Please add YouTube to the list. I'm watching my kids' brains slowly melt as they go from YouTube short to YouTube short like little crack addicts trying to get their next fix. Throw in a bunch of AI generated bottom of the barrel swill and I'm on the verge of blocking YouTube entirely yet again. I blocked YouTube for years because of all the garbage child targeted auto generated videos that were flooding the platform. It's very frustrating because there is a lot of good content that I would like them to continue to have easy access to, but the cost of entry is way too high.
I took me a while but I finally figured this out. I think the difficulty is a dark ui pattern that hides the control behind an age selection. In the youtube kids admin settings, there's a part where you select your kids age 0-4, 4-9 etc...
My kid is 4 so I never really looked at the later options but after probably 20 times on that screen, I noticed at the end (where my eyes glossed over the higher ages) there's something along the lines of "control content yourself".
Once I selected it, I could whitelist channels and completely disable search and recommendations. This means the youtube kids app _only_ shows what I say it can.
If I want to give him access to something like "smarter every day" or a specific video that's not on youtube kids, I can click share from my account and share with "kids"
We've still pretty much banned youtube on all devices but, like you said, there's a lot of valuable stuff and I really miss the time when he would get in to "tornadoes" or "helicopters" or some other topic and we could watch a bunch of educational videos without being flooded with trash toy videos and subversive attention leeching ads.
This at least opens the door back up for some of that good content without the garbage.
I considered doing the same but in the end decided I don’t want to use a platform I have to fight against, while still letting them build brand recognition to my kid.
So I downloaded a bunch of the videos on our desktop and blocked the site. Works for my 3.5 year old, not sure the plan when they outgrow it.
>I considered doing the same but in the end decided I don’t want to use a platform I have to fight against, while still letting them build brand recognition to my kid.
>So I downloaded a bunch of the videos on our desktop and blocked the site.
Downloading videos from youtube and blocking the site seems more like fighting against the platform (and more work) than turning on a whitelist mode. Seems like the end result is the same but with more work.
I did the same and it’s great. At some point normal boredom kicks in and no bad habits are formed. I realized a while ago that many kids are primed early throug so many channels, it’s beyond despicable. At this point a big share of blame needs to fall on the parents turning a bling eye to it all.
It's practically fucking impossible to have a normal amount of tech in the house and keep it under control, while also keeping things not-annoying for the adults. It's so much work, all because the tech is bad at providing simple and powerful solutions.
Everything lacks the basics, and nothing reads system-level e.g. content rating restrictions, it's all per-service and per-device and it's maddening.
Worse, the single most-useful parental control possible, an allow-list, is often absent from TV interfaces and steaming services. Allow-list just the PBS app on AppleTV? Impossible, there is no way to do a case-by-case allow list. Allow-list only the handful of non-brain-rot children's shows on Netflix? Nah, it's just by age rating. Et c.
[EDIT] Our solution, after years and years of banging our heads against this? App-installation blocked everywhere, no YouTube on anything, all streaming services cancelled because they're such a pain in the ass, and the kids have a large curated set of pirated content served by Jellyfin that they can watch when they get TV time, including some things pulled from YouTube by yt-dlp. If we want to one-off stream something for the kids outside of that set of content, we "cast" it from a parent's device.
The non-piracy alternative would be to go back to discs for everything, I guess.
Standard ways of interacting with "modern" media services are just awful, if you're a parent. They're so bad that it's easiest to simply abandon them.
I pretty much subscribe to your list, with the further caveat the router I got for Comcast service has a USBA network drive port that can run a 64GB thumbstick of content. A single piece of content can serve 5 devices this way before you start seeing buffering issues. Great for car trips.
A family unit should own all accounts in the family, parents should be able to reset any password to any owned account from a central dashboard without hunting down email links and 2factor. I don't want to set up a management account for each service. I want all any services management options exposed by api and displayed in my central dashboard. Of my choice.
Would it help to do it with a kid on your lap, or otherwise actively involved? Perhaps you could put a laptop on the floor and make a game of it, and certainly in our line there's never any shortage of complicated words that can be said in funny ways.
I don't know. I didn't ever have kids, but if I don't mind letting a $3k laptop wear a few battle scars just for it participating in the life of a photographer, I have to suppose getting a little dinged up to help make a child smile must be at least as honorable.
