[keyle]

My toddler watches shows on there.

It's been good to teach him colours, but it's all very low quality videos with clearly chinese-english influence.

My biggest concern is not the content of those, it's the automatic skip after the episode is over, to "whatever" youtube feels right afterwards, and also the ads being played between episodes, some are about gaming, but violent, and a toddler takes everything he sees as "real".

[saudioger]

That's my experience, and why I pulled the plug on it. Unless you're on top of your kid the entire time, it's incredibly difficult to keep an eye on that. YouTube is designed to just shove as much content in front of your face as possible, quality, content, age-appropriateness, be damned.

[ALittleLight]

I've read this on hackernews a few times and have experienced some objectionable "kids" content on YouTube myself. Plus, there's a ton of mindless stuff like opening toys or kinder eggs.

I wonder if there's some kind of startup here. A service that whitelists YouTube content and curates the list. There could be an app you sign into before you hand it off to the child, it permits only whitelisted YouTube videos to be played. Possibly the videos are separated into tiers - educational, entertainment, prosocial. Then, you come up with a mix that you want to expose your child to for auto play - e.g. 40, 20, 40. Content could also be flagged for themes that are potentially undesirable - death, sex, religion, etc.

Pay 15-20 dollars an hour for people to watch and annotate videos. Get the same video to go through the process two or three times to catch potential errors. Your evaluators can easily watch content at 2x speed and not miss much. How much does processing an hour's worth of YouTube video cost? 60 dollars?

Invest a hundred grand, whitelist a thousand hours of YouTube content (assuming you reject half), build a simple mobile app to play your whitelisted YouTube videos, sign people up for 5 dollars a month and you can use the proceeds to keep growing your whitelist.

[nkrisc]

Why reinvent the wheel? There's lots of great, timeless kids content, like Sesame Street. There's tons of episodes spanning decades. The only problem to solve is getting it all in one conveniently accessed place.

[vidarh]

A lot of the DVD collections of Sesame Street now has warnings that they're for adults due to content that they consider dated and not suitable for small children any more... I don't know how much I agree with that, but a lot of content that seems 'timeless' to people who grew up with it will seem wildly out of place to younger people.

[nkrisc]

That's interesting, I had no idea. Nor can I possibly think of anything that might serve as an example of "adult" on Sesame Street. Though I watched it mostly in the early 90s so maybe some of the older stuff is what's at "fault" here? Perhaps some of the themes might seem inappropriate for children if you're living in a homogeneous, middle-class suburb or town as many episodes did deal with things that kids growing up in city like New York might encounter.

[vidarh]

The one I have here is from '69-'74, and note that it's still certified "U", it simply starts with a verbal notice that "these early Sesame Street episodes are intended for grownups and may not suit the needs of today's preschool child," so it's a pretty mild warning. Milder than I remembered actually.

I found an article talking about it. It's pretty mild stuff, but an interesting illustration of how what we consider appropriate changes in all kinds of small ways:

> What parent today would want their child to see kids running through a construction site or jumping on an old box spring? Scenes like the ones included on the new DVD would probably not make it into today's program now.

> "We wouldn't have children on the set riding without a bicycle helmet," Rollins Westin says.

> And what's that little girl doing with that man?

> "In the very first episode, Gordon takes a little girl's hand who he's just met on the street, befriends her and takes her into his home to give her ice cream," Rollins Westin said. "That's something we wouldn't do on the show today."

(From https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sesame-street-for-adults-only/ )

[gambiting]

....like what for example?

[abootstrapper]

PBS Kids Video and Games apps.

[mromanuk]

I thought about that, there was an app doing that for iOS called Jellies

[sjg007]

There are apps for this. Most are parent curated.

[kyriakos]

Other than YouTube kids that is owned by Google itself what other apps are there? Can you recommend?

[sjg007]

There's Jellies and a bunch of apps that offer whitelists for Youtube.

[TallGuyShort]

^ This. View it as a teaching tool to make yourself a more effective parent. Don't view it as a babysitter.

[fipple]

Teach him colors with blocks the way every toddler before 2010 learned them. The most valuable skill of the future will be to not compulsively need screens.

[keyle]

I do too of course. He learns colours with food, objects we play with AND TV.

[humanrebar]

I think avoiding bad romantic partners and substance abuse still rank above too much Instagram.

[sp332]

People learn by repetition. Youtube is great for that.

[LeoPanthera]

You can turn off autoplay on the top right of any video page, but it's a local cookie and not stored in your account, so you have to do it separately on every device and, in my experience, does seem to have a habit of randomly turning itself back on again.

[ivanhoe]

Also kids have tendency to just click randomly anywhere and figure out all the buttons in no time, so you can't really rely on GUI to stop them. Mine actually learned letters by searching the youtube for his favorite cartoon characters. At first he bugged me to do it for him, but very quickly he figured out what I'm doing and that he can look at the title of the current video and enter the same letters into the search to get more videos - but since he had no idea what those letters mean he'd often get some totally unrelated and non-kids results... toddlers are just unstoppable, resistance is futile :)

[ConceptJunkie]

We discovered by accident how easy it is for kids to stumble into bad things.

We had a computer set up with Windows 98 for the kids to play games (this was a long time ago...). The computer was in the family room so we could always see what was going on, and the kids really did stick to playing games and other benign activities.

One day I watched my youngest to see what he was doing as he sat down to use the computer. He was about 5 or 6 at the time, and he would open up a web browser and type "sonic" to search for Sonic the Hedgehog pictures. At the time, at least, this was the kinds of things he would find, and I'm not aware of the kids stumbling into anything awful. But another term they used often was "chao" for the little creatures that you care for in the Sonic Adventure games, and since that can also be a name, other material would eventually come up as well.

We quickly realized that this had the potential to lead them into bad territory. It was an eye-opening experience. Seeing what's going on on YouTube these days is whole new level of scary.

[keyle]

Can you do that on a PS4 though?