7 ms·

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 kid

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 1y 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 1y ago
  [deleted]
- Retr0id 1y 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 1y 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)
  - sebastiennight 1y ago
    I anticipate my kid needing to live in a word with capitalism, it doesn't ncessarily mean that they need a Mastercard at 4 years old. Same with many other things: condoms, keys to a car, access to alcohol. There is a time for everything, and at the age of 4, a young human probably has not yet maxxed out on analog stimuli opportunities. I learned YouTube when it came out in 2006 and I was 21. I've got 19 years of YouTube experience and I'm doing fine. A 21-year old logging into YouTube for the first time in 2025 will probably be doing even better within days. (hours ? minutes ?) I don't see any reason that a child needs "the internet" (for a value of "the internet" meaning "mass-market apps") to prepare for the future. Maybe you'd want to give them "Scratch Jr"[0] at some point to give them a head start ; maybe that would make much more sense. But YouTube?? [0]: https://scratch.mit.edu/ https://scratch.mit.edu/
    - Retr0id 1y ago
      It's more like giving them pocket money than a Mastercard. Given the dwindling number of ways to spend physical cash these days, a prepaid card might actually make sense, if you can monitor its usage.
      - joseda-hg 1y ago
        The only place I would use physical money that doesn't take a form of digital payment, is public transportation (And that one is a matter of time) While there are many formative opportunities about handling physical money (The sensation of exchanging physical coins is big on a kids mind or knowing they have money and having missplaced it), I can 100% see a case for a card instead, trackable, instant access to emergency money, etc
  - Apocryphon 1y ago
    Why does a child who isn't even in school yet need the internet?
  - haswell 1y ago
    Kids grow up in a world full of things that are not appropriate at a young age, but are perfectly fine later in life. Personally, I worry about the mental models formed at an early age, and how distorting technology can be relative to the real world. It layers abstraction on top of abstraction on top of abstraction at a time when kids are trying to make sense of reality for the first time and establishing internal models that will stay with them into adulthood. Sure, some carefully curated content may be fine, but I think there’s a deeper question to be asked about the impact of current technology on young brains. Adults certainly haven’t adjusted very well. The truth is, we don’t really know how harmful it is. Maybe we’ll survive the next 100 years to find out.
    - somenameforme 1y ago
      There's also what it's taking the place of. Even if it's not directly harmful, and I think that's one hugeeee if, it's a massive timesink that they would otherwise spent doing other things. And it's difficult to imagine anything that could be worse except maybe just sitting in front of the TV. Though even there, TV has the benefit of being much more boring, so the kid may be more inclined to voluntarily seek other entertainment; so perhaps even TV isn't worse.
    - andrepd 1y ago
      There's more excellent children's content out there than they could ever watch in a lifetime. I mean videos, books, toys, games, etc. Why would you even need to give them access to the internet until they're 12 or 14 or 16 years old? You just need to curate the good content yourself (hard, time consuming), and that's it.
  - aziaziazi 1y ago
    That doesn’t makes sense to me: Everybody drinks alcohol. Should I help my toddler tryout alcohol to prepare to the future dinners, parties and weddings?
    - Retr0id 1y ago
      I was allowed to try sips of alcohol as a young child (not that young, though). I think knowing what alcohol tastes like is a pretty useful thing to know, for example to detect a spiked drink.
      - onemoresoop 1y ago
        Oh please, kids will detect alcohol as a foreign substance and will hate it, nobody has to teach them that. And spiked drinks are usually alcohol based drinks spiked with other substances. Good luck detecting that!!
      - gessha 1y ago
        Not sure why you get downvoted without any arguments but to add support for your position, I had a similar experience growing up. I didn’t want to drink before high school gatherings where there was peer pressure and I stopped shortly after that. I see so many first-world westerners cringe at the idea of letting your child have freedom and make mistakes on their own. Tracking, parental controls everywhere, neighbors snitching when your child is out and about exploring the world, etc, etc.
  - spacechild1 1y ago
    Why? My generation only got access to the internet in high school. I got my first smartphone in my mid twenties. Yet I'm able to navigate the modern world just fine.
    - gh0stcat 1y ago
      This, as someone without kids, I am SHOCKED by how many people are like... "obviously my 2 year old just watches the videos I want them to watch" as if they deserve a pat on the back. Why do these young children need screens?? Parents need to take a step back and question what has been normalized.
      - lotsofpulp 1y ago
