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Please add YouTube to the list. I'm watching my kids' brains slowly melt as they go from YouTube short to YouTube short like little crack addicts trying to get

by bmurphy1976 2y ago

Please add YouTube to the list. I'm watching my kids' brains slowly melt as they go from YouTube short to YouTube short like little crack addicts trying to get their next fix. Throw in a bunch of AI generated bottom of the barrel swill and I'm on the verge of blocking YouTube entirely yet again. I blocked YouTube for years because of all the garbage child targeted auto generated videos that were flooding the platform. It's very frustrating because there is a lot of good content that I would like them to continue to have easy access to, but the cost of entry is way too high.

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sanderjd 2y ago
The author of this blog wrote a whole freaking book about exactly this! I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. How is this like 95% of the comments here, as if Haidt didn't write an incredibly well known book about how all of this is bad!
- Apocryphon 2y ago
  Because even though he is reposted here every few months not everyone has deigned to actually read any of his stuff
  - sanderjd 2y ago
    That's fine, but if you're going to post "now do X" in response to a criticism of Y, it behooves you to understand whether the author might have already opined on X.
- lolinder 2y ago
  Most people here didn't even follow the link and are just responding to the title. They don't know who wrote the piece, much less what it actually says.
  - everyone 2y ago
    They've also been scrolling too much.. Their attention span cant handle it lol. Their propensity for scrolling has degraded their ability to criticize it.
- cinntaile 2y ago
  I don't get what you are trying to say? Can't people share their experiences?
  - lolinder 2y ago
    This comment isn't so bad, but there were a bunch of comments earlier that were implying or stating outright that the author of TFA was targeting TikTok specifically for political reasons, which is clearly nonsense if you have even a passing familiarity with Haidt's body of work. OP followed a similar pattern by starting with "please add YouTube to the list", but they did at least elaborate and didn't imply that TikTok was being targeted unfairly.
  - sanderjd 2y ago
    You're totally right. I wouldn't have written what I wrote, if I had seen this comment before seeing the ten thousand other comments on this page that just say "whatabout {other social media app}". Not fair to the author of this comment who was just sharing an experience. Too late to delete it now, so I just have to live with my shame :)
- deleted 2y ago
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tux1968 2y ago
It's worth blocking shorts alone, they're the worst culprit. Letting kids still access long form videos.
- GNOMES 2y ago
  The fact that Family Link app on Android doesn't have this feature drives me crazy. Youtube kids exists, but far too many channels are not available without manual intervention.
radicalbyte 2y ago
This x10000. I really wish that the EU would step in and force Google to either kill Shorts or give us full control over the crap they're pushing down our throats. As this is HN and full of smart people - if there are any workable (OSS) options to filtering YouTube to remove shorts (and the far-right/Nazi crap) then please let us know.
- NegativeLatency 2y ago
  Maybe you could rig something up with invidious? https://github.com/iv-org/invidious https://github.com/iv-org/invidious
- zcar 2y ago
  [dead]
yapyap 2y ago
All the (popular) social medias morph towards the tiktok short form content. Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube, etc. It’s the most attention holding thing a.t.m.
darknavi 2y ago
To some extent I feel the same about video games too. I watch my ~9 year old Nephew play games on his Switch and he swaps between games every ~5 minutes. I think as a 90s kid we had a hand full of games for our Gameboys, N64, etc. but had to wait for a holiday to actually get new physical content. Now it's easy and cheap enough to just download a slough of digital games (with fast resume and what not) and hop between them like crazy.
- obscurette 2y ago
  I had just a conversation with parent who said she allows her kids to play videogames only because it's the only thing they are able to do with focus. At the same time she is worried that they seem to be unable to listen even 4-minute pop hits from start to finish. They only listen "best parts of hits" – intro, beginning of first chorus, bridge and skip to next piece.
  - dismalaf 2y ago
    > unable to listen even 4-minute pop hits from start to finish Maybe the kids have realised that those pop hits are repetitive and uninteresting...
    - FranzFerdiNaN 2y ago
      Or their attention span is simply destroyed by social media and YouTube. Plenty of pop music is excellent. But if you give it 30 seconds you will never find out if that’s true.
      - ragnese 1y ago
        I can't decide if username checks out or not...
    - sebastiennight 2y ago
      To be fair, 30 seconds of Bohemian Rhapsody is about the maximum I've ever been able to handle!
antimoan 2y ago
disable Youtube history and no more shorts or AI suggested content. It quickly becomes a useful tool since you can see channels you subscribe to or if you are interested in a subject you have to search for it instead of getting pulled in the AI suggested contents as soon as you open the app.
- nihakue 2y ago
  THANK YOU so much for this. I'd spend some time researching how to disable YouTube shorts only to come to the conclusion that I had to use a different client (I picked NewPipe, but faced frequent issues with playback and I ended up having to click out to YouTube 90% of the time anyway) I've disabled YouTube history now and it's almost exactly what I'd hoped for. Shorts are disabled, no 'feed', no suggestions, just my subscriptions. I owe you a beer.
  - antimoan 1y ago
    My pleasure, I went down that rabbit hole myself until I saw a comment in reddit that helped me to make youtube the way I like it. I am just passing it forward and glad to hear it helped you.
gpspake 2y ago
I took me a while but I finally figured this out. I think the difficulty is a dark ui pattern that hides the control behind an age selection. In the youtube kids admin settings, there's a part where you select your kids age 0-4, 4-9 etc... My kid is 4 so I never really looked at the later options but after probably 20 times on that screen, I noticed at the end (where my eyes glossed over the higher ages) there's something along the lines of "control content yourself". Once I selected it, I could whitelist channels and completely disable search and recommendations. This means the youtube kids app _only_ shows what I say it can. If I want to give him access to something like "smarter every day" or a specific video that's not on youtube kids, I can click share from my account and share with "kids" We've still pretty much banned youtube on all devices but, like you said, there's a lot of valuable stuff and I really miss the time when he would get in to "tornadoes" or "helicopters" or some other topic and we could watch a bunch of educational videos without being flooded with trash toy videos and subversive attention leeching ads. This at least opens the door back up for some of that good content without the garbage.
- the_third_wave 2y ago
  > My kid is 4 so ... ... there is no way in hell I'll give him or her access to the 'net. Right? Right.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - Retr0id 2y ago
    Unless you anticipate your child growing up to live in a world with no internet, it doesn't make much sense to raise them with no internet. Parentally-curated information sources seems like a more than fine approach to that.
    - danesparza 2y ago
      I agree with this approach, especially teaching your kids that "what you put in your brain matters" (kinda like what you put in your mouth matters)