For that matter, I recall a ferret - now long since gone to her reward, of course, this was decades ago - jumping on an Esc key just in time to cancel a Windows 2000 install, and that was funny enough to laugh about for years. How much more so with a cheerful, clever baby primate? Don't mind me, though. Just getting a little maudlin in my old age.
Children still need to be able to explore the world themselves, I would say most of the time kids spend above 3yo should be without a parent facilitating their activities.
Also, adults have lots of responsibilities other than making sure children are playing constructively. Requiring over-the-shoulder collaboration for all online activity isn't realistic, especially when you have more than one child per parent.
Banning youtube has been a no-brainer for me. The loss of the "smart" shows is a cost well worth reducing attention addiction.
> I would say most of the time kids spend above 3yo should be without a parent facilitating their activities.
3 to 4 year olds are still putting things in their mouth that they shouldn’t be.
In a village raises the kid scenario, there would be older kids and neighbors looking after the kid, presumably with good intentions since they are neighbors.
But in a world (the internet) where anyone from around the world can communicate any of their idea to everyone instantaneously, the village is no longer raising the kid, so village rules don’t apply.
More to add, but I would like to note first that I suggested making a game of configuring an MDM profile (indeed natively miserable! Why else suggest inviting along a whole kid to try to make it tolerable, lol) and never suggested that manual filtering must be synchronous filtering.
Download tools and selfhosted video streaming tools exist for YT content. I run them myself. I learned to set them up based on a couple of HN commenters' passing mentions that it was easier than I had made it out to be, by following search terms from their comments, and by screwing around breaking things till they quit falling apart on me.
In other words, old-fashioned sysadmin work, of the kind I loudly hate and quietly love to. In aggregate, it took about two days' (ie ca 16h though not as closely tracked as if billing ofc) work, and though my notes are aides-memoires in no fit state for publication, I would be happy to share them privately and save you some of that time.
(This offer stands for any reader, and my email is in my profile here; to see those, click on the name above this or any comment. My fifty-year-old, brilliant but determinedly nontechnical, beloved catty bitch of an ex-boyfriend had much derision for the content of my library, but none for the quality of service. I confide you won't disappoint your family too badly, either.)
eta: What I wanted to add is this, a short and I hope not too dull piece which I wrote now almost a decade ago. Please excuse the state you find it in; my old website broke ages ago and this needs a rewrite anyway for that the man proved far more vile than I yet knew to paint him. But I think it still can stand as a hint of my real feelings on these matters, which might surprise you somewhat. https://web.archive.org/web/20220125083230/https://aaron-m.c...
16 hours is like 2-3 weeks of free time for children of young parents.
I cannot really explain to a non-parent how different the life of a parent is. We don't have the ability to sit down and do 16 hours of time in a project in 2 days.
This is why parents and especially young parents need a community.
It's nothing for example I would shy away from administering for my neighborhood, tenant per family or account per family or whatever people want in each their own case - in the same sense we share other resources as a community, from a drop cord to a car or a bedroom. Indeed I have no kids of my own in large part because I was terrified I'd be homeless by 50, if I did not focus on building the kinds of skills that make this something I can do in a couple days without mostly at any time putting in a lot of serious effort - this was second-screen stuff I did mostly in bed with a cup of one or another of the embarrassing milk-and-coffee concoctions I like.
I never knew what I would miss that way, focusing on building a reliably remunerative career instead of fostering any other kind of social connection, until too damn late. I don't need to hear (and won't receive well) anything like "it's never too late;" no one else here is competent to speak to my personal regrets, and I speak of this one here only so I can cite it as one motivation among many to try to do something with that so hard-earned skill that makes a difference for folks whose lives are embedded among those of others in just that way I never learned the hang of. What else could I do that's worth more?
No one is asking me to do that for my community, not at the moment. I don't know if anyone else here would think of it; one major reason I bought here is because I've lived here enough years to know it is mostly unattractive to tech people and fast becoming more so. That's good; no monoculture is healthy and that one metastasizes.
