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This trait must serve us in some capacity. You see this with children and iPads. My kids know 3x what I did when I was their same age. It's as if something ca

• radium3d 3y ago
  I would also like this for myself. Lol
  • eimrine 3y ago
    LOL guys isn't that so hard not to watch dumb or short or news videos from your main account? My recommendations are never game videos, and rarely less than 1 hour videos because guess what? I seldomly watch videos which are less than 1 hour and never watch games.
    • retrac 3y ago
      On Youtube lately, I have lately mostly been watching videos on metal smelting and ancient Mesopotamia. There are conspiracies about these topics, apparently. I wouldn't have thought so. But the Youtube algorithm manages to dredge them up.
• ok123456 3y ago
  TikTok has this switch. There's a STEM mode in the user settings that will only show you educational content on your algorithmic stream.
  • aantix 3y ago
    I would LOVE this feature for my kids.
    • vik0 3y ago
      You would voluntarily subject your kids to short-form media consumerism?
      • aantix 3y ago
        There's amazing short-form video content out there that piques my curiosity and motivates me to learn more.
      • choilive 3y ago
        Short-form media is not necessarily bad. Like all forms of media, it can be a useful learning tool or it can be a massive time sink. Social media has just weaponized it to optimize for engagement at all costs.
        • madsbuch 3y ago
          it really depends on what you want to learn. personally I don't believe that 5 minute trivia is going to be worth a dime in the AI ridden world Og tomorrow.
          • BlueTemplar 3y ago
            Og loves trivia ! Og can recite plenty of them !
            • madsbuch 3y ago
• RGamma 3y ago
  Implying watching anything makes you smarter. I've also read and seen so many things, but it's mostly (95%+) gone. The only things I continue to remember are those from where I actively participate(d) in (including in online communities). The collective consumption-heavy posture of online usage can't be healthy... Though I will grant that some latent knowledge might stick regardless. Active curation and note-taking (e.g. in a personal knowledge base or in a private/public wiki) might also help. In fact it's this that I would recommend most to kids these days: record and curate the things you do and see. Not only for nostalgia's sake but also so that you can find (and reshare? ;)) stuff again.
• baq 3y ago
  > If any Youtube engineers are reading, please give us (the parents) more control! Unfortunately, this won't happen. No number go up, no change. Noone will get promoted for this. Not the PM: number won't go up. Not the dev: number won't go up. Neither the director nor the VP: number won't go up. It's really like opium - until the regulators come in, nothing will change as numbers must go up. The free market libertarians will say you have free will and should think for yourself, rationally, let the market decide. Well, the market decided it wants to self-destruct.
  • willsmith72 3y ago
    it will eventually apple, youtube, google, amazon made their bacon by being user-centric and generating huge value. now they're busy capturing value you can only capture for so long without generating
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
• itishappy 3y ago
  Have you considered trying a dedicated academic steaming service instead? The incentives align better with what you're seeking, and I'd bet the content does too. I don't have much experience in this field, but you might look into stuff like the streaming apps for PBS or TED, or even paying for Nebula or Curiosity Stream. If you were really serious about something, you could even look at a learning platform like Khan Academy, Brilliant, or Coursera.
• aantix 3y ago
  I actually researched writing a proxy that would intercept and rewrite Youtube's JSON API responses with pre-selected, educational videos. This is how much I hate their recommendation algorithm. That way, the Youtube app appears to work the same. It's just that those videos that are blacklisted in the recommendation response, e.g. all the videos with the word 'minecraft' in the title, would be replaced with Youtube shorts from Neil deGrasse Tyson. Intercept the response. Rewrite the <title> and <URL> entries for blacklisted videos. Return the rewritten response to the client. Point my kids's iPads at this proxy. YouTube's app uses certificate pinning. I would have had to reverse-engineer their certificates in order to properly sign the response. I stopped at that point in the project.
  • basil-rash 3y ago
    FWIW if you embed the youtube player on your own site you can point it to any video you want, and control all the recommendations you display alongside it. As a happy bonus, ads don't play on embedded viewers.
  • heeen2 3y ago
    Have you considered YT kids?
    • aantix 3y ago
      Still has the same issue. If someone watches one Blue's Clues video, ten more are recommended afterwards. I want a more diverse set of recommendations from a smaller set of educational channels. And I want to filter entirely by keyword. Disabling individual channels for something like 'Minecraft' content is futile.
    • actionfromafar 3y ago
      Have you considered SatanTube™ kids?
  • verisimi 3y ago
    You prefer Neil deGrasse Tyson to Minecraft for your kids?
• thomastjeffery 3y ago
  > so that we can override their curiosity and say "OK, learn something else today." I'm not sure you even noticed the question you just presented: "what something?" If you can find a meaningful answer to that question, I suspect it will resolve your problem without help. As a rule of thumb, any solution that boils down to "stop" will be practically impossible to implement. A more tractable solution is usually along the lines of "do this instead". Something that could be really valuable here is a competitor to YouTube's algorithm. Copyright makes that difficult, because YouTube is in a legally enforced position to monopolize their library/metadata.