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throwanem 2y ago
You have to filter it manually for them. There's no other way, though in a year or two we might start to see products backed by true multimodal models that are actually worth looking at. I don't mean to seem blunt or rude. I don't actually have kids, so even if I were inclined to judge, I've no basis. But just looking at what YouTube has been doing over the last couple of years, even as a premium subscriber and so never seeing ads - I mean, it's terrible, it's as if it is actively trying to drag me down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole, in the sense that I might watch a half dozen videos today about simulated jet-plane gunfights in DCS, and tomorrow I'm seeing recommendations for what I only recognize as "Intro to 5G Covid Conspiracy (CONT 101, 3 credits)" because I have studied the subject. I report these videos and they stop coming, until the next time. It isn't as though there is a game here on the other side of which for there to be an adversarial mind, but there are times when it feels enough that way - when I'm half asleep, perhaps, and most especially - that I just don't even open the app or website entirely, but listen to an old podcast episode instead because those at least I can trust. (I pay subscriptions or buy copies; anything 'ad-supported' is a hard stop. I prefer people just say outright 'this is what I have and what I think it's worth, let's see if we can make an honest deal' because I am an American.) I am seriously considering hosting a local Invidious instance, or similar, and terminating my now about ten-year YouTube Premium subscription. Ads are a technical problem that I was happy to pay a few bucks a month rather than however many hours to solve. I did enough years of sysadmin work for a living that I no longer enjoy it even slightly, so that's no small trade for me to consider. But now I'm really looking hard at what that money's going to, and by the sound of things lately, I'm among the least enthusiastic of such critics.
- taude 2y ago
  Kind of weird, because I use youtube premium, a LOT. I don't get anything political, or conspiracy theory. I do get WAY too many wood working suggestions, AI tech, and astrophysics stuff. However, these are at the expense of the other channels on topics that I've subscribed to, like body weight fitness, health nutrition, some music stuff. The YouTube alg is obviously broken. By broken, it's optimized for monetary profit. I get tired of specifically having to search out my other channels that I subscribe to, that I'm contemplating giving up Premium, and only using it on an as needed basis, since I need to search for my workout channels anyway.
InkCanon 2y ago
Some of my relatives and colleagues actually actively encourage this. They give them an iPad with YouTube on it after meals and so on. It acts as a pacifier.
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  Are you so confident that they're not doing so in a limited and appropriate manner?
  - basisword 2y ago
    There’s no appropriate level of short form swipe through content for kids. Adults can barely cope with it.
_spduchamp 2y ago
We're trying a new thing in our house to curb the dopamine addiction. Screens allowed every 2nd day. So far it has been working well, and our kid always finds something creative to do on the screen free days.
- AppleBananaPie 2y ago
  This is an interesting idea thanks! I realize mine (by coincidence) do something similar but it's in two day stretches. They want to play Minecraft sometimes but other times they want to go play outside or play with their toys or watch a show. They definitely have a harder time stopping some kinds of shows though regardless of only watching them some days so I have to remove some them.
bluetidepro 2y ago
Related: I pay for YouTube premium and there is still no way to hide/ignore Shorts in the entire platform or any of their apps. It’s infuriating, and a feature that is badly needed. It should be there for free but at the very least allow premium paying users to hide that garbage.
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  Why do you pay for a platform that is actively hostile to you and the creators who produce content you like? This is the primary reason I won't ever pay for premium. Youtube actively works against the interests of creators I have been following since before Youtube even existed. There's always some bullshit going on. I'm a grown ass man watching other grown ass men (they had to click the checkbox that their content is NOT FOR KIDS), but if they say "Fuck" too many times they still make zero dollars. If I could see the ads, I know they are often softcore pornography or literal scams, but god forbid those companies get placed next to someone saying fuck I guess. Google has spent near two decades reducing how much money they pay you for your content, despite their market only increasing. They treat content creators like dirt. Google doesn't want ten thousand Simon Gertz and BPS.Space and AvEs and Applied Science and Practical Engineerings and Stuff Made Heres. Google doesn't want the channel that covered WW1 and WW2 in "real time". Google doesn't want Dan Olsen (Folding Ideas) content. Google doesn't want LGR. Google wants 100 Mr Beasts. Google wants a hundred more fake "crafts" channels. Why pay money to that?
_bin_ 2y ago
You are completely correct. I'm watching the same thing happen to my little cousin. Please hear me: take the phones and take the computers and take the ipads and make them go play outside. We do this when my cousin visits and it's amazing how quickly he shapes up. But there will be a point at which it's gone too far and the damage is much harder to repair. You can youtube-dl whatever is good and stick it on a raspberry pi running kodi with no internet. You can get them el cheapo kindles and load them up with all the books they could ever read. You can let them use computers supervised for khanacademy. But please, as the rare adult who's aware of and cares about this issue, don't let your kids fall victim to it.
- qwerpy 2y ago
  I completely agree (I use yt-dlp to download curated content onto VLC on the iPad) but in practice, for two working parents and 2+ kids, there are often times where you're too exhausted to do anything but plop them in front of screen so you can take a sanity break / do some chores / prep meals / etc. I'm fortunate enough to make enough to afford live in child care and a stay at home wife, so we're able to avoid almost all screen time. But the vast majority of families don't have this luxury. "If you can't responsibly parent, why did you have kids?" This is a very difficult choice for many people. The drive to have kids is fundamental to being human. But it's very expensive and hard.
  - bslanej 2y ago
    Both parents working makes child rearing extremely hard but there are some obvious taboos around this discussion.
    - oblio 2y ago
      You are right but in my experience sticking with clasic entertainment solutions works out better. And I think people are responding to your dilemma with the very sensible solution of just not having kids. Unless you have a very flexible setup somehow, or lots of cash (or both), yeah, child rearing is nightmare fuel.
    - 2y ago
perdomon 2y ago
I say block it again. Get those kids outside in the creek!
noisy_boy 2y ago
Google has created Family Link app to allow parents to control the allowed screen time, apps they can see and sites they can open etc. Conveniently, they allow blacklist/whitelist only at a domain level and YouTube shorts have the same domain as YouTube i.e. https://www.youtube.com/shorts https://www.youtube.com/shorts - they could have very easily provided a regex/pattern based blacklist/whitelist feature. Blocking YouTube in its entirety is not feasible because lots of educational videos are hosted on it. The only option is to externalize the filtering via pihole etc. I suppose allowing parents to prevent their kids from watching the inane garbage that is shorts is a step too far in Google's books.
- sebastiennight 2y ago