So sure. In theory I could build something like a Helm chart or deployable Compose file, or some such awful useless other shit that no one with a life could ever make heads nor tails of. Those are all things I wasted too much of my one and only mortal life learning how to do, but there are no tools we make that a human can use so just that alone doesn't work. So then I'd have to turn it into a business, and pitch to YC just so I could say they rejected me, and eventually Alphabet would sue me into my next incarnation for threatening one Ads PM's metrics bonus best case, and all I ever really wanted to do was help the overworked parents around me make their kids happy in a way that was safe.
To hell with all that, it's for the chumps here whom I grant are in the majority but do not mistake me for one of them. I said before if you want my notes you can email me and I'll share them, Docker Compose file and all; if you don't have time to act on them then you can try to find a friend or family member or neighbor who does, if you still remember how to speak to any such person. Or trade someone for babysitting so you do have the time. Or let your kids learn something about what Daddy does all day! And if you're embarrassed of that, well, maybe you should be. Unless you know some grave occult evil of Jellyfin or yt-dlp, I don't see why you'd feel that way, though.
Any of those you're welcome to by me, or whatever else you like. Not my problem, but for whatever you find it to be worth, I would say any or all of them seems a better use of your precious time than to waste more of it whining to me.
Unless you anticipate your child growing up to live in a world with no internet, it doesn't make much sense to raise them with no internet. Parentally-curated information sources seems like a more than fine approach to that.
Kids grow up in a world full of things that are not appropriate at a young age, but are perfectly fine later in life.
Personally, I worry about the mental models formed at an early age, and how distorting technology can be relative to the real world. It layers abstraction on top of abstraction on top of abstraction at a time when kids are trying to make sense of reality for the first time and establishing internal models that will stay with them into adulthood.
Sure, some carefully curated content may be fine, but I think there’s a deeper question to be asked about the impact of current technology on young brains. Adults certainly haven’t adjusted very well. The truth is, we don’t really know how harmful it is. Maybe we’ll survive the next 100 years to find out.
There's also what it's taking the place of. Even if it's not directly harmful, and I think that's one hugeeee if, it's a massive timesink that they would otherwise spent doing other things. And it's difficult to imagine anything that could be worse except maybe just sitting in front of the TV. Though even there, TV has the benefit of being much more boring, so the kid may be more inclined to voluntarily seek other entertainment; so perhaps even TV isn't worse.
There's more excellent children's content out there than they could ever watch in a lifetime. I mean videos, books, toys, games, etc. Why would you even need to give them access to the internet until they're 12 or 14 or 16 years old? You just need to curate the good content yourself (hard, time consuming), and that's it.
I was allowed to try sips of alcohol as a young child (not that young, though). I think knowing what alcohol tastes like is a pretty useful thing to know, for example to detect a spiked drink.
Oh please, kids will detect alcohol as a foreign substance and will hate it, nobody has to teach them that. And spiked drinks are usually alcohol based drinks spiked with other substances. Good luck detecting that!!
Not sure why you get downvoted without any arguments but to add support for your position, I had a similar experience growing up.
I didn’t want to drink before high school gatherings where there was peer pressure and I stopped shortly after that.
I see so many first-world westerners cringe at the idea of letting your child have freedom and make mistakes on their own. Tracking, parental controls everywhere, neighbors snitching when your child is out and about exploring the world, etc, etc.
Why? My generation only got access to the internet in high school. I got my first smartphone in my mid twenties. Yet I'm able to navigate the modern world just fine.
This, as someone without kids, I am SHOCKED by how many people are like... "obviously my 2 year old just watches the videos I want them to watch" as if they deserve a pat on the back. Why do these young children need screens?? Parents need to take a step back and question what has been normalized.
Skills compound, so the logic of I didn’t do x until age y, and I was still competitive, doesn’t mean that your kid will be competitive with their peers if they wait until the same age, assuming others are not.
Not that it means 2 year olds should run around the internet with unfettered access, but just that the aforementioned logic is not sound.
There is also benefit to being culturally in sync (not necessarily 1 to 1, but somewhat) with one’s peer group. It can be alienating to be the odd one out.
If it were up to my grandparents, I never would have watched a tv show or movie growing up, or read fiction novels. But while that may have had some benefits, it obviously would have some costs with me being unable to participate in some of my peers’ activities and conversations.
But your generation got access at the same time. You were on the same page as your peers. I don't have kids but my friends that do worry that if they block their kid from social media, their kid won't be able to relate to other kids.
