago
  I do agree with this but getting that curation tonwork sounds - interesting it's almost something i could use the social graph to do ...
- sametmax 9y ago
  Children bellow 10 should not have access to internet without supervision IMO.
  - nojvek 9y ago
    We’re visiting some friends in Australia and almost everyone has an ipad per kid with unrestricted YouTube access. They feel kids keep themselves entertained with iPads and games. Some of them have glasses at a young age since they look at the iPad so closely. I’m legit worried for the next generation of kids who grow up on YouTube consuming endless amounts of ads and crappy entertainment. Add that to the fact that an iPad is a very poor creative device and mostly a consuming device. I learnt programming at a young age because I had a proper keyboard and programming was mildly entertaining. Flash and actionscript were my canvas of endless creativity in holidays. It’s almost impossible to program anything relatively complex on an iPad. For the parents of HN, how do you ensure your kids use tech appropriately and don’t develop mindless addiction to it?
    - mcphage 9y ago
      > I’m legit worried for the next generation of kids who grow up on YouTube consuming endless amounts of ads and crappy entertainment. That's what we grew up on, too. I was hoping that streaming video would let me cut ads out of my kids' lives, but... they just changed form.
jasonkostempski 9y ago
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.
- noir_lord 9y ago
  Same, I'm interested in Programming, Chess, History and Engineering. 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.
  - mistermann 9y ago
    I watch youtube a LOT and have 3 or 4 different primary interests, and I regularly spend a fair amount of time looking for new channels, etc typically with no success. And then occasionally, I will sometimes come across a perfectly relevant channel with 1 million+ subscribers, that the youtube algorithm has never suggested to me as a channel, or even any of the individual videos. It is so inept that it seems impossible to be accidental - obviously that makes no sense at all, but then knowingly allowing twisted videos to continue existing in children's channels makes no sense either, yet here we are.
  - nikanj 9y ago
    Spotify does similar things with its discover weekly-lists, but at least in their case, the motivation somewhat obvious. I don't think payola is a think for Youtube videos yet, though it seems inevitable that there's a market opportunity there.
- fredguth 9y ago
  Me too! YT Kids sucks in blacklisting and I don’t understand why can’t the parents whitelist some channels.
- gowld 9y ago
acobster 9y ago
Reminds me of a fictional program devised by EFF: YTKAd-Free. https://www.eff.org/missing-devices https://www.eff.org/missing-devices
throwaway93192 9y ago
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.
- ReverseCold 9y ago
  People vote with their actions time and time again that they do not care if they are tracked. If you want a future without all this happening, stop giving your kids YouTube in the first place.
  - pmlnr 9y ago
    Google has a lot of subscription services as well; this could be one of those, without exploiting kids.
  - lern_too_spel 9y ago
    Parents explicitly do want to track what their children are watching. That's not the problem. The problem is that YouTube Kids promotes garbage.
- gowld 9y ago
  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.
ascorbic 9y ago
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).
josteink 9y ago
TIL there is a YouTube kids service/app. Which I can’t use because of my IP-address. Again. 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.
- lawik 9y ago
  I would really like the option of paying for YT Red. But nope. So yeah. Frustrating.
  - fredguth 9y ago
    I’m in the same situation here.
- kristiandupont 9y ago
  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?
  - izacus 9y ago
    Why can't the parents decide if the curation is good enough? Why is a complete hard lockout with no choice "understandable"?
- gowld 9y ago
  It's an opportunity for you to build a video service for your country.
intopieces 9y ago
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?
- snuxoll 9y ago