  I'm thinking that piHole wouldn't work for the same reason? (it's all on the same domain, so DNS-based filtering would be worthless)
  - noisy_boy 2y ago
    Seems like piHole does support regex based filtering: https://docs.pi-hole.net/regex/ https://docs.pi-hole.net/regex/
    - sebastiennight 2y ago
      Yes, but the regex is still run at the DNS-filter level, so you can use the regex to filter IPs or domains, not URL paths. You can filter (.*).youtube.com You cannot filter youtube.com/(.*)
      - noisy_boy 2y ago
        Thanks for checking it - bad news all around I guess.
rehevkor5 2y ago
YouTube really needs to provide an option in their mobile app to disable shorts.
lukan 2y ago
Yeah, me too. It will be blocked again and just handpickes local videos and games to choose from. I never thought I would have to do this as an adult, but what else you do?
aantix 2y ago
I’m building a new YouTube player experience for my kids. You can block shorts. Block keywords (e.g. Minecraft, MrBeast) Email me if you’d like to test. jim.jones1@gmail.com
lo_zamoyski 2y ago
Yeah. From time to time, you hear that reading books is somehow obsolete, and that valuing books reflects an undue emphasis on medium rather than content. This view is mistaken. The form in which information is delivered is not irrelevant to how it is processed, understood, or retained. There is a crucial difference between sustained engagement with a coherent body of thought and the piecemeal consumption of isolated informational fragments. Short-form content, whether in the form of articles, posts, or "snippets", habituates the reader to a fragmented mode of attention. Over time, this practice undermines the capacity for deep focus and coherent understanding. The effects are cumulative: what is lost is not merely quantity of information, but quality of comprehension. Certain kinds of understanding only emerge over time, in context, and in continuity. A complex argument, or a meaningful dialogue, cannot be replaced by a summary or a highlight reel. To suggest it can overlooks the way serious thought takes place.
0xEF 2y ago
Have you considered switching to Nebula? A lot of the YouTubers I like and tend to trust are also active on that platform. Will there is still some fluff, Nebula does seem to be far more discerning about the content it hosts.
thedougd 2y ago
Continuously frustrated to see the YouTube app return to my Apple TV home screen. I can appreciate why Google makes it hard for me to block their apps on their platforms, but why won't Apple allow me to explicitly allow or disallow which apps can be installed on my Apple TV? Why don't screen time limits apply to the Apple TV?
- fullshark 2y ago
  Huh? I can remove the YouTube app from my AppleTV https://support.apple.com/guide/tv/install-or-delete-apps-atvbaa1a9524/tvos https://support.apple.com/guide/tv/install-or-delete-apps-at...
  - thedougd 2y ago
    The kids can easily add back free apps with their Apple ID.
- jwjohnson314 2y ago
  The lack of screen time limits on the Apple TV just demonstrates Apple's complete lack of credibility in this area too. And the parental controls on their other devices are illogical and remarkably buggy. Clearly not a priority.
loloquwowndueo 2y ago
We banned YouTube entirely for the kid, best decision we ever made.
deadbabe 2y ago
An awesome app would be something that could hijack algorithms for various social media apps on home WiFi and feed kids parent-approved content silently without them even knowing, and messing with search results so they struggle to find things you don’t want them to see.
onemoresoop 2y ago
Download content of your choosing (yeah, you can even DL from youtube), put it offline and let kids watch from a playlist you curated yourself. Yank off any wifi connectivity, it’s poison finds ways to dumb down the kids.
cynicalpeace 2y ago
Yes, you should prohibit it. You should have never introduced them to it in the first place. Not trying to be mean- just trying to be frank. Our kids get almost no screen time. We watch a movie once a week as a family. That's it. We have no problems because we have never introduced screens to them beyond that. Our kids like playing outside.
charlie0 2y ago
There are alternatives to YT for educational content, like Nebula. However, even that platform lacks control and it's slowly getting flooded with non educational content. It sucks because there is no solution here short of curating your content via ytdl and rolling your own YT like software.
ccorcos 2y ago
I wish YouTube allowed a filter for minimum video length. I don’t want my kid watching anything under 5 minutes, ideally 10 minutes long. My biggest concern is the attention thrashing. If they’re going to watch some garbage, at least be stuck with it for 10 minutes so you’ll get bored of it…
7thaccount 2y ago
I commented on here before about this. I'm certainly not perfect, but what I've done is basically YouTube is something the kid doesn't watch on their own. They can watch documentaries with me or whatever (occasionally some video game stuff), but almost all YouTube kids is awful. There are a lot of really good kids shows out there across different streaming services with actual plots and character development that make them think without frying their brains. For a kid in the 8-14 year range: Avatar the Last Airbender, Gravity Falls, Owl House, Dragon Prince...etc are prob fine depending on the kid (dragon Prince is a bit darker). As a parent you need to make sure they're not watching content you object to though. I'll also find some episodes of something like Star Trek that is interesting with some moral dilemmas and just talk it out with them. TV is fine in moderation. Make sure you keep reading to them as well.
quantadev 2y ago
I noticed just last week Youtube Shorts (and long vids too) have become so full of fake AI Generated stuff it's not even worth watching. Sure it looks perfectly real,even if it's fake, but as an adult I find it just a waste of time. However children cannot TELL which things are fake quite as well as an adult can, so they'll end up basically going insane watching that crap, and end up with a very distorted view of the world. It's truly a National Security issue at this point. I hope America bans TikTok, and if I had children they wouldn't be allowed to watch this garbage. Sadly most Americans value their "friendship" with their kids more than they value their parenting responsibilities, and so they let the kids do whatever they want just so they stay on good terms with them without the kids being mad all the time. Also today's generation of moms and dads all grew up in the internet world, so to them, blocking technology from their kids seems like abuse of a sort, when it's not.
oulipo 2y ago
I think as a parent you're supposed to... prevent that by talking to them?
Neywiny 2y ago
I'll only respond to this but I do see a lot of people share your viewpoint. I think I agree with you partially. There are ways to rot the brain on YouTube. I noticed it maybe 8-9 years ago for me. I unsubscribed from all the gaming channels and only watched tech/EE/CS videos. It got to the point where in college I had weeks of 40+ hours of YouTube (does it adjust for 2x speed? Unsure) but it was mostly on STEM content. I believe that's what let me ace my classes in my later years. I just learned better from them than reading textbooks. So, please don't give up on trying to only block the brainrot. Also, kids are crafty and usually have more time than adults so be prepared to fight an uphill battle once they figure out VPNs, DNS, and other ways.
kridsdale1 2y ago
Disable “watch history” and Shorts will go away.
- jbaber 2y ago
  Wait, really?
  - kridsdale1 2y ago
    I work at Google and that is what people are telling each other when the issue of “I don’t want my kids to see this” comes up.
philips 2y ago
The only solution I have found is using YouTube kids (and now Pinchflat) and only allow approved content. I wrote a blog post about it here: https://abparenting.substack.com/p/effective-youtube-kids https://abparenting.substack.com/p/effective-youtube-kids
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sanderjd 2y ago

