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> I don't really understand why Youtube won't let me create a profile, on my paid family account that I'm paying $29 NZD a month for, which lets me whitelist ch

> I don't really understand why Youtube won't let me create a profile, on my paid family account that I'm paying $29 NZD a month for, which lets me whitelist channels The answer is to this question is always: it is too niche a product feature for a giant corporation to prioritize. This product would require constant work to keep in sync as UIs and features change. It would be one more feature to regression test against an ever growing list changes, and an ever growing list of client apps that need to work across an endless list of phones, computers, tvs, etc. This is why it is important that society normalize third party clients to public web services. We should be allowed to create and use whatever UI we want for the public endpoints that are exposed. PS: this particular feature exists though. https://support.google.com/youtubekids/answer/6172308?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid https://support.google.com/youtubekids/answer/6172308?hl=en&...

ndriscoll 1y ago
Your second paragraph is kind of funny as a solution to your first, but was nonetheless what I was going to suggest: since it would require too much work for a multi-trillion dollar company to be cable of building, you can instead rely on hobbyists and use yt-dlp and jellyfin to make your own whitelisted youtube. The option (or at least documentation) does not seem to be there for computers. Is it only on mobile devices?
PoignardAzur 1y ago
The PS kind of undermines the rest of your point.
frereubu 1y ago
That feature isn't what I think the parent comment is asking for. What you've linked to is specifically YouTube Kids, and it's groups of channels whitelisted by the YouTube team. What I think the parent comment is asking for, and I want too, is full availability of all YouTube channels, but the ability to block everything except whitelisted channels. I agree, it's too niche a product. But I often think that people whose response to complaints about kids' access to inappropriate content is "you need to parent your kids" is fine, but I need the tools to do that! A tool like this would be a godsend.
- shkkmo 1y ago
  > I agree, it's too niche a product I don't think it is that niche. I think lots of people would take advantage of it not just for their kids, but themselves. The problem is that it is a feature that makes YouTube less "sticky" and thus there is economic incentive against implementing it due to lack of competition in that area. (Their competitors also want to maximize stickiness.)
- modeless 1y ago
  Why is everyone saying this doesn't exist? It's right there on the linked page! It's called "Approved Content Only" and I assure you that it exists, it's a real feature, it works just like you want, I use it myself, my kids watch Primitive Technology and Smarter Every Day and they can't watch videos I don't whitelist. It does have a few issues. It's not reliable in showing everything you allow, sometimes things are missing for no reason, other times it will prevent you from whitelisting a video because it contains product placement (why does Google get to decide that for me? I'm an adult and can choose what level of product placement is acceptable for my kids). But it is a true whitelist mode and won't show other videos, just as requested.
  - fhub 1y ago
    YouTube Documentation on this feature - https://support.google.com/youtubekids/answer/6172308?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid#zippy=%2Capproved-content-only https://support.google.com/youtubekids/answer/6172308?hl=en&... The embedded walkthrough video on how to set it up is really quite good.
  - lstamour 1y ago
    Edit: I just noticed the list of supported countries (in my link below) includes Canada but excludes the French-speaking province of Quebec. It seems a bit spiteful to go so far as to ensure a service can be legally delivered in such a long list of countries and then exclude Quebec. Hm, I was about to use Puerto Rico as an example, but it’s not in the list as well, but perhaps it’s considered part of the United States here. Now back to the comment I’d written at first: It does seem to be, in typical large corporation fashion, a bit too complicated to set up. For example, there are three ways to add parental supervision, including a mode where you can transition from YouTube Kids to the full YouTube experience while still preserving those controls until a child is 13: https://support.google.com/youtubekids/answer/10495678?sjid=5512051554599945065-NA#zippy=%2Chow-youtube-supervised-experiences-work https://support.google.com/youtubekids/answer/10495678?sjid=... That said, all it would take is an open web browser and a not signed in YouTube account for kids to bypass these controls. But I suppose that’s not actually the point - the point of channel filtering is to reduce the harm recommendation engines and spammy content might have. The gotcha is that recommendation engines are everywhere now, spammy content is pervasive, and even AI responses in Google are arguably now a source of noise to be filtered. I will say, however, it’s great to have an ad-free family plan for YouTube. I wish you could add more accounts to it, but for now I’m getting by with YouTube brand (sub-)accounts to create separate lists of subscriptions, histories and recommendations while still staying ad-free in apps. And tools adults might find useful, I expect kids and teens would find useful too - for example, browser extensions to customize your YouTube experience. As long as we have an open web for e.g. YouTube, we do have independent options, if geeky enough to pursue them. :)
bamboozled 1y ago
Of course if it made a bunch of money it would be a top priority though.
- ElCapitanMarkla 1y ago
  Yeah its a weird one, the lack of this feature is whats making me stop giving them money and I wonder how many other families are in the same boat.