  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.
bberrry 9y ago
As far as I know Youtube Kids is still unavailable outside the US. Anyone aware of a workaround to get it on my iPad?
akshayjullia 9y ago
A non-algorithmic version of the app could be a waste.
carlhjerpe 9y ago
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.
AndrewOMartin 9y ago
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?
- coatmatter 9y ago
  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. Do you trust anyone?
- gowld 9y ago
  Anything not lambasted on the front page of HuffPo is acceptable.
afandian 9y ago
"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.
- Zhyl 9y ago
  I got annoyed at my father once for making a sarcastic comment about 'algorithms' in the sense you're describing here. So I sat him down at the table and cut 10 bits of string of different length. I then walked him through bubble sorting the bits of string. Then I said something like 'that is all an algorithm is. A set of rules or instructions that a computer can follow. The only trick the computer has is that it can do the instructions really quickly. There is no magic and they're not inherently oppressive.' I wasn't expecting it to work, but after that he never made another dig at 'algorithms'.
unicornporn 9y ago
Just curious, is there advertising in the YouTube Kids app?
- replicatorblog 9y ago
  nope!
annamargot 9y ago
So it’s Netflix but with ads and worse content? 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.
pfarnsworth 9y ago
My son loves YouTube kids (my daughter not so much) but luckily we haven’t come up against Elsagate yet. He’s simply too dorky with his video choices. He has learned all about astronomy through YTK and most recently he has learned all the American presidents from YTK videos. I am surprised that there’s no whitelisting though. Looks like we’re going all the way back to the original Yahoo days with their curated list of acceptable web site lists.
jgalt212 9y ago
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.
djrogers 9y ago
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. Why does this not exist?
- snuxoll 9y ago
  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.
- innagadadavida 9y ago
  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.
  - jjp 9y ago
    For the time limits you could take a look at Circle, which allows you reasonable control (at an individual level) of when and how long your children are using Netflix etc. And offers some control of what (by classified type) or domain whitelist/blacklist. Don’t think I can block specific urls so can’t achieve whitelist only YouTube.
    - mistermann 9y ago
      I've been looking for a router with good monitoring and control for years, this looks very impressive, thanks! https://meetcircle.com/ https://meetcircle.com/
- acct1771 9y ago
  You can. You just have to do it "the old fashioned way", aka, spending the time with your kids.
censorship 9y ago
I really do not trust my kids with google or facebook. Both companies violated and continue to violate privacy rights. We should sue these companies to take responsibility.
uhuru 9y ago
Is hackernews censoring peoples comments ? How long is this been going on ..
a1369209993 9y ago
If anyone else is apalled by the various parents talking about censoring their children's video/internet access and everyone just going along with it: you're not alone. I can't offer anything else encouraging, but at least know that you're not the only person in the world that recognizes this as child abuse.
- tree_of_item 9y ago
  "Censoring" these videos is child abuse? Because there are quite a few people in this thread who say allowing your children to view these generative videos with dark themes is child abuse.
SN76477 9y ago
ahh yes, the non-algorithm - also the future. As we learn that automation sucks for human interaction
sunstone 9y ago
I think it's pretty clear that with kids the solution is a tablet with known content and no connectivity.
faostb 9y ago
I had the same issue (bad content for kids on Kids Youtube) so I built http://kiddotube.com/ http://kiddotube.com/ for my kid (be careful: it is just a micro ec2 instance) with only best youtube channels for kids. There is a "parent mode" in which I can disable channels, playlists or videos that I don't like.

