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You're severely downplaying the amount of educational content that it has to offer. If youtube went down overnight, it -would- be a huge loss. If you give your

You're severely downplaying the amount of educational content that it has to offer. If youtube went down overnight, it -would- be a huge loss. If you give your children unfettered access to youtube, that's your own fault as a parent. Youtube should be better about handling this but I think it's more of a communication issue. Youtube is essentially a medium unto itself. A LOT of people use it so there's going to be good, and there's going to be bad. You can make the case of "radicalizing people" for just about any other medium that people consume. In the end, it's basically what you make of it. You can find a wealth of diverse channels to watch and grow from, or you can watch drivel. It isn't any different than the trash on tv or in pulp novels, except that individual people have more power and freedom to create things. If you think differently then you're just looking at older mediums with rose-tinted glasses.

ben_w 8y ago
I make heavy use of the educational content — 3Blue1Brown, applied science, bigclivedotcom, braincraft, CGP Grey, Computerphile, CrashCourse, … «continues alphabetically», … ViHart, Vintage Space, WDR (German language broadcaster “Westdeutscher Rundfunk”). Most of them have other revenue streams. Patreon, or being a division of PBS, or day jobs. I’m not worried about their survival. One of those videos was “This Video Will Make You Angry”. Meme-based economics are not your friend. For extremist or propagandist content, unfortunately both those things mean it will continue even without YouTube or a clone.
- intertextuality 8y ago
  I'm not talking about content makers' survival. I'm talking about existing content being lost. Even assuming those people had everything backed up, it would be scattered all over the place. This Video Will Make You Angry was a good video. No idea why it specifically is being discussed here. > For extremist or propagandist content, unfortunately both those things mean it will continue even without YouTube or a clone. Yes, this has nothing to do with youtube. Again, you can propagate charged content via other mediums, especially on the internet.
  - slededit 8y ago
    Like educational videos from the 50s, its neat to be able to go back and see them. But these subjects get continuously recovered. Sometimes just to spice it up, and sometimes the material does change. Its not the end of the world.
  - ben_w 8y ago
    I was giving examples of the harm side of the equation. Up two levels, “YT radicalizes viewers”, your reply (by my reading) downplayed that harm. If your primary concern is searchability, that is a surprise: YouTube is the second largest search engine after google.com, and I didn’t perceive any suggestion that the latter would be harmed by the copyright proposal. Even if it was, even rubbish search engines like iTunes’ Podcasts doesn’t stop me getting vastly more content than I have time for even if I took early retirement and listened at double speed.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
sbov 8y ago
> If you give your children unfettered access to youtube, that's your own fault as a parent. Unfettered access, or maybe you turn your head for 5 minutes and your kid clicks a recommended video next to the one you set them up to watch and now mickey mouse is running around cutting everyone's head off oh god what is happeni...
- intertextuality 8y ago
  Recommended by whom? An algorithm? Why is that any guarantee of safe or quality programming for young children? Youtube does need to address these videos, but they're not omniscient gods either. There is too much content to humanly (or algorithmically, seemingly) to police effectively. Why do you put so much trust in random recommended videos? What makes youtube so trustworthy? I'm asking because I genuinely don't understand this mindset at all.
  - kristiandupont 8y ago
    It's not a "mindset" that there is an inviting "click here for the next recommended video" link when one is done playing.
    - intertextuality 8y ago
      Then don't use youtube. Download the videos offline first, etc. What's the issue here? No one is forcing you to let your kid sit unattended on a website with questionable recommended videos.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > Recommended by whom? An algorithm? By YouTube; the choice to make the recommendation and the choice to use an algorithm (both in general and the specific algorithm chosen) as part of the recommendation process are human decisions made yb YouTube employees in the course of their duties. > Youtube does need to address these videos, but they're not omniscient gods either. While the second half is true, it magnifies rather than mitigates the firall it does is call out the hubris and irresponsibility at YouTube behind the current status quo. > There is too much content to humanly (or algorithmically, seemingly) to police effectively. The quantity of content on YouTube, and the fact that it is not constrained by their ability to effectively police it is also a product of human decisions made by YouTube employees in the course of job duties, not some kind for natural occurrence with which YouTube is beset. And the fact that any part of that corpus is subject to recommendation algorithms without being policed is also such a human decision.
sytelus 8y ago
> If you give your children unfettered access to youtube, that's your own fault as a parent. How do you propose to prevent the disasters described in this thread? YouTube have loose standards and virtually no demonstrated ability for enforcement. I'm specifically worried about giving locked down PC to kid with my best effort and still kids getting exposed to content that they are not yet ready to process. How does YouTube enables me to to make sure that kids are protected?
- Aic1kuir 8y ago
  Would this work? https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/13/youtube-kids-adds-a-whitelisting-parent-control-feature-plus-a-new-experience-for-tweens/?guccounter=1 https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/13/youtube-kids-adds-a-whitel...