theelous3 1y ago
You heard it here first folks - children are too niche now. 2ish billion people, well known for their indirect spending power, are not worth figuring out a simple whitelist system for.
- GoblinSlayer 1y ago
  It's parenting that is niche. It's outsourced to Google.
natnatenathan 1y ago
I don’t think this is too niche of a feature. Instead, the issue is that this would decrease the engagement (and profitability) for any customer using it, so they have a disincentive to building it. Same reason that Facebook removed features that helped customers narrow their feeds down to just favorite friends and family.
Aurornis 1y ago
> We should be allowed to create and use whatever UI we want for the public endpoints that are exposed Having been at a company that tried this: The number of poorly-behaved or outright abusive clients is a huge problem. Having a client become popular with a small group of people and then receive some update that turned it into a DDoS machine because someone made a mistake in a loop or forgot to sleep after an error was a frequent occurrence. The secondary problem is that when it breaks, the customers blame the company providing the service, not the team providing the client. The volume of support requests due to third party clients became unbearable. These days there’s also a problem of scraping and botting. The more open the API, the more abuse you get. You can’t have security through obscurity be your only protection, but having a closed API makes a huge difference even though the bad actors can technically constantly reverse engineer it if they really want. In practice, they get tired and can’t keep up. I doubt this will be a popular anecdote on HN, but after walking the walk I understand why this idealistic concept is much harder in reality.
- shivasaxena 1y ago
  Thanks for your comment and for sharing your experience. > Having been at a company that tried this: The number of poorly-behaved or outright abusive clients is a huge problem. Having a client become popular with a small group of people and then receive some update that turned it into a DDoS machine because someone made a mistake in a loop or forgot to sleep after an error was a frequent occurrence. Ok, but this could be easily solved by having rate limits on api? > The secondary problem is that when it breaks, the customers blame the company providing the service, not the team providing the client. The volume of support requests due to third party clients became unbearable. I would say this is subjective/arguable in general.
  - afiori 1y ago
    There is no limit that avoid both false nevative and false postives
  - qcnguy 1y ago
    It's what happens, it's almost by definition not subjective. The world is full of people geeky enough to use third party clients but not geeky enough to understand the nuances of service evolution. Their reasoning goes like this: yesterday it worked, today it doesn't. I didn't change my client, so it must have been the service that changed. Therefore, it's the service's fault. This type of reasoning is typically reinforced by the third party app developers themselves, who will tweet "XXX broke their APIs today, really sorry, working hard to get you an update that works around their $@!%#! engineering" and other stuff that not-so-subtly encourages people to blame the service. Also, don't discount the abuse aspect. Closing clients and out-iterating them is a proven strategy for winning the abuse war, and as all users care about abuse but very few care about third party clients, losing the latter to please the rest of the user base is an easy decision to make.
BrenBarn 1y ago
> The answer is to this question is always: it is too niche a product feature for a giant corporation to prioritize. The answer is even shorter: money. Our society prioritizes "giant corporation makes money" over good things happening.
GoblinSlayer 1y ago
Electron apps solve the sync problem by redirecting to main site for full UI. Also there's not much need for UI in this case, because the user is not supposed to change or see whitelist, filtering can be implemented on server side.
ygritte 1y ago
How can it be niche if it would be front and center for every responsible parent?
- GoblinSlayer 1y ago
  >responsible parent >responsible Yeah, that's niche.
  - ygritte 1y ago
    Fuck.
dpassens 1y ago
> This product would require constant work to keep in sync as UIs and features change. But why does the UI need to change? Nobody would miss having to relearn it every couple of months.
pmarreck 1y ago
No, that feature doesn't exist. My son is 4 and I looked. You can approve individual videos, but to my knowledge you can't whitelist channels for your kid. You can subscribe to a bunch of channels, and that will tend to make your kids' feed get steered in that direction, but random outliers are always a possibility. Which as a parent of a toddler is absolutely mind-numbing. Which means that every so often he will always end up encountering either some foreign-language content (borderline appropriate if I want him to learn his native tongue first) or something with violence, etc. that is not at all appropriate, or something like some kid playing some dumb but colorful game (non-mind-enriching, pure dopamine garbage) from some rando channel. PLUS, they seem to be abandoning YouTube Kids in order to merge its functionality into the main YouTube app, and yet... Like, does ANYONE at Google/Alphabet/whatever actually have fucking kids?!?!?! I paid for family YouTube just so my kid (and myself) wouldn't be forced to watch ads. All they'd have to do here is let me ban FUCKING shorts (don't get me started... note that they intentionally made this extremely difficult to impossible, good luck blocking it at the router level), and whitelist some channels, and they'd instantly make every parent 100% happier with YouTube! And no, I'm sorry but this would NOT be hard to build/maintain. Hell, they can hire me to build it out, I'm LFW!