The author of this blog wrote a whole freaking book about exactly this! I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. How is this like 95% of the comments here, as if Haidt didn't write an incredibly well known book about how all of this is bad!

Apocryphon 2y ago
Because even though he is reposted here every few months not everyone has deigned to actually read any of his stuff
- sanderjd 2y ago
  That's fine, but if you're going to post "now do X" in response to a criticism of Y, it behooves you to understand whether the author might have already opined on X.
lolinder 2y ago
Most people here didn't even follow the link and are just responding to the title. They don't know who wrote the piece, much less what it actually says.
- everyone 2y ago
  They've also been scrolling too much.. Their attention span cant handle it lol. Their propensity for scrolling has degraded their ability to criticize it.
cinntaile 2y ago
I don't get what you are trying to say? Can't people share their experiences?
- lolinder 2y ago
  This comment isn't so bad, but there were a bunch of comments earlier that were implying or stating outright that the author of TFA was targeting TikTok specifically for political reasons, which is clearly nonsense if you have even a passing familiarity with Haidt's body of work. OP followed a similar pattern by starting with "please add YouTube to the list", but they did at least elaborate and didn't imply that TikTok was being targeted unfairly.
- sanderjd 2y ago
  You're totally right. I wouldn't have written what I wrote, if I had seen this comment before seeing the ten thousand other comments on this page that just say "whatabout {other social media app}". Not fair to the author of this comment who was just sharing an experience. Too late to delete it now, so I just have to live with my shame :)
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tux1968 2y ago

