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One unintended consequence of the FTC settlement mentioned in the article is that almost no-one wants to create high quality kid-friendly content anymore, becau
by makomk 6y ago
One unintended consequence of the FTC settlement mentioned in the article is that almost no-one wants to create high quality kid-friendly content anymore, because doing so forces them to accept huge restrictions on how everyone interacts with it - now no-one can add those videos to playlists or leave comments on them, by FTC decree, even if they're adults on the main version of YouTube. So anyone producing content that isn't vapid trash and could actually attract a wide audience is incentivised to aggressively exclude kids from that audience.
- darkwater 6y agoI struggle to understand how personal playlists need a user to work. And comments... well, YT Kids audience is not the most commenting one...
- nicbou 6y agoI recall that YouTube had a problem with pedophiles using YouTube's standard features to discover and recommend each other otherwise innocuous videos. If I'm not mistaken, it's one of the reasons why they crippled their sidebar recommendations.
- oceanghost 6y agoThis is infuriating as a parent. My daughter likes certain videos, and I have to write down the titles of her favorite videos to search for them every time she asks for them. (We watch YouTube on an nvidia shield). I honestly don't understand how this restriction makes sense, it all seems punitive.
- throwaway3699 6y agoMy uninformed answer is that one of the things that promoted YouTube into implementing this stuff was a YT peadophile ring was discovered to be sharing 'questionable moments' with playlists, comments and timestamps. Creepy as fuck.
- oceanghost 6y agoOh, that's... unpleasant. I remember Tosh.0 talking about some channel which mostly had young to very young girls doing gymnastics or having pool parties, etc. I could see the need to end that, but, why can't I make a private playlist with my kiddo's videos?
- detaro 6y agoAt least on the web version, funnily enough you can do add them to a playlist. If you do it from the search results list, not the video permalink. You could also try if an alternative YouTube client like NewPipe works on the Shield, and brings more useful bookmarking features? (Another option would be downloading them, again with NewPipe or on a PC, and keeping the files somewhere)
- oceanghost 6y agoI was not aware of Newpipe, I will look into that. Thank you. Your advice is eminently practical. I already have a PLEX server, I could just youtube-dl the videos/channels she likes.
- pfranz 6y agoThat's exactly what I did. My kid loves live music like NPR tiny desk concerts. It also allows me to censor the few that had some bad words. I'd still prefer if I could whitelist regular YouTube videos I explicitly approve of...
- detaro 6y agoAh, if you have a plex server that makes that part easier. But really depends on how you use it, e.g. if you explore YT together an app that can browse is obviously better than just downloaded backups.