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by 77ko 2991 days ago
The safest way to use YouTube with kids is to download videos offline using youtube-dl or one of its front ends and use an app like VLC to play them.

Kids shouldn't be accessing YouTube directly. It really is bad. A simple example: looking for videos for a school women's history day thingamajig, YouTube kept recommending outright twisted videos which were sort of women's history but algorithmically generated and just plain wrong.

The other interesting thing I found with YouTube is that it's very hard to find good parent curated playlists. The bad stuff overwhelms the good.

2 comments

Children bellow 10 should not have access to internet without supervision IMO.
We’re visiting some friends in Australia and almost everyone has an ipad per kid with unrestricted YouTube access.

They feel kids keep themselves entertained with iPads and games. Some of them have glasses at a young age since they look at the iPad so closely.

I’m legit worried for the next generation of kids who grow up on YouTube consuming endless amounts of ads and crappy entertainment.

Add that to the fact that an iPad is a very poor creative device and mostly a consuming device. I learnt programming at a young age because I had a proper keyboard and programming was mildly entertaining. Flash and actionscript were my canvas of endless creativity in holidays.

It’s almost impossible to program anything relatively complex on an iPad.

For the parents of HN, how do you ensure your kids use tech appropriately and don’t develop mindless addiction to it?

> I’m legit worried for the next generation of kids who grow up on YouTube consuming endless amounts of ads and crappy entertainment.

That's what we grew up on, too. I was hoping that streaming video would let me cut ads out of my kids' lives, but... they just changed form.

I do agree with this but getting that curation tonwork sounds - interesting

it's almost something i could use the social graph to do ...