That is a valid concern, but certainly not for pre-schoolers. Once they go to school, peer pressure will gradually kick in and I will need to make compromises. I just wanted to challenge the notion that a 5-year-old should be able to browse the internet, because that is completely ridiculous IMO.
I anticipate my kid needing to live in a word with capitalism, it doesn't ncessarily mean that they need a Mastercard at 4 years old.
Same with many other things: condoms, keys to a car, access to alcohol. There is a time for everything, and at the age of 4, a young human probably has not yet maxxed out on analog stimuli opportunities.
I learned YouTube when it came out in 2006 and I was 21. I've got 19 years of YouTube experience and I'm doing fine. A 21-year old logging into YouTube for the first time in 2025 will probably be doing even better within days. (hours ? minutes ?)
I don't see any reason that a child needs "the internet" (for a value of "the internet" meaning "mass-market apps") to prepare for the future.
Maybe you'd want to give them "Scratch Jr"[0] at some point to give them a head start ; maybe that would make much more sense. But YouTube??
It's more like giving them pocket money than a Mastercard. Given the dwindling number of ways to spend physical cash these days, a prepaid card might actually make sense, if you can monitor its usage.
The only place I would use physical money that doesn't take a form of digital payment, is public transportation (And that one is a matter of time)
While there are many formative opportunities about handling physical money (The sensation of exchanging physical coins is big on a kids mind or knowing they have money and having missplaced it), I can 100% see a case for a card instead, trackable, instant access to emergency money, etc
True, but 4 years old? The reactions that 4 year olds have to videos on screens is like drugs. They are fully hipnotized while watching the video, to the point that its difficult to get them to react to the outside world, and turning off the screen triggers some hard withdrawal reactions. At that age they have 0 tools to control and understand their emotions.
I certainly don't. Occasionally we watch photos or music videos together. There is no unsupervised device usage.
Side note: Just a few days ago I witnessed a mom letting her ~2 year old daughter browse TikTok while shopping groceries. The kid mindlessly swept to the next video every few seconds. I was horrified.
They don't need internet access at that age, don't listen to what other people say (trust your gut on this one)
My first computer was at age 13 and I had internet (broadband, directly) at 20.
Now, obviously both of those are very late for 2025+ and social pressure would be overbearing.
But I think internet usage before, say, 7, is useless. There is so much to learn in the real world before that, anyway (outdoors activities including sports, books, card and boardgames, crafting, ...).
Thankfully I live in a place where they're introducing school bans for smartphones, total ones in primary and during classes in secondary. That should reduce social pressure massively.
If all goes well computers will be introduced around 7, supervised (probably with a locked down Linux and various educational programs, maybe some simple multiplayer games, etc). A dumb phone will probably appear in a few years and a locked down smartphone as late as possible, maybe around 12?
I expect mobile device mastery to happen almost instantly, instilling desktop computer usage is the real target, maybe some programming.
Unsupervised internet usage is a tricky thing. Not sure when exactly, they need to learn about NSFW and especially NSFL. And of course about the crack-manufacturers employed by FAANG.
I gave my kid the Youtube Kids app at that age. I curated the channels he was allowed to watch. It was pretty good. I loved it when my kid quoted random science facts to me that I didn't know.
There's a lot of good stuff on the internet. More information than we had access to as kids. Better to raise them to be responsible, well adjusted humans than to shield them from reality.
Do they need access to that information at the age of 4 though? Almost certainly not. They don't even have basic reading proficiency until age around age 7 or 8. Kindergarten is still mostly focused on phonics.
This is completely wrong. Kids can easily learn to read at age 5. A child who is working on "basic reading proficiency" at 8 is very behind and has not been well-served by the people responsible for raising them.
there must be a ReVanced alternative for web browsers, ever since cracking YouTube I find myself only using it when I want to search for a video because I have disabled the home screen and disabled shorts so I never see the slop
Untrap YouTube + Brave browser + Sponsorblock works quite well, too. I've disabled pretty much every "recommended" section: no in-video cards, no "related videos", nothing except on the main page, so the only way to get "random suggestions from the algorithm is is by intentionally refreshing the home page.
