[weinzierl]

I can easily block TikTok because it has little informational value. Youtube on the other hand is a serious and important learning resource and I would not want to block it for my kid.

At the same time, offering Youtube Shorts in the same service under the same domain is like "cabinet next to their bed with cigarettes, snickers bars, and painkiller pills" as a sibling comment aptly put it.

[lawn]

I use a combination of:

- https://letsblock.it/ and Ublock Origin

- The Unhook plugin for Firefox

- Blocking channels on my YouTube account when I see something inappropriate

- Adguard Home also blocks certain channels

to try to moderate the YouTube content for my kids. It's not perfect, but it does get rid of a lot of garbage (like YouTube Shorts).

[HlessClaudesman]

My 6 year olds class were given a chromebook with youtube installed just as an app, zero filtering, zero adimn controls from our end.

It's like no one in the loop: teachers, IT providers, local / government procurement, big tech companies, etc thought to ask themselves if it was a good idea for kids to roam unrestricted on a site where anyone can post anything.

Not to mention the constant barrage of video advertising in the classroom.

Bonkers.

[bbor]

I wonder if there’s a chrome/FF extension to block shorts… just delete the whole element as soon as it hits the DOM. If not, someone please make one! I guess this could just be a tampermonkey script, even…

It blows my mind that they’re willing to pollute their brand and value for such a clearly awful, addictive feature. So short sighted. If anyone here is still a Google employee, I implore you: leave. Your talents could be used so much better when directed by people who are a little less greedy

[galdosdi]

I used to work there and this kind of thing is why I left. Google lost their moral compass years ago. The greed I saw from top to bottom was baffling. People earning $200k already, who spent all their time figuring out how to get the next promotion (and thus inventing stupid unnecessary and uninteresting projects) rather than trying to find actually fulfilling-to-the-employee or useful-to-the-enterprise-or-the-user work.

You already make a ton of money and have a ton of status, why not enjoy it and find work that is actually fulfilling to you and/or useful to the user and/or failing that at least useful to the shareholders if nothing else. But no, they were conditioned to seek achievement blindly and without any moral or other introspection.

I could not stand it. I spent years regretting not holding my nose longer for the sake of being able to buy a house and so forth.... but I've made my peace with it. Since then I've had the opportunity to see how harmful Google's attempts to make money are to children (they are the new Joe Camel) and now I no longer have regrets at all. It's one thing to manipulate and exploit adults who should know better, but to target children is just the worst kind of low.

[bbor]

Very interesting perspective, thanks for the insight! Seriously.

I recently quit Google, thus the preachy tone above lol - it’s an emotional topic. Ultimately I wanted to prove to myself that I could cut it as a “big tech” software engineer, but the whole corporate structure and purpose was unbelievably anxiety and shame inducing. Probably an overreaction but hey, us engineers are a fragile bunch…

I was in ads, so it was the front line of the insanity: thousands of truly kind, smart people were pampered in brand new Science-Fiction buildings on NASA Ames land (kagi “Google Bayview Campus”) with the finest food, gyms, tech, transportation, everything. They talked all day about modernizing ads and pleasing customers and powering the Free and Open Internet, and never about politics. And promotions, as you said. Meanwhile:

- we were surrounded by an army of underpaid contract workers because the engineers refuse to collectively organize with them,

- desperate pleas from organizations I trust to stop [LATEST_GOOGLE_3PC_REPLACEMENT_PROPOSAL] because it would destroy the internet were hitting the top of hacker news every few weeks,

- lawsuits are landing from the DoJ for illegal business practices with quite shocking screenshots of internal slides, and

- The legal manipulation culture runs so deep that employees get regular training on why they need to tag everything as “attorney client communications” even if there’s no attorneys involved (something tells me that “”loophole”” isn’t gonna last long).

Such a weird, jarring experience. I’m still living off Google savings so haven’t quite hit the “miss the paycheck” stage for real, not looking forward to that! Hopefully someone finds this emotional rant illuminative.

[popcalc]

https://unhook.app/

[2024user]

Thanks for sharing. I wish this could hide all Shorts though. They still show in search and on the subscription pages though

[dimask]

YOU SAVED ME

[nalinidash]

You should try https://newpipe.net/