  • aantix 3y ago
    I'd be more than willing to curate on behalf of my children. Or delegate their recommendations to only a select series of educational YouTube channels.
  • BlueTemplar 3y ago
    Another competitor to YouTube with its own editorializing is missing the point. Especially if the only competition is around the feed. (Same as when some reader here was missing the point when asking for an editorialized feed for PeerTube videos.) Focus should rather be on banning platforms. (They are digging their own graves with that editorializing anyway, since once they do that they become legally responsible for publishing what their users upload.) Only then you can start talking about only allowing open algorithms (so, no neural networks) on generalist search engines.
• jancsika 3y ago
  > It's as if something can finally fill their bandwidth, keep up with their thoughts, and answer those questions in real-time. There's a problem with your line of thinking. E.g., I remember the epiphany when I realized that a particular C codebase was an implementation of a (more or less) object-oriented dynamic programming language. Ooh, here's the part that implements classes. Here's the part that instantiates the objects. Here's the method-dispatcher. Ooh, here's the half-baked templating system that lets the user associate custom classes with 2d vector drawings and instantiate objects from them! I was taking in the code of that codebase as fast as I could scroll and read the functions and structs. At most, reading this code took up perhaps 20% of the time I was devoting to this endeavor. The other 80% was thinking through those design choices and their implications, during my unstructured time-- going on a walk, sitting on a bus, etc.-- when I was away from the computer. If your kids are exposed to 3x of my example screen time, they're going to require vastly more unstructured time than I had to think through the implications of everything the screen put in front of their eyeballs. Trends in cell phone usage-- and even basic arithmetic of 24 hours in a day-- tells me that your kids aren't getting that.
  • aantix 3y ago
    Thinking through the design/implications - does that have to come from unstructured time? What if it were more thoughtful content - a series of problem(s) proposed at the beginning, walking through possibilities, and then the solutions revealed at the end? Is it possible that the content can teach us both knowledge and how to think/reason?
  • ribosometronome 3y ago
    There's also a problem with your line of thinking: you are not a child. You do not have the neuroplasticity they do. Their brains are learning in ways that we simply cannot any longer; it' a real apples:oranges situation.
    • BlueTemplar 3y ago
      Maybe, but you seem to be suggesting instead that this is an apples : suspension bridges scenario...
• madsbuch 3y ago
  > Such a massive opportunity for education - e.g. inserting more academic videos in between entertainment. I whole heartedly disagree with this. I believe that one of the key aspects in early education is learning patience - love NG term personal fulfillment is not something you can do between the dopamine hits Og YouTube videos.
• Almondsetat 3y ago
  Does that "x3" include useful stuff that isn't internet factoids?
• busyant 3y ago
  > It's as if something can finally fill their bandwidth, keep up with their thoughts, and answer those questions in real-time. No wonder they get angry when it's time to put away the iPad - they're engaged at a high level. To me, it feels like some type of "pleasure center" trigger. I was talking to a psychologist once and what she said resonated with me. We were/are both middle-aged and she said something to the effect of, "When we were kids, our games were, at best, a '7' (out of 10). These days, all popular entertainment is a '10+.' Hard to compete."
• circuit10 3y ago
  Minecraft can be good for learning, it encourages creativity, especially with things like redstone. It probably depends on the type of video though
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• migro23 3y ago
  > It's as if something can finally fill their bandwidth, keep up with their thoughts, and answer those questions in real-time. No wonder they get angry when it's time to put away the iPad - they're engaged at a high level. Or they are angry because by taking away the iPad you are interrupting their dopamine rush. Whether your iPad + Internet/social media/YouTube is engaging them to fullest maximizing growth potentiation or is simply turning their brains into dopamine chasing crack heads is up for debate. It may be somewhere in the middle and whether the positives outweigh the negatives is individual for each child/person and how and how often they engage with it. Regardless, I think there are more variables at play than you outline above.
  • Salgat 3y ago
    Isn't the dopamine rush from fulfilling their curiosity?
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• geor9e 3y ago
  >My kids know 3x what I did when I was their same age. This makes it sound like kids across the board are getting smarter and more knowledgeable. Then why are so many headlines saying the opposite? "U.S. reading and math scores drop to lowest level in decades" or "Children's IQs are getting lower, US study finds" etc etc. Even if it's clickbait, I'm not seeing any "kids are getting smarter" clickbait.
  • notso411 3y ago
    [dead]
• tylerdurden91 3y ago
  I think instead of Youtube, pick apps that curate content on your behalf. For example, try Kidzovo an app that curates learning content for kids, makes it interactive so kids are not only watching it passively. And we intersperse it with general questions like: "Why should you be nice to your neighbor?" and then parents can hear their kids' responses in the parents' section of the app. Disclaimed: I work for Kidzovo.