It's worth blocking shorts alone, they're the worst culprit. Letting kids still access long form videos.

GNOMES 2y ago
The fact that Family Link app on Android doesn't have this feature drives me crazy. Youtube kids exists, but far too many channels are not available without manual intervention.

radicalbyte 2y ago

This x10000. I really wish that the EU would step in and force Google to either kill Shorts or give us full control over the crap they're pushing down our throats. As this is HN and full of smart people - if there are any workable (OSS) options to filtering YouTube to remove shorts (and the far-right/Nazi crap) then please let us know.

NegativeLatency 2y ago
Maybe you could rig something up with invidious? https://github.com/iv-org/invidious https://github.com/iv-org/invidious
zcar 2y ago
[dead]

yapyap 2y ago

All the (popular) social medias morph towards the tiktok short form content. Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube, etc. It’s the most attention holding thing a.t.m.

darknavi 2y ago

To some extent I feel the same about video games too. I watch my ~9 year old Nephew play games on his Switch and he swaps between games every ~5 minutes. I think as a 90s kid we had a hand full of games for our Gameboys, N64, etc. but had to wait for a holiday to actually get new physical content. Now it's easy and cheap enough to just download a slough of digital games (with fast resume and what not) and hop between them like crazy.

obscurette 2y ago
I had just a conversation with parent who said she allows her kids to play videogames only because it's the only thing they are able to do with focus. At the same time she is worried that they seem to be unable to listen even 4-minute pop hits from start to finish. They only listen "best parts of hits" – intro, beginning of first chorus, bridge and skip to next piece.
- dismalaf 2y ago
  > unable to listen even 4-minute pop hits from start to finish Maybe the kids have realised that those pop hits are repetitive and uninteresting...
  - FranzFerdiNaN 2y ago
    Or their attention span is simply destroyed by social media and YouTube. Plenty of pop music is excellent. But if you give it 30 seconds you will never find out if that’s true.
    - ragnese 1y ago
      I can't decide if username checks out or not...
  - sebastiennight 2y ago
    To be fair, 30 seconds of Bohemian Rhapsody is about the maximum I've ever been able to handle!

antimoan 2y ago

disable Youtube history and no more shorts or AI suggested content. It quickly becomes a useful tool since you can see channels you subscribe to or if you are interested in a subject you have to search for it instead of getting pulled in the AI suggested contents as soon as you open the app.

nihakue 2y ago
THANK YOU so much for this. I'd spend some time researching how to disable YouTube shorts only to come to the conclusion that I had to use a different client (I picked NewPipe, but faced frequent issues with playback and I ended up having to click out to YouTube 90% of the time anyway) I've disabled YouTube history now and it's almost exactly what I'd hoped for. Shorts are disabled, no 'feed', no suggestions, just my subscriptions. I owe you a beer.
- antimoan 1y ago
  My pleasure, I went down that rabbit hole myself until I saw a comment in reddit that helped me to make youtube the way I like it. I am just passing it forward and glad to hear it helped you.