You are completely correct. I'm watching the same thing happen to my little cousin. Please hear me: take the phones and take the computers and take the ipads and make them go play outside. We do this when my cousin visits and it's amazing how quickly he shapes up. But there will be a point at which it's gone too far and the damage is much harder to repair.
You can youtube-dl whatever is good and stick it on a raspberry pi running kodi with no internet. You can get them el cheapo kindles and load them up with all the books they could ever read. You can let them use computers supervised for khanacademy. But please, as the rare adult who's aware of and cares about this issue, don't let your kids fall victim to it.
I completely agree (I use yt-dlp to download curated content onto VLC on the iPad) but in practice, for two working parents and 2+ kids, there are often times where you're too exhausted to do anything but plop them in front of screen so you can take a sanity break / do some chores / prep meals / etc.
I'm fortunate enough to make enough to afford live in child care and a stay at home wife, so we're able to avoid almost all screen time. But the vast majority of families don't have this luxury.
"If you can't responsibly parent, why did you have kids?" This is a very difficult choice for many people. The drive to have kids is fundamental to being human. But it's very expensive and hard.
Yes, yes, yes! There is no way my 5 year old daughter gets access to apps like YouTube. Occassionally, I let her use a drawing app or we watch some photos or music videos together, but that's about it regarding mobile devices. She may watch kids shows/movies on DVD while I'm preparing dinner, but not more than 30 minutes.
She spends her time with toys, puzzles, drawing, painting, crafting, Legos, books, playing outside, playing with friends, playing with her little brother, etc. She can easily do Origamis for one hour. I hope I can sustain this as long as possible. I know it will get harder and harder once she goes to school.
Yes. I don't know at what age it's no longer feasible to restrict apps, but my young kids will never get access to youtube, tiktok, twitch until at least middle school if not high school. Until then, it's slower moving kids shows on Netflix or downloaded high quality content from youtube. And yes, even those are the last resort for when it's raining outside, we've already cycled through all the indoor playgrounds, no one is available for play dates, the toys and puzzles and books have been all cycled through, and both parents are unable to provide supervised play.
Agreed. Doing this from the start yields great results.
Imagine going the other way round is detox, you need to pushback hard since they will fight you on everything.
I think it's worth it even in that case. Though obviously if you never offer that option from the start, you're golden. Toys, puzzles, long form entertainment, etc.
Yes, thank you. It feels like whenever this topic is brought up everyone argues between some false dichotomy of letting the kid binge on algorithmic slop or personally engaging with them in some wholesome activity.
Meanwhile a couple generations of us grew up with two working parents who were happy to just throw us in front of the TV or our lego sets when they needed a break. And that seemed to work fine?
Our daughter is only 2, but she's still absolutely thrilled whenever we let her zone out to some Disney movie on the TV, and has yet to even hold a tablet (that we know of, at least). I know things will probably change for us as she gets older, so I try to withold too much judgement from the parents I see happily plopping a tablet with YouTube in front of their kid. But for now, it's just hard for me to even imagine doing that.
I'm sure many would ask "whats the difference between a movie on TV amd YouTube on a tablet?" Well, tons, just from my personal experience. But her pediatrician, early child development professional we work with, and research I've read, all seem to indicate there's a pretty big difference.
A movie requires following a plot line for a sustained amount of time (like 1.25 hours). YouTube shorts are like 30 second dopamine hits that make a movie seem like a chore. Think about that. What we used to do for fun is considered by some to be exhausting now.
I was really shocked last week when I met two women in their early 20s in a bar. Someone mentioned The Lord of the Rings. I said I'd read it.
They were shocked! They were asking about the film.
And I was probably more shocked when they said they don't read books because they don't have the patience. One said she once read a whole book and it was really good, but hasn't don't so since.
I have to disagree on this. I was not an "easy child", and there were periods where both my parents worked, but they never budged and pacified me. I never had a videogame system and didn't have a cell phone until I got a job and earned the money. TV was almost never permitted; generally when someone was sick or family movie night a few times per year. If they had conceded when my siblings and I were young, if they had established they were weak and could effectively be bullied into giving us our way, that really would have been poor parenting. It's how one winds up with spoiled brats. And I remember vividly during the various tantrums of various children, my mother in particular would tell us, "I refuse to raise a brat."