ndriscoll 1y ago

Your second paragraph is kind of funny as a solution to your first, but was nonetheless what I was going to suggest: since it would require too much work for a multi-trillion dollar company to be cable of building, you can instead rely on hobbyists and use yt-dlp and jellyfin to make your own whitelisted youtube. The option (or at least documentation) does not seem to be there for computers. Is it only on mobile devices?

PoignardAzur 1y ago

The PS kind of undermines the rest of your point.

frereubu 1y ago

That feature isn't what I think the parent comment is asking for. What you've linked to is specifically YouTube Kids, and it's groups of channels whitelisted by the YouTube team. What I think the parent comment is asking for, and I want too, is full availability of all YouTube channels, but the ability to block everything except whitelisted channels. I agree, it's too niche a product. But I often think that people whose response to complaints about kids' access to inappropriate content is "you need to parent your kids" is fine, but I need the tools to do that! A tool like this would be a godsend.

shkkmo 1y ago
> I agree, it's too niche a product I don't think it is that niche. I think lots of people would take advantage of it not just for their kids, but themselves. The problem is that it is a feature that makes YouTube less "sticky" and thus there is economic incentive against implementing it due to lack of competition in that area. (Their competitors also want to maximize stickiness.)
modeless 1y ago
Why is everyone saying this doesn't exist? It's right there on the linked page! It's called "Approved Content Only" and I assure you that it exists, it's a real feature, it works just like you want, I use it myself, my kids watch Primitive Technology and Smarter Every Day and they can't watch videos I don't whitelist. It does have a few issues. It's not reliable in showing everything you allow, sometimes things are missing for no reason, other times it will prevent you from whitelisting a video because it contains product placement (why does Google get to decide that for me? I'm an adult and can choose what level of product placement is acceptable for my kids). But it is a true whitelist mode and won't show other videos, just as requested.
- fhub 1y ago
  YouTube Documentation on this feature - https://support.google.com/youtubekids/answer/6172308?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid#zippy=%2Capproved-content-only https://support.google.com/youtubekids/answer/6172308?hl=en&... The embedded walkthrough video on how to set it up is really quite good.
- lstamour 1y ago
  Edit: I just noticed the list of supported countries (in my link below) includes Canada but excludes the French-speaking province of Quebec. It seems a bit spiteful to go so far as to ensure a service can be legally delivered in such a long list of countries and then exclude Quebec. Hm, I was about to use Puerto Rico as an example, but it’s not in the list as well, but perhaps it’s considered part of the United States here. Now back to the comment I’d written at first: It does seem to be, in typical large corporation fashion, a bit too complicated to set up. For example, there are three ways to add parental supervision, including a mode where you can transition from YouTube Kids to the full YouTube experience while still preserving those controls until a child is 13: https://support.google.com/youtubekids/answer/10495678?sjid=5512051554599945065-NA#zippy=%2Chow-youtube-supervised-experiences-work https://support.google.com/youtubekids/answer/10495678?sjid=... That said, all it would take is an open web browser and a not signed in YouTube account for kids to bypass these controls. But I suppose that’s not actually the point - the point of channel filtering is to reduce the harm recommendation engines and spammy content might have. The gotcha is that recommendation engines are everywhere now, spammy content is pervasive, and even AI responses in Google are arguably now a source of noise to be filtered. I will say, however, it’s great to have an ad-free family plan for YouTube. I wish you could add more accounts to it, but for now I’m getting by with YouTube brand (sub-)accounts to create separate lists of subscriptions, histories and recommendations while still staying ad-free in apps. And tools adults might find useful, I expect kids and teens would find useful too - for example, browser extensions to customize your YouTube experience. As long as we have an open web for e.g. YouTube, we do have independent options, if geeky enough to pursue them. :)

bamboozled 1y ago

Of course if it made a bunch of money it would be a top priority though.

ElCapitanMarkla 1y ago
Yeah its a weird one, the lack of this feature is whats making me stop giving them money and I wonder how many other families are in the same boat.

theelous3 1y ago

You heard it here first folks - children are too niche now. 2ish billion people, well known for their indirect spending power, are not worth figuring out a simple whitelist system for.