gpspake 2y ago

I took me a while but I finally figured this out. I think the difficulty is a dark ui pattern that hides the control behind an age selection. In the youtube kids admin settings, there's a part where you select your kids age 0-4, 4-9 etc... My kid is 4 so I never really looked at the later options but after probably 20 times on that screen, I noticed at the end (where my eyes glossed over the higher ages) there's something along the lines of "control content yourself". Once I selected it, I could whitelist channels and completely disable search and recommendations. This means the youtube kids app _only_ shows what I say it can. If I want to give him access to something like "smarter every day" or a specific video that's not on youtube kids, I can click share from my account and share with "kids" We've still pretty much banned youtube on all devices but, like you said, there's a lot of valuable stuff and I really miss the time when he would get in to "tornadoes" or "helicopters" or some other topic and we could watch a bunch of educational videos without being flooded with trash toy videos and subversive attention leeching ads. This at least opens the door back up for some of that good content without the garbage.

the_third_wave 2y ago
> My kid is 4 so ... ... there is no way in hell I'll give him or her access to the 'net. Right? Right.
- deleted 2y ago
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- Retr0id 2y ago
  Unless you anticipate your child growing up to live in a world with no internet, it doesn't make much sense to raise them with no internet. Parentally-curated information sources seems like a more than fine approach to that.
  - danesparza 2y ago
    I agree with this approach, especially teaching your kids that "what you put in your brain matters" (kinda like what you put in your mouth matters)

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throwanem 2y ago

You have to filter it manually for them. There's no other way, though in a year or two we might start to see products backed by true multimodal models that are actually worth looking at. I don't mean to seem blunt or rude. I don't actually have kids, so even if I were inclined to judge, I've no basis. But just looking at what YouTube has been doing over the last couple of years, even as a premium subscriber and so never seeing ads - I mean, it's terrible, it's as if it is actively trying to drag me down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole, in the sense that I might watch a half dozen videos today about simulated jet-plane gunfights in DCS, and tomorrow I'm seeing recommendations for what I only recognize as "Intro to 5G Covid Conspiracy (CONT 101, 3 credits)" because I have studied the subject. I report these videos and they stop coming, until the next time. It isn't as though there is a game here on the other side of which for there to be an adversarial mind, but there are times when it feels enough that way - when I'm half asleep, perhaps, and most especially - that I just don't even open the app or website entirely, but listen to an old podcast episode instead because those at least I can trust. (I pay subscriptions or buy copies; anything 'ad-supported' is a hard stop. I prefer people just say outright 'this is what I have and what I think it's worth, let's see if we can make an honest deal' because I am an American.) I am seriously considering hosting a local Invidious instance, or similar, and terminating my now about ten-year YouTube Premium subscription. Ads are a technical problem that I was happy to pay a few bucks a month rather than however many hours to solve. I did enough years of sysadmin work for a living that I no longer enjoy it even slightly, so that's no small trade for me to consider. But now I'm really looking hard at what that money's going to, and by the sound of things lately, I'm among the least enthusiastic of such critics.

taude 2y ago
Kind of weird, because I use youtube premium, a LOT. I don't get anything political, or conspiracy theory. I do get WAY too many wood working suggestions, AI tech, and astrophysics stuff. However, these are at the expense of the other channels on topics that I've subscribed to, like body weight fitness, health nutrition, some music stuff. The YouTube alg is obviously broken. By broken, it's optimized for monetary profit. I get tired of specifically having to search out my other channels that I subscribe to, that I'm contemplating giving up Premium, and only using it on an as needed basis, since I need to search for my workout channels anyway.

InkCanon 2y ago

Some of my relatives and colleagues actually actively encourage this. They give them an iPad with YouTube on it after meals and so on. It acts as a pacifier.

bryanlarsen 2y ago
Are you so confident that they're not doing so in a limited and appropriate manner?
- basisword 2y ago
  There’s no appropriate level of short form swipe through content for kids. Adults can barely cope with it.

_spduchamp 2y ago

We're trying a new thing in our house to curb the dopamine addiction. Screens allowed every 2nd day. So far it has been working well, and our kid always finds something creative to do on the screen free days.

AppleBananaPie 2y ago
This is an interesting idea thanks! I realize mine (by coincidence) do something similar but it's in two day stretches. They want to play Minecraft sometimes but other times they want to go play outside or play with their toys or watch a show. They definitely have a harder time stopping some kinds of shows though regardless of only watching them some days so I have to remove some them.

bluetidepro 2y ago

Related: I pay for YouTube premium and there is still no way to hide/ignore Shorts in the entire platform or any of their apps. It’s infuriating, and a feature that is badly needed. It should be there for free but at the very least allow premium paying users to hide that garbage.

mrguyorama 2y ago
Why do you pay for a platform that is actively hostile to you and the creators who produce content you like? This is the primary reason I won't ever pay for premium. Youtube actively works against the interests of creators I have been following since before Youtube even existed. There's always some bullshit going on. I'm a grown ass man watching other grown ass men (they had to click the checkbox that their content is NOT FOR KIDS), but if they say "Fuck" too many times they still make zero dollars. If I could see the ads, I know they are often softcore pornography or literal scams, but god forbid those companies get placed next to someone saying fuck I guess. Google has spent near two decades reducing how much money they pay you for your content, despite their market only increasing. They treat content creators like dirt. Google doesn't want ten thousand Simon Gertz and BPS.Space and AvEs and Applied Science and Practical Engineerings and Stuff Made Heres. Google doesn't want the channel that covered WW1 and WW2 in "real time". Google doesn't want Dan Olsen (Folding Ideas) content. Google doesn't want LGR. Google wants 100 Mr Beasts. Google wants a hundred more fake "crafts" channels. Why pay money to that?