  - baldfat 8y ago
    I was just going to post this. This is the answer to most people's parental problems with YouTube. I use this with my 7 year old. There is no way to do this easily and never for an average parent. Common Sense Media is my friend as a parent, but I have to lock down YouTube just to keep him from seeing something that no kid should see. I use OpenDNS and I have a few custom scripts so I can learn how often certain sites are being used. "Too much of a good thing is still too much." I use history on my daughters YT account with a quick script that compares her computer's history on her computer. I don't run it all the time but I tell her trust but verify a lot. She is doing her school online and our biggest issue is she will watch videos and not do here work for a few hours.
- intertextuality 8y ago
  > How does YouTube enables me to to make sure that kids are protected? It doesn't. I don't know why this expectation exists; youtube has not shown itself to be trustworthy in this sort of thing. Clearly an alternative needs to be used, like downloading youtube videos beforehand or using something else entirely.
  - 8y ago
PavlovsCat 8y ago
> You're severely downplaying the amount of educational content that it has to offer. That cannout outweigh Elsagate stuff. Educational content could be on smaller platforms, and there even could be platforms to find it on those smaller platforms. > In the end, it's basically what you make of it. No, it's thousands of channels and hundreds thousands of videos designed to mentally abuse children, and for months and months, while parents begged YouTube to even take notice, autoplay beelined to this stuff from cartoons. That's what you get from algorithms designed to maximize "engagement". > You can find a wealth of diverse channels to watch and grow from, or you can watch drivel. We're talking about things aimed at toddlers. Oh, and initially also YouTube for Kids. When you talk about "unfettered access" and simply blame it on parents, it just shows you are downplaying something you might not even have looked into. Apart from the Elsagate subreddit, which has a lot of crap but also important posts buried among it, you probably can still enter "learn colors" or "Minecraft Monster School" or a lot of other things into YouTube, and maybe click on some related videos of videos in the search results. I promise, it won't take long to find something that can ruin your day.
- intertextuality 8y ago
  I have looked into it. I don't have kids, but I would never allow them access to autoplay videos on youtube. Given my knowledge of Google, Youtube, and their overall ineptitude in this regard. Just because something from them is marketed "for kids", doesn't mean it's necessarily good. I still blame the parents, especially after Elsagate. It takes some mental gymnastics to allow children to watch random videos on a site where anyone can upload anything, and a site run by a company that thinks algorithms can work by themselves to filter content correctly. There are other platforms that have content for kids. Youtube never was a correct option, unless you yourself download videos beforehand to ensure their quality. Please don't blindly trust things just because they say "it's aimed at children". Its still up to you, the parent/guardian, to actually make sure that it's acceptable content. Trusting an internet titan of a company to actually care or get it right is an enormously stupid idea, in my opinion.
consumer451 8y ago
You made some very good points. I wrote my comment with much less thought than I should have. I mostly consume educational videos on YT myself, but I feel like that I am not a normal user. YT does spread all kinds of good knowledge, but I was thinking the content and views taken as a whole. I am really surprised my comment got that many upvotes here. I still do stand by my original thought, but it was just that, a thought - though poorly phrased.
pluma 8y ago
I have yet to see an educational content provider that isn't primarily funded from Patreon, direct sponsorships ("This video is sponsored by..." lynda.com, Audible, Skillshare, etc etc) or produced by an entity that has relies on external streams of revenue (e.g. BBC, PBS). Heck, even the "trash pop" part of YouTube (e.g. drama channels) don't seem to primarily rely on ad revenue anymore. And most of the gaming channels seem to actually prefer Twitch (but either want to editorialise their content rather than upload raw streams or only still use YT because they want a more diversified revenue stream). YouTube's initial appeal was that it was a "marketplace of ideas" and everybody could upload videos of pretty much anything and build an audience and (eventually) earn a few bucks from advertising. Recently that marketplace has increasingly shifted to promote what's already popular and YouTube has actively brought in established content producers from TV while also algorithmically demonetizing "lesser" channels (note: this doesn't mean less-viewed channels or channels with fewer subscribers) with little to no means of appeal. The gold rush when it was actually financially viable to make a living off the ad revenue and fund your video production are long gone for the vast majority of creators.
nathan_long 8y ago
> It isn't any different than the trash on tv or in pulp novels, except that individual people have more power and freedom to create things. If you think differently then you're just looking at older mediums with rose-tinted glasses. What makes it different is a recommendation engine that is deliberately designed to maximize the amount of viewing time and has no moral compass about doing so. When a kid finishes reading Ranger Rick magazine, nothing prompts them to read anything else except their own interests and the pile of books their parents have purposefully made available to them. You don't have strangers popping in the window, tempting them to read something nasty, and if you do, you get that person arrested.