        Skills compound, so the logic of I didn’t do x until age y, and I was still competitive, doesn’t mean that your kid will be competitive with their peers if they wait until the same age, assuming others are not. Not that it means 2 year olds should run around the internet with unfettered access, but just that the aforementioned logic is not sound. There is also benefit to being culturally in sync (not necessarily 1 to 1, but somewhat) with one’s peer group. It can be alienating to be the odd one out. If it were up to my grandparents, I never would have watched a tv show or movie growing up, or read fiction novels. But while that may have had some benefits, it obviously would have some costs with me being unable to participate in some of my peers’ activities and conversations.
    - sapphicsnail 1y ago
      But your generation got access at the same time. You were on the same page as your peers. I don't have kids but my friends that do worry that if they block their kid from social media, their kid won't be able to relate to other kids.
      - spacechild1 1y ago
        That is a valid concern, but certainly not for pre-schoolers. Once they go to school, peer pressure will gradually kick in and I will need to make compromises. I just wanted to challenge the notion that a 5-year-old should be able to browse the internet, because that is completely ridiculous IMO.
  - youoy 1y ago
    True, but 4 years old? The reactions that 4 year olds have to videos on screens is like drugs. They are fully hipnotized while watching the video, to the point that its difficult to get them to react to the outside world, and turning off the screen triggers some hard withdrawal reactions. At that age they have 0 tools to control and understand their emotions.
- dismalaf 1y ago
  There's a lot of good stuff on the internet. More information than we had access to as kids. Better to raise them to be responsible, well adjusted humans than to shield them from reality.
  - derektank 1y ago
    Do they need access to that information at the age of 4 though? Almost certainly not. They don't even have basic reading proficiency until age around age 7 or 8. Kindergarten is still mostly focused on phonics.
    - Icathian 1y ago
      This is completely wrong. Kids can easily learn to read at age 5. A child who is working on "basic reading proficiency" at 8 is very behind and has not been well-served by the people responsible for raising them.
      - spacechild1 1y ago
        Yes, but still I would argue that books are the more appropriate reading material :)
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
        Icathian 1y ago
        Yeah, 100% with you on that.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
    - JoshTriplett 1y ago
      > They don't even have basic reading proficiency until age around age 7 or 8. Some develop advanced reading proficiency well before that, and the more they read the more likely that is to become the case. Every child is different, but the more you assume they can't do certain things, the more you'll find that to be self-fulfilling. (That said, that makes an argument for extensive access to reading materials, not videos.)
- spacechild1 1y ago
  I certainly don't. Occasionally we watch photos or music videos together. There is no unsupervised device usage. Side note: Just a few days ago I witnessed a mom letting her ~2 year old daughter browse TikTok while shopping groceries. The kid mindlessly swept to the next video every few seconds. I was horrified.
- stickfigure 1y ago
  I gave my kid the Youtube Kids app at that age. I curated the channels he was allowed to watch. It was pretty good. I loved it when my kid quoted random science facts to me that I didn't know. YMMV.
- oblio 1y ago
  They don't need internet access at that age, don't listen to what other people say (trust your gut on this one) My first computer was at age 13 and I had internet (broadband, directly) at 20. Now, obviously both of those are very late for 2025+ and social pressure would be overbearing. But I think internet usage before, say, 7, is useless. There is so much to learn in the real world before that, anyway (outdoors activities including sports, books, card and boardgames, crafting, ...). Thankfully I live in a place where they're introducing school bans for smartphones, total ones in primary and during classes in secondary. That should reduce social pressure massively. If all goes well computers will be introduced around 7, supervised (probably with a locked down Linux and various educational programs, maybe some simple multiplayer games, etc). A dumb phone will probably appear in a few years and a locked down smartphone as late as possible, maybe around 12? I expect mobile device mastery to happen almost instantly, instilling desktop computer usage is the real target, maybe some programming. Unsupervised internet usage is a tricky thing. Not sure when exactly, they need to learn about NSFW and especially NSFL. And of course about the crack-manufacturers employed by FAANG.
plussed_reader 1y ago
Is there a modern parent sysadmin reference? I miss portability of settings; configuring restrictions for an mdm is soul sucking.
- throwanem 1y ago