_bin_ 2y ago

You are completely correct. I'm watching the same thing happen to my little cousin. Please hear me: take the phones and take the computers and take the ipads and make them go play outside. We do this when my cousin visits and it's amazing how quickly he shapes up. But there will be a point at which it's gone too far and the damage is much harder to repair. You can youtube-dl whatever is good and stick it on a raspberry pi running kodi with no internet. You can get them el cheapo kindles and load them up with all the books they could ever read. You can let them use computers supervised for khanacademy. But please, as the rare adult who's aware of and cares about this issue, don't let your kids fall victim to it.

qwerpy 2y ago
I completely agree (I use yt-dlp to download curated content onto VLC on the iPad) but in practice, for two working parents and 2+ kids, there are often times where you're too exhausted to do anything but plop them in front of screen so you can take a sanity break / do some chores / prep meals / etc. I'm fortunate enough to make enough to afford live in child care and a stay at home wife, so we're able to avoid almost all screen time. But the vast majority of families don't have this luxury. "If you can't responsibly parent, why did you have kids?" This is a very difficult choice for many people. The drive to have kids is fundamental to being human. But it's very expensive and hard.
- bslanej 2y ago
  Both parents working makes child rearing extremely hard but there are some obvious taboos around this discussion.
  - oblio 2y ago
    You are right but in my experience sticking with clasic entertainment solutions works out better. And I think people are responding to your dilemma with the very sensible solution of just not having kids. Unless you have a very flexible setup somehow, or lots of cash (or both), yeah, child rearing is nightmare fuel.
  - 2y ago

perdomon 2y ago

I say block it again. Get those kids outside in the creek!

noisy_boy 2y ago

Google has created Family Link app to allow parents to control the allowed screen time, apps they can see and sites they can open etc. Conveniently, they allow blacklist/whitelist only at a domain level and YouTube shorts have the same domain as YouTube i.e. https://www.youtube.com/shorts https://www.youtube.com/shorts - they could have very easily provided a regex/pattern based blacklist/whitelist feature. Blocking YouTube in its entirety is not feasible because lots of educational videos are hosted on it. The only option is to externalize the filtering via pihole etc. I suppose allowing parents to prevent their kids from watching the inane garbage that is shorts is a step too far in Google's books.

sebastiennight 2y ago
I'm thinking that piHole wouldn't work for the same reason? (it's all on the same domain, so DNS-based filtering would be worthless)
- noisy_boy 2y ago
  Seems like piHole does support regex based filtering: https://docs.pi-hole.net/regex/ https://docs.pi-hole.net/regex/
  - sebastiennight 2y ago
    Yes, but the regex is still run at the DNS-filter level, so you can use the regex to filter IPs or domains, not URL paths. You can filter (.*).youtube.com You cannot filter youtube.com/(.*)
    - noisy_boy 2y ago
      Thanks for checking it - bad news all around I guess.

rehevkor5 2y ago

YouTube really needs to provide an option in their mobile app to disable shorts.

lukan 2y ago

Yeah, me too. It will be blocked again and just handpickes local videos and games to choose from. I never thought I would have to do this as an adult, but what else you do?

aantix 2y ago

I’m building a new YouTube player experience for my kids. You can block shorts. Block keywords (e.g. Minecraft, MrBeast) Email me if you’d like to test. jim.jones1@gmail.com

lo_zamoyski 2y ago

Yeah. From time to time, you hear that reading books is somehow obsolete, and that valuing books reflects an undue emphasis on medium rather than content. This view is mistaken. The form in which information is delivered is not irrelevant to how it is processed, understood, or retained. There is a crucial difference between sustained engagement with a coherent body of thought and the piecemeal consumption of isolated informational fragments. Short-form content, whether in the form of articles, posts, or "snippets", habituates the reader to a fragmented mode of attention. Over time, this practice undermines the capacity for deep focus and coherent understanding. The effects are cumulative: what is lost is not merely quantity of information, but quality of comprehension. Certain kinds of understanding only emerge over time, in context, and in continuity. A complex argument, or a meaningful dialogue, cannot be replaced by a summary or a highlight reel. To suggest it can overlooks the way serious thought takes place.