182 points by pulisse 9y ago

psyc 9y ago

YouTube responding to users' serious concerns? And it only took about 3 years? Well, may wonders never cease.

Earlier I suggested YouTube start to use actual editors: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16758397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16758397 I guess this is their response. AI will never replace humans in judgement. Sorry Silicon Valley. It's not going to happen. Stop trying to make it happen.

taeric 9y ago
I would be surprised if AI doesn't assist in the near future. Now, even.
- bobthepanda 9y ago
  Sure. But AI is notoriously bad at detecting edge cases of things. This is particularly true with user generated content, where new, unfamiliar cultural contexts come about all the time.
- JeremyBanks 9y ago
  https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/30/16222850/youtube-google-brain-algorithm-video-recommendation-personalized-feed https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/30/16222850/youtube-google-b...
- nostalgeek 9y ago
  "assist" is the key here. Often big companies such as Google believe than AI can "replace", because any process involving human interaction "doesn't scale".
  - taeric 9y ago
    Agreed. Apologies for keeping my first post too brief. I think, quite firmly, that what we call ai we'll be used to augment many techniques without replacing them. I share the scepticism that it will replace them. Though, I think it is prudent to acknowledge the progress that has been made. My self twenty years ago would be impressed with what we have. I suspect the same will be true in another twenty.
- aspaceman 9y ago
  AI should definitely assist! I think that folks just don't want AI to be the final say in anything since it seems to be just as biased as its human counterparts. The issue with AI is it's a lot harder to question the black box than it is to question a human operator. Accountability will be especially important as AIs come into contact with more and more of our lives. Google et al. appear to have systems in place where AI makes the final say on your behavior, but then you can find a human reviewer if you really beg / you're important enough. I don't think that's sustainable from a social perspective

Overtonwindow 9y ago

This sounds good but I see another side: Targeted advertising to kids.

dbasedweeb 9y ago
Of course, most programming for kids has been just that for decades, with a few notable exceptions (Sesame Street, Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, others probably). The programs themselves when I was a kid typically took the form of a 22 minute toy advertisement, interspersed with more advertising. Of course, they didn’t have data on my particular viewing habits and a psych profile, but honestly it still worked pretty well. The best bet if you care about your kid is probably to try and curate yourself. That’s definitely doable if you’re well-off in a two parent home with one child at a time, but how many families does that describe on average?
- InitialLastName 9y ago
  > they didn’t have data on my particular viewing habits and a psych profile I'd bet that 8-year olds (as a population), with their under-cooked brains and extremely limited autonomy have MUCH more predictable psych profiles and viewing habits than adults as a population. Anecdote for illustration: I, and everybody I went to school with, watched the same show when we got home from school. How much more predictable a viewing pattern can you get? Plus, you can bet that I wanted whatever toy they were advertising, and bugged my parents about it as soon as I could. Thinking about it, I'll never see data to confirm this but I'll bet childrens' TV advertisers have better conversion rates than Facebook, with all of its carefully mined and organized profiling data.
  - Larrikin 9y ago
    I have a friend at Bandai that says the US market actually has laws that prevent the situation that occurs in Japan. Shows like Power Rangers basically have their entire commercial blocks bought out by the toy company that manufactures the Power Rangers toys. This creates a very interesting relationship where the show runners and toy creators work together when creating the next season, where the two companies have veto power over ideas from the other. The toy companies come up with special guns or powers unique from the previous toy line, but the show producer can argue that it wouldn't translate well on screen or that there aren't enough good story lines and vice versa. In America atleast the toy tie ins are limited in the amount of advertising they can show. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the limitations on online advertising are far weaker than their television equivalents. This tracks with my own viewings as a child from what I can remember. I remember being bombarded with toy ads when I was young, but I also remember being excited about toy tie ins I didn't know existed when I got my parents to rent Power Rangers on VHS and having the first and last 5 minutes of the video tape consist of toy advertisements.

borne0 9y ago

Hmm, my nephew already saw pepa pig having her teeth extracted on YouTube kids so I'm gonna say this is too little too late.