I know I probably sound incredibly boomer rn, but I see the effects of this in my generation (zoomers) and much, much more sharply with kids. I can't say it's "easier", but from my limited experience handling kids, it's trading a short-term hassle for huge long-term benefit.
The worst is both parents working high pressure jobs that bleed into hours outside of "9-5 on weekdays" and even when not working, the stress is omnipresent. I haven't met a single person who is superhuman enough to work one of these jobs and be an involved parent while not allowing their own mental/physical health to deteriorate. One of us had to become a full-time parent and the size of the paycheck determined who it was. Taboos be damned, it felt like life and death at that point.
You are right but in my experience sticking with clasic entertainment solutions works out better.
And I think people are responding to your dilemma with the very sensible solution of just not having kids. Unless you have a very flexible setup somehow, or lots of cash (or both), yeah, child rearing is nightmare fuel.
This is an area where Americans’ lack of a functioning government is so incredibly glaring and obviously harmful, that I’m amazed nobody seems to mention it. Have regulations become so stigmatized that sensible, widely supported steps to protect the minds of our youth (arguably every bit as important as ensuring their food is not literal poison) isn’t even worth debating? I think this is another symptom of how totalitarian capitalism has been allowed to erode the common sense of society well past the point it can reasonably function.
You can do both. I'm not sure why people have this as an either or thing. My kid (6) plays outside after school and watches youtube or whatever on her tablet. I don't consider it much different than when I did the same and came home to play videogames. I have greatly restricted youtube because I do think it's a blight on my kid's mind, but she has other apps like PBS and hell even good ol' digital junk food silver surfer. Everything in moderation.
In the 1990s, there wasn't a free TV channel for children in Britain. At the right time of day there might be two choices, later only one, then nothing.
It was not unusual not to want to watch what was available, and have to do something else.
I think this is a huge difference compared to modern video media.
To some extent I feel the same about video games too.
I watch my ~9 year old Nephew play games on his Switch and he swaps between games every ~5 minutes.
I think as a 90s kid we had a hand full of games for our Gameboys, N64, etc. but had to wait for a holiday to actually get new physical content. Now it's easy and cheap enough to just download a slough of digital games (with fast resume and what not) and hop between them like crazy.
I have an 8 year old and I just curate the hell out of things he's allowed to play, and limit time consistently and ruthlessly. Right now he gets 10 minutes/day for video games, and his options are Slay the Spire, Into the Breach, and Braid. He's happy to play the games provided, and I'm happy that he's basically choosing between a math test, chess, and logic puzzles.
I give him another 20 minutes a day of creative time that he can use for things like TinkerCad or drawing apps. He only takes me up on it about half the time.
I do a similar thing with video content. He can choose from a very limited list of educational-ish shows (1 per day). Total screen time is under an hour/day, and I don't feel like any of it is brain rot. It does take more work up front for me on the curation end, but we don't need to revisit options all that often.
Those are all great slow-paced single-player games with a lot of depth. There are no dailies, loot boxes, battle passes, or activity feeds. They're entirely self-contained with practically no link to the Internet dopamine sludge machine.
They’ll surely enjoy playing fewer games rather than an avalanche of content that will leave them disoriented, bored and anxious. It happens with adults too.
I had just a conversation with parent who said she allows her kids to play videogames only because it's the only thing they are able to do with focus. At the same time she is worried that they seem to be unable to listen even 4-minute pop hits from start to finish. They only listen "best parts of hits" – intro, beginning of first chorus, bridge and skip to next piece.
My impression is that's a problem with Google Shorts.
Google has been trying to get me to watch Shorts since they introduced them with little effect.
One day they offer me a video of a Chinese girl transforming into a nine-tailed fox on Shorts which was a good choice for me. After that they want to show me endless AI slop videos of Chinese girls transforming into all sorts of things on America's Got Talent always with the same music, the same reaction shots, etc.
I tend to look at the recommendation problem as a classification problem [1] but one thing that challenges that is that the answer to "do you want to see more content like this?" is different for content that is 5% of your feed (you relish it) to the very same content if it is 95% of your feed (you're disgusted.) My own answer to the diversity problem [2] is to k-Means the content into 20 clusters and rank the cluster independently so I am always operating at the 5% point.