  Would it help to do it with a kid on your lap, or otherwise actively involved? Perhaps you could put a laptop on the floor and make a game of it, and certainly in our line there's never any shortage of complicated words that can be said in funny ways. I don't know. I didn't ever have kids, but if I don't mind letting a $3k laptop wear a few battle scars just for it participating in the life of a photographer, I have to suppose getting a little dinged up to help make a child smile must be at least as honorable. For that matter, I recall a ferret - now long since gone to her reward, of course, this was decades ago - jumping on an Esc key just in time to cancel a Windows 2000 install, and that was funny enough to laugh about for years. How much more so with a cheerful, clever baby primate? Don't mind me, though. Just getting a little maudlin in my old age.
  - hahajk 1y ago
    Children still need to be able to explore the world themselves, I would say most of the time kids spend above 3yo should be without a parent facilitating their activities. Also, adults have lots of responsibilities other than making sure children are playing constructively. Requiring over-the-shoulder collaboration for all online activity isn't realistic, especially when you have more than one child per parent. Banning youtube has been a no-brainer for me. The loss of the "smart" shows is a cost well worth reducing attention addiction.
    - throwanem 1y ago
      More to add, but I would like to note first that I suggested making a game of configuring an MDM profile (indeed natively miserable! Why else suggest inviting along a whole kid to try to make it tolerable, lol) and never suggested that manual filtering must be synchronous filtering. Download tools and selfhosted video streaming tools exist for YT content. I run them myself. I learned to set them up based on a couple of HN commenters' passing mentions that it was easier than I had made it out to be, by following search terms from their comments, and by screwing around breaking things till they quit falling apart on me. In other words, old-fashioned sysadmin work, of the kind I loudly hate and quietly love to. In aggregate, it took about two days' (ie ca 16h though not as closely tracked as if billing ofc) work, and though my notes are aides-memoires in no fit state for publication, I would be happy to share them privately and save you some of that time. (This offer stands for any reader, and my email is in my profile here; to see those, click on the name above this or any comment. My fifty-year-old, brilliant but determinedly nontechnical, beloved catty bitch of an ex-boyfriend had much derision for the content of my library, but none for the quality of service. I confide you won't disappoint your family too badly, either.) eta: What I wanted to add is this, a short and I hope not too dull piece which I wrote now almost a decade ago. Please excuse the state you find it in; my old website broke ages ago and this needs a rewrite anyway for that the man proved far more vile than I yet knew to paint him. But I think it still can stand as a hint of my real feelings on these matters, which might surprise you somewhat. https://web.archive.org/web/20220125083230/https://aaron-m.com/2017/12/17/small-travelers-in-an-antique-land https://web.archive.org/web/20220125083230/https://aaron-m.c...
citizenkeen 1y ago
My frustration is that you can’t add monetized videos to that list, so there’s a lot of great science videos you can’t add.
- philips 1y ago
  I started running Pinchflat and a Jellyfin server after I outgrew the restrictions in YouTube kids.
angryGhost 1y ago
there must be a ReVanced alternative for web browsers, ever since cracking YouTube I find myself only using it when I want to search for a video because I have disabled the home screen and disabled shorts so I never see the slop
- netsharc 1y ago
  I use https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/improve-youtube-%F0%9F%8E%A7-for-yo/bnomihfieiccainjcjblhegjgglakjdd https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/improve-youtube-%F0... and my YouTube start page is empty... it can also remove shorts from the search results.
  - rglullis 1y ago
    Untrap YouTube + Brave browser + Sponsorblock works quite well, too. I've disabled pretty much every "recommended" section: no in-video cards, no "related videos", nothing except on the main page, so the only way to get "random suggestions from the algorithm is is by intentionally refreshing the home page.
bcoughlan 1y ago
I considered doing the same but in the end decided I don’t want to use a platform I have to fight against, while still letting them build brand recognition to my kid. So I downloaded a bunch of the videos on our desktop and blocked the site. Works for my 3.5 year old, not sure the plan when they outgrow it.
- onemoresoop 1y ago
  I did the same and it’s great. At some point normal boredom kicks in and no bad habits are formed. I realized a while ago that many kids are primed early throug so many channels, it’s beyond despicable. At this point a big share of blame needs to fall on the parents turning a bling eye to it all.
  - chrisweekly 1y ago
    boredom is an essential ingredient in the development of a healthy mind
- nonethewiser 1y ago
  >I considered doing the same but in the end decided I don’t want to use a platform I have to fight against, while still letting them build brand recognition to my kid. >So I downloaded a bunch of the videos on our desktop and blocked the site. Downloading videos from youtube and blocking the site seems more like fighting against the platform (and more work) than turning on a whitelist mode. Seems like the end result is the same but with more work.
  - LtWorf 1y ago
    Maybe he's downloading kid's cartoons from telegram… he didn't say where he's downloading from.
    - kridsdale1 1y ago
      Telegram is a media piracy platform now? I had no idea.