borne0 9y ago
Downvotes right off the bat? Ok, parents are happy to give their kids a screen to give themselves a momentary reprieve but if that trust is broken good luck getting it back.
dkoubsky 9y ago
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.
- Pulcinella 9y ago
  See the previous discussion on HN and it’s link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15637504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15637504 It’s very disturbing, especially once you have kids of your own and it hits home.
  - musage 9y ago
    https://imgur.com/a/Hpds1 https://imgur.com/a/Hpds1 What disturbs me is how no explanation other than "copy cats out for ad money" is allowed. The abusiveness of it might even get be allowed to be seen if only it could be tied to profit motive. But just targeting children at scale to fuck them up, maybe not even for ads, not even to groom them -- too nasty, can't be, Pizzagate tinfoil yadda yadda. Not that it would take more than a single multi-billionaire with a brain tumor or something; let's simply not even look into it, and make up revisionist narratives once the source material is all gone. But the material was/is there, not much about the nature of the content is mysterious. Nothing about the denial is mysterious either, except those in it. They prefer to talk about the people talking about the supposed intent of the people who made the videos, rather than the videos thoroughly. And even when it's well meant, "disturbing" is too much of an umbrella to be useful. It's pretty fucked up that the whole conversation ranges from "is this disturbing or can it be rationalized neatly". I guess that's called framing. To me it's "disturbing" because it seems to be reading from a script, and because some of it focuses on abuse, gleefully so. And that borders on stuff like toy videos (thousands and hundreds of thousands of them, it seems) which are just hands of an adult... shoving dolls around, making shrill voices. Or those endless wastelands of generated 3D animations playing with heads or tying identity to color, putting things in blenders and microwaves. And so on; there are two bottlenecks, the attention span of listeners/readers, and the energy it takes to look at and then recount all this stuff -- but the amount of fucked up shit is NOT a bottleneck. Even as a collective we don't muster the attention span required. It's an ocean, and we're the people skirting it saying it's a puddle anyway so there isn't even a need to measure its depth. And that itself, the overwhelming of the attention span, is another abusive aspect in all this. And we're not really discussing this or other aspects, using the "nutjobs" as a fig leaf for not doing so. But that's not nutty, and turning a blind eye to abuse is not documented behavior of a deeply sick society. Whatever helps them sleep. ElsaGate made also me less tolerant of stuff that isn't outright abusive, but simply very shit. That's not fair, but it did sensitize me to "just" sloppy and lazy children's entertainment, too. It's better kids entertain themselves and each other than be entertained by crap adults, I bet you they learn more from that. And frankly, when I look at what goes for adult entertainment, I see ElsaGate as the latest, ugliest achievement in a long line of normalization of abuse. It's no wonder the reaction is so limp and mostly focuses on sweeping it under the rug. We made this, ultimately; but we won't see it for what it is, nor the connection to what we accept.

spraak 9y ago

Are there any apps that just let you select specific videos or playlists? That is, I'd like something even more customizable.

tomstockmail 9y ago
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. [1] https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/ https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/
- romuloab42 9y ago
  That was my conclusion as well. I didn't get fancy about setting cronjobs. I just run a script every now and then, and it is enough for my case. I'm still looking for a good player that would behave somewhat like Youtube Kids (auto play, fullscreen, no volume/brightness controls). All players I've tried have controls that kids don't understand and, accidentally or intentionally, end up ruining everything.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    For what platform? On Android, MX Player has a lock functionality, and a Kids Lock plugin (makes a bit harder to unlock).
- spraak 9y ago
  Cool, thanks for your help!
- 9y ago

nightcracker 9y ago

Wow, a whitelisted, non-algorithmic feed of videos! Oh wait, do you mean... a playlist?

romuloab42 9y ago
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.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
  So it's just a playlist of playlists then? A meta-playlist.
- fma 9y ago
  My wife's business has a TV that plays some videos from YouTube of her company in the waiting room. At the end of the Playlist pops up videos from competitors. In the past it would autoplay those and it was embarassing but at least I turned that off. She pays for YouTube Red. There is no way for YouTube to not autosuggest, or to repeat the videos in a Playlist over and over. I decided for her to use YouTube because of the auto caption. Will need to find some other solution...
  - rasz 9y ago
    Its trivial on the desktop with one of the extensions/userscripts, both hiding suggestions and autoplaying what you select.
    - fma 9y ago
      Yes, actually you can do it on a computer easily. You can even use like ListenOnRepeat.com and control the playlist. The problem is when she opens her retail location she wants to do it from the app on the tv, or app on her phone and do a Chromecast. I'd rather not install a computer there just to show some videos...and I don't know why YouTube forces the suggested videos to paying customers without giving an option to turn it off.

fudged71 9y ago

Finally, it's YouTube Kids, for Kids!

