[ericthor]

I would say they the author dragged the readers into the dark depths of YouTube, but the billions of views on these videos belay that metaphor.

The ending is as pointed as it can be. It's hard to define what the solution is and how to go about dividing up responsibility.

Technology companies create these relatively neutral platforms which then grow and are gamed. In this case these videos are vying for mass attention from children which is subsequently monetized. They optimize, tweak, and mass produce their only paying regard to amount of attention they can secure. Taste, morals, exploitation of children, and everything else are meaningless so long as their videos receive an adequate number of views.

They did a good job of extrapolating this issue to other problem areas such a radical left/right videos or conspiracy videos. Here is an example of this issue in the form of Google results from yesterdays mass-shooting https://twitter.com/justinhendrix/status/927335154707828736

I think the lion's share of responsibility lies with the technology companies and governments. I'm hesitant to have government involved in their inability to keep pace or understand new and developing technologies. It's also hard to define how to solve this problem without censoring speech or disenfranchising it. It's hard for me to define what is the absolute issue and what to call it.

A "seemingly neutral platform" can become corrupted or systematically abused. You constantly need to account for bad actors and gray actors.

[Cacti]

Re: billions of views:

"Once again, the view numbers of these videos must be taken under serious advisement. A huge number of these videos are essentially created by bots and viewed by bots, and even commented on by bots. "

[ericthor]

That is an important caveat and it's hard to accurately pin down since there is no idea of how many of these views are generated by users or by bots.

For the real view number of billions to be wrong bots need to account for over 90% of the views if we're only considering the two channels the article referenced.

That bot percentage would have to be much higher if you factor in other channels of similar veins. https://socialblade.com/youtube/top/500/mostviewed

Though you also have to factor in how many channels are just run of the mill content egg opening content vs more disturbing children's entertainment.

[lovich]

Where are you getting 90% from? There are only a little over 7 billion people on the planet and a little less than half of those have internet connection last I saw. If something got billions of view either the entire internet population watched it, or a smaller group watched it many many times. Sure some things are viral, but what are the odds that they have near 100% penetration or that everyone who sees it just plays it on repeat?

[c22]

My two year old daughter has watched "Let It Go" 12 times so far today and it's only a little after noon. I could very much see the human target audience of this content watching it on repeat.

[ericthor]

Little Baby Bum 13 billion + Blu Toys Surprise Brinquedos & Juegos 6 billion views = 19 billion views. If 90% of those views are from bots that still leaves about 2 billion views from actual people. Not saying there are billions of people watching these videos. I'm saying that even if the vast majority of the views were from bots that still leaves billions of actual views. I would agree lots of folks would play the videos on repeat. The actual number of folks/children in this sort of video matrix would be even trickier to determine.

[lowmagnet]

When I worked in newspaper web tech, I did an analysis of our front end traffic, grouped by IP ranges, user agent claims, and so on. I found that the majority of our bandwidth was spiders and bots. The majority of our hits were also robots. I couldn't do anything about that without big spending with our cache vendor to prevent it.

[nasmorn]

I have seen them pop up on YouTube and it was the last time I ever let my children use it.

[breatheoften]

Honestly — I think there is an easy solution. Require platform vendors use “trusted human” curation for videos shown to children below a certain age.

To avoid having to make a single decision about who constitutes a “trusted human” — democratize the curation process to allow arbitrary numbers of groups of humans to exist where each group can supply only one “kid approved yes/no” recommendation per video.

Then deal with the proliferation and ranking of moderation groups by making each parent manually select the set of agencies which are allowed to mark a video as child viewable. Audit the practices of the most popular agencies to ensure they consist of humans making decisions based on some human notion of child interest.

If there are insufficient numbers of moderation groups, threaten regulation or introduce regulation and provide funding for moderation non profit organizations.

This kind of setup would severely fragment the market for gaming kid psychology and likely ensure insufficient profit motive for it to continue at a meaningful scale.

[peterchon]

I think the responsibility should lie with whose ever is making money off it.

[jod67]

The solution is simple - remove the public view counts. People (producers and consumers) are unnecessarily over influenced by it. There is a huge global population of semi literate people on the net today that have no concept of how to parse all the information they are seeing. The numbers are their guide posts. They learn quickly how to pander because the waste majority of content is pandering to the lowest common denominator.

[quadrangle]

That's not a solution as long as "popular" videos still get higher ranking in searches.