the_third_wave 1y 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 1y ago
[deleted]
Retr0id 1y 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 1y 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)
- sebastiennight 1y ago
  I anticipate my kid needing to live in a word with capitalism, it doesn't ncessarily mean that they need a Mastercard at 4 years old. Same with many other things: condoms, keys to a car, access to alcohol. There is a time for everything, and at the age of 4, a young human probably has not yet maxxed out on analog stimuli opportunities. I learned YouTube when it came out in 2006 and I was 21. I've got 19 years of YouTube experience and I'm doing fine. A 21-year old logging into YouTube for the first time in 2025 will probably be doing even better within days. (hours ? minutes ?) I don't see any reason that a child needs "the internet" (for a value of "the internet" meaning "mass-market apps") to prepare for the future. Maybe you'd want to give them "Scratch Jr"[0] at some point to give them a head start ; maybe that would make much more sense. But YouTube?? [0]: https://scratch.mit.edu/ https://scratch.mit.edu/
  - Retr0id 1y ago
    It's more like giving them pocket money than a Mastercard. Given the dwindling number of ways to spend physical cash these days, a prepaid card might actually make sense, if you can monitor its usage.
    - joseda-hg 1y ago
      The only place I would use physical money that doesn't take a form of digital payment, is public transportation (And that one is a matter of time) While there are many formative opportunities about handling physical money (The sensation of exchanging physical coins is big on a kids mind or knowing they have money and having missplaced it), I can 100% see a case for a card instead, trackable, instant access to emergency money, etc
- Apocryphon 1y ago
  Why does a child who isn't even in school yet need the internet?
- haswell 1y ago
  Kids grow up in a world full of things that are not appropriate at a young age, but are perfectly fine later in life. Personally, I worry about the mental models formed at an early age, and how distorting technology can be relative to the real world. It layers abstraction on top of abstraction on top of abstraction at a time when kids are trying to make sense of reality for the first time and establishing internal models that will stay with them into adulthood. Sure, some carefully curated content may be fine, but I think there’s a deeper question to be asked about the impact of current technology on young brains. Adults certainly haven’t adjusted very well. The truth is, we don’t really know how harmful it is. Maybe we’ll survive the next 100 years to find out.
  - somenameforme 1y ago
    There's also what it's taking the place of. Even if it's not directly harmful, and I think that's one hugeeee if, it's a massive timesink that they would otherwise spent doing other things. And it's difficult to imagine anything that could be worse except maybe just sitting in front of the TV. Though even there, TV has the benefit of being much more boring, so the kid may be more inclined to voluntarily seek other entertainment; so perhaps even TV isn't worse.
  - andrepd 1y ago
    There's more excellent children's content out there than they could ever watch in a lifetime. I mean videos, books, toys, games, etc. Why would you even need to give them access to the internet until they're 12 or 14 or 16 years old? You just need to curate the good content yourself (hard, time consuming), and that's it.
- aziaziazi 1y ago
  That doesn’t makes sense to me: Everybody drinks alcohol. Should I help my toddler tryout alcohol to prepare to the future dinners, parties and weddings?
  - Retr0id 1y ago
    I was allowed to try sips of alcohol as a young child (not that young, though). I think knowing what alcohol tastes like is a pretty useful thing to know, for example to detect a spiked drink.
    - onemoresoop 1y ago
      Oh please, kids will detect alcohol as a foreign substance and will hate it, nobody has to teach them that. And spiked drinks are usually alcohol based drinks spiked with other substances. Good luck detecting that!!
    - gessha 1y ago
      Not sure why you get downvoted without any arguments but to add support for your position, I had a similar experience growing up. I didn’t want to drink before high school gatherings where there was peer pressure and I stopped shortly after that. I see so many first-world westerners cringe at the idea of letting your child have freedom and make mistakes on their own. Tracking, parental controls everywhere, neighbors snitching when your child is out and about exploring the world, etc, etc.
- spacechild1 1y ago
  Why? My generation only got access to the internet in high school. I got my first smartphone in my mid twenties. Yet I'm able to navigate the modern world just fine.
  - gh0stcat 1y ago
    This, as someone without kids, I am SHOCKED by how many people are like... "obviously my 2 year old just watches the videos I want them to watch" as if they deserve a pat on the back. Why do these young children need screens?? Parents need to take a step back and question what has been normalized.