Nition 9y ago

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.

Pulcinella 9y ago
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.
0x00000000 9y ago
Blacklisting doesn't even work. I blocked a channel and clicked "not interested" on about 10 videos and still keep getting videos from that channel
tanilama 9y ago
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.

magoon 9y ago

But not for Chromebook. 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.

adorton 9y ago
A few months ago, my Chromebook was updated to support Android apps. YouTube Kids should be available on the Play store assuming your Chromebook is updated to support it.

w-ll 9y ago

What ever happen to Yahooligans?

77ko 9y ago

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.

lifeisstillgood 9y ago
I do agree with this but getting that curation tonwork sounds - interesting it's almost something i could use the social graph to do ...
sametmax 9y ago
Children bellow 10 should not have access to internet without supervision IMO.
- nojvek 9y ago
  We’re visiting some friends in Australia and almost everyone has an ipad per kid with unrestricted YouTube access. They feel kids keep themselves entertained with iPads and games. Some of them have glasses at a young age since they look at the iPad so closely. I’m legit worried for the next generation of kids who grow up on YouTube consuming endless amounts of ads and crappy entertainment. Add that to the fact that an iPad is a very poor creative device and mostly a consuming device. I learnt programming at a young age because I had a proper keyboard and programming was mildly entertaining. Flash and actionscript were my canvas of endless creativity in holidays. It’s almost impossible to program anything relatively complex on an iPad. For the parents of HN, how do you ensure your kids use tech appropriately and don’t develop mindless addiction to it?
  - mcphage 9y ago
    > I’m legit worried for the next generation of kids who grow up on YouTube consuming endless amounts of ads and crappy entertainment. That's what we grew up on, too. I was hoping that streaming video would let me cut ads out of my kids' lives, but... they just changed form.

jasonkostempski 9y ago

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.

noir_lord 9y ago
Same, I'm interested in Programming, Chess, History and Engineering. 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.
- mistermann 9y ago
  I watch youtube a LOT and have 3 or 4 different primary interests, and I regularly spend a fair amount of time looking for new channels, etc typically with no success. And then occasionally, I will sometimes come across a perfectly relevant channel with 1 million+ subscribers, that the youtube algorithm has never suggested to me as a channel, or even any of the individual videos. It is so inept that it seems impossible to be accidental - obviously that makes no sense at all, but then knowingly allowing twisted videos to continue existing in children's channels makes no sense either, yet here we are.
- nikanj 9y ago
  Spotify does similar things with its discover weekly-lists, but at least in their case, the motivation somewhat obvious. I don't think payola is a think for Youtube videos yet, though it seems inevitable that there's a market opportunity there.
fredguth 9y ago
Me too! YT Kids sucks in blacklisting and I don’t understand why can’t the parents whitelist some channels.
gowld 9y ago

acobster 9y ago

Reminds me of a fictional program devised by EFF: YTKAd-Free. https://www.eff.org/missing-devices https://www.eff.org/missing-devices

throwaway93192 9y ago

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.

ReverseCold 9y ago
People vote with their actions time and time again that they do not care if they are tracked. If you want a future without all this happening, stop giving your kids YouTube in the first place.
- pmlnr 9y ago
  Google has a lot of subscription services as well; this could be one of those, without exploiting kids.
- lern_too_spel 9y ago
  Parents explicitly do want to track what their children are watching. That's not the problem. The problem is that YouTube Kids promotes garbage.
gowld 9y ago
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.

ascorbic 9y ago

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).

josteink 9y ago

TIL there is a YouTube kids service/app. Which I can’t use because of my IP-address. Again. 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.