ben_w 8y ago

I make heavy use of the educational content — 3Blue1Brown, applied science, bigclivedotcom, braincraft, CGP Grey, Computerphile, CrashCourse, … «continues alphabetically», … ViHart, Vintage Space, WDR (German language broadcaster “Westdeutscher Rundfunk”). Most of them have other revenue streams. Patreon, or being a division of PBS, or day jobs. I’m not worried about their survival. One of those videos was “This Video Will Make You Angry”. Meme-based economics are not your friend. For extremist or propagandist content, unfortunately both those things mean it will continue even without YouTube or a clone.

intertextuality 8y ago
I'm not talking about content makers' survival. I'm talking about existing content being lost. Even assuming those people had everything backed up, it would be scattered all over the place. This Video Will Make You Angry was a good video. No idea why it specifically is being discussed here. > For extremist or propagandist content, unfortunately both those things mean it will continue even without YouTube or a clone. Yes, this has nothing to do with youtube. Again, you can propagate charged content via other mediums, especially on the internet.
- slededit 8y ago
  Like educational videos from the 50s, its neat to be able to go back and see them. But these subjects get continuously recovered. Sometimes just to spice it up, and sometimes the material does change. Its not the end of the world.
- ben_w 8y ago
  I was giving examples of the harm side of the equation. Up two levels, “YT radicalizes viewers”, your reply (by my reading) downplayed that harm. If your primary concern is searchability, that is a surprise: YouTube is the second largest search engine after google.com, and I didn’t perceive any suggestion that the latter would be harmed by the copyright proposal. Even if it was, even rubbish search engines like iTunes’ Podcasts doesn’t stop me getting vastly more content than I have time for even if I took early retirement and listened at double speed.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

sbov 8y ago

> If you give your children unfettered access to youtube, that's your own fault as a parent. Unfettered access, or maybe you turn your head for 5 minutes and your kid clicks a recommended video next to the one you set them up to watch and now mickey mouse is running around cutting everyone's head off oh god what is happeni...

intertextuality 8y ago
Recommended by whom? An algorithm? Why is that any guarantee of safe or quality programming for young children? Youtube does need to address these videos, but they're not omniscient gods either. There is too much content to humanly (or algorithmically, seemingly) to police effectively. Why do you put so much trust in random recommended videos? What makes youtube so trustworthy? I'm asking because I genuinely don't understand this mindset at all.
- kristiandupont 8y ago
  It's not a "mindset" that there is an inviting "click here for the next recommended video" link when one is done playing.
  - intertextuality 8y ago
    Then don't use youtube. Download the videos offline first, etc. What's the issue here? No one is forcing you to let your kid sit unattended on a website with questionable recommended videos.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > Recommended by whom? An algorithm? By YouTube; the choice to make the recommendation and the choice to use an algorithm (both in general and the specific algorithm chosen) as part of the recommendation process are human decisions made yb YouTube employees in the course of their duties. > Youtube does need to address these videos, but they're not omniscient gods either. While the second half is true, it magnifies rather than mitigates the firall it does is call out the hubris and irresponsibility at YouTube behind the current status quo. > There is too much content to humanly (or algorithmically, seemingly) to police effectively. The quantity of content on YouTube, and the fact that it is not constrained by their ability to effectively police it is also a product of human decisions made by YouTube employees in the course of job duties, not some kind for natural occurrence with which YouTube is beset. And the fact that any part of that corpus is subject to recommendation algorithms without being policed is also such a human decision.

sytelus 8y ago

> If you give your children unfettered access to youtube, that's your own fault as a parent. How do you propose to prevent the disasters described in this thread? YouTube have loose standards and virtually no demonstrated ability for enforcement. I'm specifically worried about giving locked down PC to kid with my best effort and still kids getting exposed to content that they are not yet ready to process. How does YouTube enables me to to make sure that kids are protected?