GoblinSlayer 1y ago
It's parenting that is niche. It's outsourced to Google.

natnatenathan 1y ago

I don’t think this is too niche of a feature. Instead, the issue is that this would decrease the engagement (and profitability) for any customer using it, so they have a disincentive to building it. Same reason that Facebook removed features that helped customers narrow their feeds down to just favorite friends and family.

Aurornis 1y ago

> We should be allowed to create and use whatever UI we want for the public endpoints that are exposed Having been at a company that tried this: The number of poorly-behaved or outright abusive clients is a huge problem. Having a client become popular with a small group of people and then receive some update that turned it into a DDoS machine because someone made a mistake in a loop or forgot to sleep after an error was a frequent occurrence. The secondary problem is that when it breaks, the customers blame the company providing the service, not the team providing the client. The volume of support requests due to third party clients became unbearable. These days there’s also a problem of scraping and botting. The more open the API, the more abuse you get. You can’t have security through obscurity be your only protection, but having a closed API makes a huge difference even though the bad actors can technically constantly reverse engineer it if they really want. In practice, they get tired and can’t keep up. I doubt this will be a popular anecdote on HN, but after walking the walk I understand why this idealistic concept is much harder in reality.

shivasaxena 1y ago
Thanks for your comment and for sharing your experience. > Having been at a company that tried this: The number of poorly-behaved or outright abusive clients is a huge problem. Having a client become popular with a small group of people and then receive some update that turned it into a DDoS machine because someone made a mistake in a loop or forgot to sleep after an error was a frequent occurrence. Ok, but this could be easily solved by having rate limits on api? > The secondary problem is that when it breaks, the customers blame the company providing the service, not the team providing the client. The volume of support requests due to third party clients became unbearable. I would say this is subjective/arguable in general.
- afiori 1y ago
  There is no limit that avoid both false nevative and false postives
- qcnguy 1y ago
  It's what happens, it's almost by definition not subjective. The world is full of people geeky enough to use third party clients but not geeky enough to understand the nuances of service evolution. Their reasoning goes like this: yesterday it worked, today it doesn't. I didn't change my client, so it must have been the service that changed. Therefore, it's the service's fault. This type of reasoning is typically reinforced by the third party app developers themselves, who will tweet "XXX broke their APIs today, really sorry, working hard to get you an update that works around their $@!%#! engineering" and other stuff that not-so-subtly encourages people to blame the service. Also, don't discount the abuse aspect. Closing clients and out-iterating them is a proven strategy for winning the abuse war, and as all users care about abuse but very few care about third party clients, losing the latter to please the rest of the user base is an easy decision to make.

BrenBarn 1y ago

> The answer is to this question is always: it is too niche a product feature for a giant corporation to prioritize. The answer is even shorter: money. Our society prioritizes "giant corporation makes money" over good things happening.

GoblinSlayer 1y ago

Electron apps solve the sync problem by redirecting to main site for full UI. Also there's not much need for UI in this case, because the user is not supposed to change or see whitelist, filtering can be implemented on server side.

ygritte 1y ago

How can it be niche if it would be front and center for every responsible parent?

GoblinSlayer 1y ago
>responsible parent >responsible Yeah, that's niche.
- ygritte 1y ago
  Fuck.

dpassens 1y ago

> This product would require constant work to keep in sync as UIs and features change. But why does the UI need to change? Nobody would miss having to relearn it every couple of months.

pmarreck 1y ago

No, that feature doesn't exist. My son is 4 and I looked. You can approve individual videos, but to my knowledge you can't whitelist channels for your kid. You can subscribe to a bunch of channels, and that will tend to make your kids' feed get steered in that direction, but random outliers are always a possibility. Which as a parent of a toddler is absolutely mind-numbing. Which means that every so often he will always end up encountering either some foreign-language content (borderline appropriate if I want him to learn his native tongue first) or something with violence, etc. that is not at all appropriate, or something like some kid playing some dumb but colorful game (non-mind-enriching, pure dopamine garbage) from some rando channel. PLUS, they seem to be abandoning YouTube Kids in order to merge its functionality into the main YouTube app, and yet... Like, does ANYONE at Google/Alphabet/whatever actually have fucking kids?!?!?! I paid for family YouTube just so my kid (and myself) wouldn't be forced to watch ads. All they'd have to do here is let me ban FUCKING shorts (don't get me started... note that they intentionally made this extremely difficult to impossible, good luck blocking it at the router level), and whitelist some channels, and they'd instantly make every parent 100% happier with YouTube! And no, I'm sorry but this would NOT be hard to build/maintain. Hell, they can hire me to build it out, I'm LFW!