0xEF 2y ago

Have you considered switching to Nebula? A lot of the YouTubers I like and tend to trust are also active on that platform. Will there is still some fluff, Nebula does seem to be far more discerning about the content it hosts.

thedougd 2y ago

Continuously frustrated to see the YouTube app return to my Apple TV home screen. I can appreciate why Google makes it hard for me to block their apps on their platforms, but why won't Apple allow me to explicitly allow or disallow which apps can be installed on my Apple TV? Why don't screen time limits apply to the Apple TV?

fullshark 2y ago
Huh? I can remove the YouTube app from my AppleTV https://support.apple.com/guide/tv/install-or-delete-apps-atvbaa1a9524/tvos https://support.apple.com/guide/tv/install-or-delete-apps-at...
- thedougd 2y ago
  The kids can easily add back free apps with their Apple ID.
jwjohnson314 2y ago
The lack of screen time limits on the Apple TV just demonstrates Apple's complete lack of credibility in this area too. And the parental controls on their other devices are illogical and remarkably buggy. Clearly not a priority.

loloquwowndueo 2y ago

We banned YouTube entirely for the kid, best decision we ever made.

deadbabe 2y ago

An awesome app would be something that could hijack algorithms for various social media apps on home WiFi and feed kids parent-approved content silently without them even knowing, and messing with search results so they struggle to find things you don’t want them to see.

onemoresoop 2y ago

Download content of your choosing (yeah, you can even DL from youtube), put it offline and let kids watch from a playlist you curated yourself. Yank off any wifi connectivity, it’s poison finds ways to dumb down the kids.

cynicalpeace 2y ago

Yes, you should prohibit it. You should have never introduced them to it in the first place. Not trying to be mean- just trying to be frank. Our kids get almost no screen time. We watch a movie once a week as a family. That's it. We have no problems because we have never introduced screens to them beyond that. Our kids like playing outside.

charlie0 2y ago

There are alternatives to YT for educational content, like Nebula. However, even that platform lacks control and it's slowly getting flooded with non educational content. It sucks because there is no solution here short of curating your content via ytdl and rolling your own YT like software.

ccorcos 2y ago

I wish YouTube allowed a filter for minimum video length. I don’t want my kid watching anything under 5 minutes, ideally 10 minutes long. My biggest concern is the attention thrashing. If they’re going to watch some garbage, at least be stuck with it for 10 minutes so you’ll get bored of it…

7thaccount 2y ago

I commented on here before about this. I'm certainly not perfect, but what I've done is basically YouTube is something the kid doesn't watch on their own. They can watch documentaries with me or whatever (occasionally some video game stuff), but almost all YouTube kids is awful. There are a lot of really good kids shows out there across different streaming services with actual plots and character development that make them think without frying their brains. For a kid in the 8-14 year range: Avatar the Last Airbender, Gravity Falls, Owl House, Dragon Prince...etc are prob fine depending on the kid (dragon Prince is a bit darker). As a parent you need to make sure they're not watching content you object to though. I'll also find some episodes of something like Star Trek that is interesting with some moral dilemmas and just talk it out with them. TV is fine in moderation. Make sure you keep reading to them as well.

quantadev 2y ago

I noticed just last week Youtube Shorts (and long vids too) have become so full of fake AI Generated stuff it's not even worth watching. Sure it looks perfectly real,even if it's fake, but as an adult I find it just a waste of time. However children cannot TELL which things are fake quite as well as an adult can, so they'll end up basically going insane watching that crap, and end up with a very distorted view of the world. It's truly a National Security issue at this point. I hope America bans TikTok, and if I had children they wouldn't be allowed to watch this garbage. Sadly most Americans value their "friendship" with their kids more than they value their parenting responsibilities, and so they let the kids do whatever they want just so they stay on good terms with them without the kids being mad all the time. Also today's generation of moms and dads all grew up in the internet world, so to them, blocking technology from their kids seems like abuse of a sort, when it's not.

oulipo 2y ago

I think as a parent you're supposed to... prevent that by talking to them?

Neywiny 2y ago

I'll only respond to this but I do see a lot of people share your viewpoint. I think I agree with you partially. There are ways to rot the brain on YouTube. I noticed it maybe 8-9 years ago for me. I unsubscribed from all the gaming channels and only watched tech/EE/CS videos. It got to the point where in college I had weeks of 40+ hours of YouTube (does it adjust for 2x speed? Unsure) but it was mostly on STEM content. I believe that's what let me ace my classes in my later years. I just learned better from them than reading textbooks. So, please don't give up on trying to only block the brainrot. Also, kids are crafty and usually have more time than adults so be prepared to fight an uphill battle once they figure out VPNs, DNS, and other ways.

kridsdale1 2y ago

Disable “watch history” and Shorts will go away.

jbaber 2y ago
Wait, really?
- kridsdale1 2y ago
  I work at Google and that is what people are telling each other when the issue of “I don’t want my kids to see this” comes up.

philips 2y ago

The only solution I have found is using YouTube kids (and now Pinchflat) and only allow approved content. I wrote a blog post about it here: https://abparenting.substack.com/p/effective-youtube-kids https://abparenting.substack.com/p/effective-youtube-kids

deleted 2y ago

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