Aic1kuir 8y ago
Would this work? https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/13/youtube-kids-adds-a-whitelisting-parent-control-feature-plus-a-new-experience-for-tweens/?guccounter=1 https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/13/youtube-kids-adds-a-whitel...
- baldfat 8y ago
  I was just going to post this. This is the answer to most people's parental problems with YouTube. I use this with my 7 year old. There is no way to do this easily and never for an average parent. Common Sense Media is my friend as a parent, but I have to lock down YouTube just to keep him from seeing something that no kid should see. I use OpenDNS and I have a few custom scripts so I can learn how often certain sites are being used. "Too much of a good thing is still too much." I use history on my daughters YT account with a quick script that compares her computer's history on her computer. I don't run it all the time but I tell her trust but verify a lot. She is doing her school online and our biggest issue is she will watch videos and not do here work for a few hours.
intertextuality 8y ago
> How does YouTube enables me to to make sure that kids are protected? It doesn't. I don't know why this expectation exists; youtube has not shown itself to be trustworthy in this sort of thing. Clearly an alternative needs to be used, like downloading youtube videos beforehand or using something else entirely.
- 8y ago

PavlovsCat 8y ago

> You're severely downplaying the amount of educational content that it has to offer. That cannout outweigh Elsagate stuff. Educational content could be on smaller platforms, and there even could be platforms to find it on those smaller platforms. > In the end, it's basically what you make of it. No, it's thousands of channels and hundreds thousands of videos designed to mentally abuse children, and for months and months, while parents begged YouTube to even take notice, autoplay beelined to this stuff from cartoons. That's what you get from algorithms designed to maximize "engagement". > You can find a wealth of diverse channels to watch and grow from, or you can watch drivel. We're talking about things aimed at toddlers. Oh, and initially also YouTube for Kids. When you talk about "unfettered access" and simply blame it on parents, it just shows you are downplaying something you might not even have looked into. Apart from the Elsagate subreddit, which has a lot of crap but also important posts buried among it, you probably can still enter "learn colors" or "Minecraft Monster School" or a lot of other things into YouTube, and maybe click on some related videos of videos in the search results. I promise, it won't take long to find something that can ruin your day.

intertextuality 8y ago
I have looked into it. I don't have kids, but I would never allow them access to autoplay videos on youtube. Given my knowledge of Google, Youtube, and their overall ineptitude in this regard. Just because something from them is marketed "for kids", doesn't mean it's necessarily good. I still blame the parents, especially after Elsagate. It takes some mental gymnastics to allow children to watch random videos on a site where anyone can upload anything, and a site run by a company that thinks algorithms can work by themselves to filter content correctly. There are other platforms that have content for kids. Youtube never was a correct option, unless you yourself download videos beforehand to ensure their quality. Please don't blindly trust things just because they say "it's aimed at children". Its still up to you, the parent/guardian, to actually make sure that it's acceptable content. Trusting an internet titan of a company to actually care or get it right is an enormously stupid idea, in my opinion.

consumer451 8y ago

You made some very good points. I wrote my comment with much less thought than I should have. I mostly consume educational videos on YT myself, but I feel like that I am not a normal user. YT does spread all kinds of good knowledge, but I was thinking the content and views taken as a whole. I am really surprised my comment got that many upvotes here. I still do stand by my original thought, but it was just that, a thought - though poorly phrased.

pluma 8y ago

I have yet to see an educational content provider that isn't primarily funded from Patreon, direct sponsorships ("This video is sponsored by..." lynda.com, Audible, Skillshare, etc etc) or produced by an entity that has relies on external streams of revenue (e.g. BBC, PBS). Heck, even the "trash pop" part of YouTube (e.g. drama channels) don't seem to primarily rely on ad revenue anymore. And most of the gaming channels seem to actually prefer Twitch (but either want to editorialise their content rather than upload raw streams or only still use YT because they want a more diversified revenue stream). YouTube's initial appeal was that it was a "marketplace of ideas" and everybody could upload videos of pretty much anything and build an audience and (eventually) earn a few bucks from advertising. Recently that marketplace has increasingly shifted to promote what's already popular and YouTube has actively brought in established content producers from TV while also algorithmically demonetizing "lesser" channels (note: this doesn't mean less-viewed channels or channels with fewer subscribers) with little to no means of appeal. The gold rush when it was actually financially viable to make a living off the ad revenue and fund your video production are long gone for the vast majority of creators.

nathan_long 8y ago

> It isn't any different than the trash on tv or in pulp novels, except that individual people have more power and freedom to create things. If you think differently then you're just looking at older mediums with rose-tinted glasses. What makes it different is a recommendation engine that is deliberately designed to maximize the amount of viewing time and has no moral compass about doing so. When a kid finishes reading Ranger Rick magazine, nothing prompts them to read anything else except their own interests and the pile of books their parents have purposefully made available to them. You don't have strangers popping in the window, tempting them to read something nasty, and if you do, you get that person arrested.