lawik 9y ago
I would really like the option of paying for YT Red. But nope. So yeah. Frustrating.
- fredguth 9y ago
  I’m in the same situation here.
kristiandupont 9y ago
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?
- izacus 9y ago
  Why can't the parents decide if the curation is good enough? Why is a complete hard lockout with no choice "understandable"?
gowld 9y ago
It's an opportunity for you to build a video service for your country.

intopieces 9y ago

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?

snuxoll 9y ago
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.

bberrry 9y ago

As far as I know Youtube Kids is still unavailable outside the US. Anyone aware of a workaround to get it on my iPad?

akshayjullia 9y ago

A non-algorithmic version of the app could be a waste.

carlhjerpe 9y ago

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.

AndrewOMartin 9y ago

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?

coatmatter 9y ago
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. Do you trust anyone?
gowld 9y ago
Anything not lambasted on the front page of HuffPo is acceptable.

afandian 9y ago

"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.

Zhyl 9y ago
I got annoyed at my father once for making a sarcastic comment about 'algorithms' in the sense you're describing here. So I sat him down at the table and cut 10 bits of string of different length. I then walked him through bubble sorting the bits of string. Then I said something like 'that is all an algorithm is. A set of rules or instructions that a computer can follow. The only trick the computer has is that it can do the instructions really quickly. There is no magic and they're not inherently oppressive.' I wasn't expecting it to work, but after that he never made another dig at 'algorithms'.

unicornporn 9y ago

Just curious, is there advertising in the YouTube Kids app?

replicatorblog 9y ago
nope!

annamargot 9y ago

So it’s Netflix but with ads and worse content? 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.

pfarnsworth 9y ago

My son loves YouTube kids (my daughter not so much) but luckily we haven’t come up against Elsagate yet. He’s simply too dorky with his video choices. He has learned all about astronomy through YTK and most recently he has learned all the American presidents from YTK videos. I am surprised that there’s no whitelisting though. Looks like we’re going all the way back to the original Yahoo days with their curated list of acceptable web site lists.

jgalt212 9y ago

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.

djrogers 9y ago

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. Why does this not exist?

snuxoll 9y ago
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.
innagadadavida 9y ago
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.
- jjp 9y ago
  For the time limits you could take a look at Circle, which allows you reasonable control (at an individual level) of when and how long your children are using Netflix etc. And offers some control of what (by classified type) or domain whitelist/blacklist. Don’t think I can block specific urls so can’t achieve whitelist only YouTube.
  - mistermann 9y ago
    I've been looking for a router with good monitoring and control for years, this looks very impressive, thanks! https://meetcircle.com/ https://meetcircle.com/
acct1771 9y ago
You can. You just have to do it "the old fashioned way", aka, spending the time with your kids.

censorship 9y ago

I really do not trust my kids with google or facebook. Both companies violated and continue to violate privacy rights. We should sue these companies to take responsibility.

uhuru 9y ago

Is hackernews censoring peoples comments ? How long is this been going on ..

a1369209993 9y ago

If anyone else is apalled by the various parents talking about censoring their children's video/internet access and everyone just going along with it: you're not alone. I can't offer anything else encouraging, but at least know that you're not the only person in the world that recognizes this as child abuse.

tree_of_item 9y ago
"Censoring" these videos is child abuse? Because there are quite a few people in this thread who say allowing your children to view these generative videos with dark themes is child abuse.

SN76477 9y ago

ahh yes, the non-algorithm - also the future. As we learn that automation sucks for human interaction

sunstone 9y ago

I think it's pretty clear that with kids the solution is a tablet with known content and no connectivity.

faostb 9y ago

I had the same issue (bad content for kids on Kids Youtube) so I built http://kiddotube.com/ http://kiddotube.com/ for my kid (be careful: it is just a micro ec2 instance) with only best youtube channels for kids. There is a "parent mode" in which I can disable channels, playlists or videos that I don't like.