With ordinary YouTube content I frequently get introduced to something like Techmoan or Jay-Z videos that I can binge with relish the same way I can binge episodes of Shangri-La Frontier season 2. But shorts don't do that for me.
If I was developing a recommendation-based content site based on short content in 2025 I would take a cue from Yostar games and make it so people are actually discouraged from sitting in really long sessions but rather you get them to keep coming back frequently to graze. I'm amazed at how a mechanism like oil in Azur Lane can rescue you from a grindy task right when you are starting to get sick of it forcing you to either engage with some other part of the game or real life for a while. There are a few of us who will spend the holiday break playing Dynasty Warriors 9 or Asgard's Wrath 2 and realize we spent a few work weeks worth of time playing a game, but even then you burn out, I think mobile games are more successful at getting more people to spend more time with games, often with content that is thinner.
[1] ... actually every problem, Hot Dog/Not Hot Dog is not a joke in my pod
[2] which I haven't seen in the literature. I used to think that I didn't understand or believe many ideas in the recommender literature such as "negative sampling", now I think the recommender literature is frequently wrong
Just like modern casino slot machines aren't actually fun despite being made by the exact same companies as very fun arcade and home video games, it's just more efficient/profitable to optimize for the easily addicted.
A casino makes most of it's money from addicts, so why waste any effort/money on making actual "good" anything when they can just press harder on the addiction buttons. Everything in a video slot machine is optimized around pressing the very specific dopamine buttons in a gambling addicts brain, to the point that it is WORSE for those who are less prone to gambling addiction.
In the exact same way, google doesn't care if you watch shorts, you are less profitable than the user who spends all day doomscrolling. So the content isn't optimized for you explicitly because the optimizations that make it more addictive for problem users, and therefore more profitable, are diametrically opposed to making "good" media.
The creative mind behind Spongebob wanted to finish after one season. "It's done, it's good, I like it as art". But Nickelodeon couldn't let that happen because it was a cash cow. So it's gone for like 8 slop filled seasons, that everyone recognizes as "worse" than the first season.
But "Good" has never been as profitable as "Addicting", so any market where you can sell something "Addicting" will be completely filled by addicting slop.
Well I know a lot of people who are addicted to TikTok or who bring disgusting foods to parties that they saw on TikTok or who are deluded they are going to be TikTok stars, I don’t know anybody who is addicted to Shorts though maybe there is one somewhere.
Just found out that my Spotify client added a Shorts-like feature where instead of playing my entire playlist, it just plays "excerpts" from the songs!
And at the opposite end of the spectrum - I've been using Suno AI to literally extend pop songs I like where the originals are only 60-90 seconds because of gaming the Spotify algorithm :-)
Well. On my desktop the feature always plays silently, so I figure something in my firewall is blocking some IP or domain it needs to play sound (despite the fact that regular Spotify playlist plays just fine).
So I would say this feature has so far been worth to me exactly two HN comments.
> They only listen "best parts of hits" – intro, beginning of first chorus, bridge and skip to next piece.
I know adults who do this. I believe it's a lack of patience created by always available convenience. When nothing is hard it's not worth the focus.
Growing up there was no next/skip/shuffle - pick a radio station and deal with it. That or dub to tape which takes effort, and skipping also takes effort. Same with video games, as another poster mentioned we only got one game at a time so that was our focus. You had the new game and a few old games. Deal with it.
No ones has to deal with much of anything anymore and companies know this. And people dont seem to mind because its so addicting.
Yikes this is terrifying! What have we done to people? This needs to be setting off alarms. I don’t know how anyone can be okay with this, let alone work at a company that contributes to it. Amoral it is.
Uh, we monetized attention? Like, most of the people on this very board did this.
When you monetize something like that, of course it sets off an arms race and puts pressure on everyone's resources of attention.
The attention economy needs to be eradicated.
A newspaper of yesteryear couldn't print infinite ads. They had roughly a set number of pages, mostly down to the economics of printing itself, and had to find the most valuable advertising to fill that space with.
In the modern day, you can create more space. No longer do you have to curate advertising to ensure it is getting everyone reasonable value, because instead of having a competitive market, everyone just created digital heroin.