    - lotsofpulp 1y ago
      Skills compound, so the logic of I didn’t do x until age y, and I was still competitive, doesn’t mean that your kid will be competitive with their peers if they wait until the same age, assuming others are not. Not that it means 2 year olds should run around the internet with unfettered access, but just that the aforementioned logic is not sound. There is also benefit to being culturally in sync (not necessarily 1 to 1, but somewhat) with one’s peer group. It can be alienating to be the odd one out. If it were up to my grandparents, I never would have watched a tv show or movie growing up, or read fiction novels. But while that may have had some benefits, it obviously would have some costs with me being unable to participate in some of my peers’ activities and conversations.
  - sapphicsnail 1y ago
    But your generation got access at the same time. You were on the same page as your peers. I don't have kids but my friends that do worry that if they block their kid from social media, their kid won't be able to relate to other kids.
    - spacechild1 1y ago
      That is a valid concern, but certainly not for pre-schoolers. Once they go to school, peer pressure will gradually kick in and I will need to make compromises. I just wanted to challenge the notion that a 5-year-old should be able to browse the internet, because that is completely ridiculous IMO.
- youoy 1y ago
  True, but 4 years old? The reactions that 4 year olds have to videos on screens is like drugs. They are fully hipnotized while watching the video, to the point that its difficult to get them to react to the outside world, and turning off the screen triggers some hard withdrawal reactions. At that age they have 0 tools to control and understand their emotions.
dismalaf 1y ago
There's a lot of good stuff on the internet. More information than we had access to as kids. Better to raise them to be responsible, well adjusted humans than to shield them from reality.
- derektank 1y ago
  Do they need access to that information at the age of 4 though? Almost certainly not. They don't even have basic reading proficiency until age around age 7 or 8. Kindergarten is still mostly focused on phonics.
  - Icathian 1y ago
    This is completely wrong. Kids can easily learn to read at age 5. A child who is working on "basic reading proficiency" at 8 is very behind and has not been well-served by the people responsible for raising them.
    - spacechild1 1y ago
      Yes, but still I would argue that books are the more appropriate reading material :)
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - Icathian 1y ago
        Yeah, 100% with you on that.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - JoshTriplett 1y ago
    > They don't even have basic reading proficiency until age around age 7 or 8. Some develop advanced reading proficiency well before that, and the more they read the more likely that is to become the case. Every child is different, but the more you assume they can't do certain things, the more you'll find that to be self-fulfilling. (That said, that makes an argument for extensive access to reading materials, not videos.)
spacechild1 1y ago
I certainly don't. Occasionally we watch photos or music videos together. There is no unsupervised device usage. Side note: Just a few days ago I witnessed a mom letting her ~2 year old daughter browse TikTok while shopping groceries. The kid mindlessly swept to the next video every few seconds. I was horrified.
stickfigure 1y ago
I gave my kid the Youtube Kids app at that age. I curated the channels he was allowed to watch. It was pretty good. I loved it when my kid quoted random science facts to me that I didn't know. YMMV.
oblio 1y ago
They don't need internet access at that age, don't listen to what other people say (trust your gut on this one) My first computer was at age 13 and I had internet (broadband, directly) at 20. Now, obviously both of those are very late for 2025+ and social pressure would be overbearing. But I think internet usage before, say, 7, is useless. There is so much to learn in the real world before that, anyway (outdoors activities including sports, books, card and boardgames, crafting, ...). Thankfully I live in a place where they're introducing school bans for smartphones, total ones in primary and during classes in secondary. That should reduce social pressure massively. If all goes well computers will be introduced around 7, supervised (probably with a locked down Linux and various educational programs, maybe some simple multiplayer games, etc). A dumb phone will probably appear in a few years and a locked down smartphone as late as possible, maybe around 12? I expect mobile device mastery to happen almost instantly, instilling desktop computer usage is the real target, maybe some programming. Unsupervised internet usage is a tricky thing. Not sure when exactly, they need to learn about NSFW and especially NSFL. And of course about the crack-manufacturers employed by FAANG.

