3 ms·
My toddler watches shows on there. It's been good to teach him colours, but it's all very low quality videos with clearly chinese-english influence. My bigges
by keyle 8y ago
My toddler watches shows on there.
It's been good to teach him colours, but it's all very low quality videos with clearly chinese-english influence.
My biggest concern is not the content of those, it's the automatic skip after the episode is over, to "whatever" youtube feels right afterwards, and also the ads being played between episodes, some are about gaming, but violent, and a toddler takes everything he sees as "real".
- LeoPanthera 8y agoYou can turn off autoplay on the top right of any video page, but it's a local cookie and not stored in your account, so you have to do it separately on every device and, in my experience, does seem to have a habit of randomly turning itself back on again.
- ivanhoe 8y agoAlso kids have tendency to just click randomly anywhere and figure out all the buttons in no time, so you can't really rely on GUI to stop them. Mine actually learned letters by searching the youtube for his favorite cartoon characters. At first he bugged me to do it for him, but very quickly he figured out what I'm doing and that he can look at the title of the current video and enter the same letters into the search to get more videos - but since he had no idea what those letters mean he'd often get some totally unrelated and non-kids results... toddlers are just unstoppable, resistance is futile :)
- ConceptJunkie 8y agoWe discovered by accident how easy it is for kids to stumble into bad things. We had a computer set up with Windows 98 for the kids to play games (this was a long time ago...). The computer was in the family room so we could always see what was going on, and the kids really did stick to playing games and other benign activities. One day I watched my youngest to see what he was doing as he sat down to use the computer. He was about 5 or 6 at the time, and he would open up a web browser and type "sonic" to search for Sonic the Hedgehog pictures. At the time, at least, this was the kinds of things he would find, and I'm not aware of the kids stumbling into anything awful. But another term they used often was "chao" for the little creatures that you care for in the Sonic Adventure games, and since that can also be a name, other material would eventually come up as well. We quickly realized that this had the potential to lead them into bad territory. It was an eye-opening experience. Seeing what's going on on YouTube these days is whole new level of scary.
- keyle 8y agoCan you do that on a PS4 though?
- saudioger 8y agoThat's my experience, and why I pulled the plug on it. Unless you're on top of your kid the entire time, it's incredibly difficult to keep an eye on that. YouTube is designed to just shove as much content in front of your face as possible, quality, content, age-appropriateness, be damned.
- ALittleLight 8y agoI've read this on hackernews a few times and have experienced some objectionable "kids" content on YouTube myself. Plus, there's a ton of mindless stuff like opening toys or kinder eggs. I wonder if there's some kind of startup here. A service that whitelists YouTube content and curates the list. There could be an app you sign into before you hand it off to the child, it permits only whitelisted YouTube videos to be played. Possibly the videos are separated into tiers - educational, entertainment, prosocial. Then, you come up with a mix that you want to expose your child to for auto play - e.g. 40, 20, 40. Content could also be flagged for themes that are potentially undesirable - death, sex, religion, etc. Pay 15-20 dollars an hour for people to watch and annotate videos. Get the same video to go through the process two or three times to catch potential errors. Your evaluators can easily watch content at 2x speed and not miss much. How much does processing an hour's worth of YouTube video cost? 60 dollars? Invest a hundred grand, whitelist a thousand hours of YouTube content (assuming you reject half), build a simple mobile app to play your whitelisted YouTube videos, sign people up for 5 dollars a month and you can use the proceeds to keep growing your whitelist.
- fipple 8y agoTeach him colors with blocks the way every toddler before 2010 learned them. The most valuable skill of the future will be to not compulsively need screens.
- sp332 8y agoPeople learn by repetition. Youtube is great for that.
- humanrebar 8y agoI think avoiding bad romantic partners and substance abuse still rank above too much Instagram.
- keyle 8y agoI do too of course. He learns colours with food, objects we play with AND TV.