4 ms·

YouTube is actively harmful to children, it’s full of crap content, endless ads and the algorithm takes you to the darkest pits in no time at all. You like paw

YouTube is actively harmful to children, it’s full of crap content, endless ads and the algorithm takes you to the darkest pits in no time at all. You like paw patrol? How about some videos of the pups killing each other? And kids love candy (brain candy) even if it is of no nutritional value - at this age they don’t know better. We found that no amount of supervision or curation by adults keeps the child completely away from this harmful content. And the YouTube Kids thing is not offered in our region. For us the only solution was to ban YouTube entirely and it’s one of the best decisions we ever made.

theshrike79 4y ago
There is good educational stuff on Youtube, but you need to actively look for it in the sea of shit. These two are in my favourites: https://www.youtube.com/@dianxixiaoge https://www.youtube.com/@dianxixiaoge https://www.youtube.com/@cnliziqi https://www.youtube.com/@cnliziqi Liziqi had some issues with her production company and stopped doing new videos, and her stuff was WAY too cutesy to be real. Dianxi is more "authentic", but still relaxing to watch.
- loloquwowndueo 4y ago
  Yeah the point is that a young child is not going to “actively look” - they just follow the trail of candy until they end up in the witches’ house :(
  - gnz11 4y ago
    That goes back to curation and oversight by the parents though.
pushingice 4y ago
We use YouTube premium (so no ads) and there have been no snuff films of the pups. But my kids know not only all of the planets, but all of the dwarf planets. I sure didn't teach them that.
aantix 4y ago
My kids watch Paw Patrol all of the time on YT. We have not encountered the type of content you outline, at all.
floren 4y ago
Having caught some Paw Patrol, I don't even know that kids should be watching genuine Paw Patrol. It's just so damn frenetic... Maybe I'm an old man yelling at clouds, but I feel that something slower-paced like Mr Rogers has to be better for you, right?
- basch 4y ago
  There's a TV section. https://www.lucieslist.com/guides/screen-time-kids-research/favorite-kids-media/ https://www.lucieslist.com/guides/screen-time-kids-research/... It's kind of funny that MTV brought about a collective panic with regard to the content kids were exposed to, but looking back, it and Americas Funniest Home Videos were the start of today's endless algorithmic hellholes. MTV was an endless stream of narratively disconnected images largely detached from the audio. AFV was an endless stream of people falling and getting pranked. From the founder of buzzfeed: That scrambling of cultural content was starting to happen in the mid-1980s, when Jameson was writing. Peretti's favorite example of this phenomenon is MTV. Whereas variety shows and televised concerts in the 1960s and 70s provided context and structure to the music they presented, MTV instead gave viewers a rapid succession of wildly different sounds and visual accompaniments to those sounds, without any logic connecting one video to another. That, in Jameson's framework, serves to confuse viewers, harm their ability to use culture to build identities, and increase the risk of people failing to build identities altogether — making them "schizophrenic" in his terminology. "The rapid fire succession of signifiers in MTV style media erodes the viewers sense of temporal continuity," Peretti writes. "To use the same words that Jameson uses to describe schizophrenic experiences, the images that flash across the MTV viewers' retina are 'isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link up into a coherent sequence.'" (As Wolters notes, those rapid fire MTV signifiers are "Not so unlike those GIF-loaded posts on BuzzFeed.") https://www.vox.com/2014/5/20/5730762/buzzfeeds-founder-used-to-write-marxist-theory-and-it-explains https://www.vox.com/2014/5/20/5730762/buzzfeeds-founder-used...

theshrike79 4y ago

There is good educational stuff on Youtube, but you need to actively look for it in the sea of shit. These two are in my favourites: https://www.youtube.com/@dianxixiaoge https://www.youtube.com/@dianxixiaoge https://www.youtube.com/@cnliziqi https://www.youtube.com/@cnliziqi Liziqi had some issues with her production company and stopped doing new videos, and her stuff was WAY too cutesy to be real. Dianxi is more "authentic", but still relaxing to watch.

loloquwowndueo 4y ago
Yeah the point is that a young child is not going to “actively look” - they just follow the trail of candy until they end up in the witches’ house :(
- gnz11 4y ago
  That goes back to curation and oversight by the parents though.

pushingice 4y ago

We use YouTube premium (so no ads) and there have been no snuff films of the pups. But my kids know not only all of the planets, but all of the dwarf planets. I sure didn't teach them that.

aantix 4y ago

My kids watch Paw Patrol all of the time on YT. We have not encountered the type of content you outline, at all.

floren 4y ago

Having caught some Paw Patrol, I don't even know that kids should be watching genuine Paw Patrol. It's just so damn frenetic... Maybe I'm an old man yelling at clouds, but I feel that something slower-paced like Mr Rogers has to be better for you, right?

basch 4y ago
There's a TV section. https://www.lucieslist.com/guides/screen-time-kids-research/favorite-kids-media/ https://www.lucieslist.com/guides/screen-time-kids-research/... It's kind of funny that MTV brought about a collective panic with regard to the content kids were exposed to, but looking back, it and Americas Funniest Home Videos were the start of today's endless algorithmic hellholes. MTV was an endless stream of narratively disconnected images largely detached from the audio. AFV was an endless stream of people falling and getting pranked. From the founder of buzzfeed: That scrambling of cultural content was starting to happen in the mid-1980s, when Jameson was writing. Peretti's favorite example of this phenomenon is MTV. Whereas variety shows and televised concerts in the 1960s and 70s provided context and structure to the music they presented, MTV instead gave viewers a rapid succession of wildly different sounds and visual accompaniments to those sounds, without any logic connecting one video to another. That, in Jameson's framework, serves to confuse viewers, harm their ability to use culture to build identities, and increase the risk of people failing to build identities altogether — making them "schizophrenic" in his terminology. "The rapid fire succession of signifiers in MTV style media erodes the viewers sense of temporal continuity," Peretti writes. "To use the same words that Jameson uses to describe schizophrenic experiences, the images that flash across the MTV viewers' retina are 'isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link up into a coherent sequence.'" (As Wolters notes, those rapid fire MTV signifiers are "Not so unlike those GIF-loaded posts on BuzzFeed.") https://www.vox.com/2014/5/20/5730762/buzzfeeds-founder-used-to-write-marxist-theory-and-it-explains https://www.vox.com/2014/5/20/5730762/buzzfeeds-founder-used...