plussed_reader 1y ago

Is there a modern parent sysadmin reference? I miss portability of settings; configuring restrictions for an mdm is soul sucking.

throwanem 1y ago
Would it help to do it with a kid on your lap, or otherwise actively involved? Perhaps you could put a laptop on the floor and make a game of it, and certainly in our line there's never any shortage of complicated words that can be said in funny ways. I don't know. I didn't ever have kids, but if I don't mind letting a $3k laptop wear a few battle scars just for it participating in the life of a photographer, I have to suppose getting a little dinged up to help make a child smile must be at least as honorable. For that matter, I recall a ferret - now long since gone to her reward, of course, this was decades ago - jumping on an Esc key just in time to cancel a Windows 2000 install, and that was funny enough to laugh about for years. How much more so with a cheerful, clever baby primate? Don't mind me, though. Just getting a little maudlin in my old age.
- hahajk 1y ago
  Children still need to be able to explore the world themselves, I would say most of the time kids spend above 3yo should be without a parent facilitating their activities. Also, adults have lots of responsibilities other than making sure children are playing constructively. Requiring over-the-shoulder collaboration for all online activity isn't realistic, especially when you have more than one child per parent. Banning youtube has been a no-brainer for me. The loss of the "smart" shows is a cost well worth reducing attention addiction.
  - throwanem 1y ago
    More to add, but I would like to note first that I suggested making a game of configuring an MDM profile (indeed natively miserable! Why else suggest inviting along a whole kid to try to make it tolerable, lol) and never suggested that manual filtering must be synchronous filtering. Download tools and selfhosted video streaming tools exist for YT content. I run them myself. I learned to set them up based on a couple of HN commenters' passing mentions that it was easier than I had made it out to be, by following search terms from their comments, and by screwing around breaking things till they quit falling apart on me. In other words, old-fashioned sysadmin work, of the kind I loudly hate and quietly love to. In aggregate, it took about two days' (ie ca 16h though not as closely tracked as if billing ofc) work, and though my notes are aides-memoires in no fit state for publication, I would be happy to share them privately and save you some of that time. (This offer stands for any reader, and my email is in my profile here; to see those, click on the name above this or any comment. My fifty-year-old, brilliant but determinedly nontechnical, beloved catty bitch of an ex-boyfriend had much derision for the content of my library, but none for the quality of service. I confide you won't disappoint your family too badly, either.) eta: What I wanted to add is this, a short and I hope not too dull piece which I wrote now almost a decade ago. Please excuse the state you find it in; my old website broke ages ago and this needs a rewrite anyway for that the man proved far more vile than I yet knew to paint him. But I think it still can stand as a hint of my real feelings on these matters, which might surprise you somewhat. https://web.archive.org/web/20220125083230/https://aaron-m.com/2017/12/17/small-travelers-in-an-antique-land https://web.archive.org/web/20220125083230/https://aaron-m.c...

citizenkeen 1y ago

My frustration is that you can’t add monetized videos to that list, so there’s a lot of great science videos you can’t add.

philips 1y ago
I started running Pinchflat and a Jellyfin server after I outgrew the restrictions in YouTube kids.

angryGhost 1y ago

there must be a ReVanced alternative for web browsers, ever since cracking YouTube I find myself only using it when I want to search for a video because I have disabled the home screen and disabled shorts so I never see the slop

netsharc 1y ago
I use https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/improve-youtube-%F0%9F%8E%A7-for-yo/bnomihfieiccainjcjblhegjgglakjdd https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/improve-youtube-%F0... and my YouTube start page is empty... it can also remove shorts from the search results.
- rglullis 1y ago
  Untrap YouTube + Brave browser + Sponsorblock works quite well, too. I've disabled pretty much every "recommended" section: no in-video cards, no "related videos", nothing except on the main page, so the only way to get "random suggestions from the algorithm is is by intentionally refreshing the home page.

bcoughlan 1y ago

I considered doing the same but in the end decided I don’t want to use a platform I have to fight against, while still letting them build brand recognition to my kid. So I downloaded a bunch of the videos on our desktop and blocked the site. Works for my 3.5 year old, not sure the plan when they outgrow it.

onemoresoop 1y ago
I did the same and it’s great. At some point normal boredom kicks in and no bad habits are formed. I realized a while ago that many kids are primed early throug so many channels, it’s beyond despicable. At this point a big share of blame needs to fall on the parents turning a bling eye to it all.
- chrisweekly 1y ago
  boredom is an essential ingredient in the development of a healthy mind
nonethewiser 1y ago
>I considered doing the same but in the end decided I don’t want to use a platform I have to fight against, while still letting them build brand recognition to my kid. >So I downloaded a bunch of the videos on our desktop and blocked the site. Downloading videos from youtube and blocking the site seems more like fighting against the platform (and more work) than turning on a whitelist mode. Seems like the end result is the same but with more work.
- LtWorf 1y ago
  Maybe he's downloading kid's cartoons from telegram… he didn't say where he's downloading from.
  - kridsdale1 1y ago
    Telegram is a media piracy platform now? I had no idea.