Imagine how awful the world would be if literally any shithead with a few dollars could slap a sign down on your front lawn that completely blocked your view and there was nothing you could do about it.
Don't imagine, because that's the very world software developers have built
Your comment mentions that your nephew swaps between games every 5 minutes but it doesn’t say why that is bad. Or maybe I don’t see how the argument follows.
I think GP means it as a symptom. If you can't remain on a single game (which is supposed to be a highly entertaining, dopamine-optimized experience) for more than 5 minutes, what is the likelihood you can stick with any harder task in everyday life for longer?
Plenty of valuable things are less exciting than a video game in their first 300 seconds, and last much longer than 5 minutes.
When I was a child, my parents had me work on a lot of puzzles. They saw this as a way to build attention span, ability to focus, and persistence to achieve long term goals (not to mention that we had the coolest, most intricate puzzles). I would probably work with my children work on something a bit more constructive and realistic, but the point is that as children we build intellectual habits and attention span from what we do, and being unable to focus on highly addictive stimuli for more than five minutes is a symptom of a strong deficit. One might even consider it an intellectual disability.
You can put 80 hours or more into an AAA game so I think you get more entertainment out of an expensive game than you do out of a movie that costs $12 for 2 hours.
Trouble is today's AAA game competes with yesterday's AAA game on sale or an AAA game a little older than that used at Gamestop for $10 minus your $5 pro discount. Or a mobile game that will suck in more people for longer that costs most players $0.00 but finds enough people who crave what premium currency can buy (or who just find a $5/month subscription enhances their fun) that they are dominating the industry in terms of revenue and leaving the business folks wondering if they can afford to go on developing AAA games.
> a mobile game that will suck in more people for longer that costs most players $0.00
You realize that most mobile gaming operate on the same aspects of exploiting addiction, manipulating young people, and so on, who don't understand the value of money or have a distorted perception of how much things cost.
Somewhere between 1% to 5% of all the players that play the game are addicted or hooked into addiction through the use of dark patterns, behavioral manipulation or intentionally misleading game mechanics. They account for a "whale's" portion of the revenue.
Yeah, but many of them are good games, otherwise, in an industry that is often failing to connect with fans. Nikki is heartwarming, Arknights is a tower defense game in a decade that hasn’t had any, like it not Azur Lane has inspired more fandom than almost anything, I meet so many players that got into Genshin Impact who aren’t playing tired JRPGs.
- if the kid cannot play each of cheap games for more than 5 minutes straight, likely cost >$80 total, does it make sense to buy them multiple games?
- if answer to above is `false`, does it really matter if the game in the bundle cost $80 if bought separately?
True, but I don't think Calvin Ball rewards the brain as much as YouTube or video games (a personal take of course). Loads of people of all ages are "suffering" from shortened attention spans with YouTube, TikTok, games, etc. but I haven't heard of any having the same with Calvin Ball.
The author of this blog wrote a whole freaking book about exactly this!
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. How is this like 95% of the comments here, as if Haidt didn't write an incredibly well known book about how all of this is bad!
Most people here didn't even follow the link and are just responding to the title. They don't know who wrote the piece, much less what it actually says.
This comment isn't so bad, but there were a bunch of comments earlier that were implying or stating outright that the author of TFA was targeting TikTok specifically for political reasons, which is clearly nonsense if you have even a passing familiarity with Haidt's body of work.
OP followed a similar pattern by starting with "please add YouTube to the list", but they did at least elaborate and didn't imply that TikTok was being targeted unfairly.
You're totally right. I wouldn't have written what I wrote, if I had seen this comment before seeing the ten thousand other comments on this page that just say "whatabout {other social media app}". Not fair to the author of this comment who was just sharing an experience. Too late to delete it now, so I just have to live with my shame :)
That's fine, but if you're going to post "now do X" in response to a criticism of Y, it behooves you to understand whether the author might have already opined on X.
disable Youtube history and no more shorts or AI suggested content. It quickly becomes a useful tool since you can see channels you subscribe to or if you are interested in a subject you have to search for it instead of getting pulled in the AI suggested contents as soon as you open the app.
THANK YOU so much for this. I'd spend some time researching how to disable YouTube shorts only to come to the conclusion that I had to use a different client (I picked NewPipe, but faced frequent issues with playback and I ended up having to click out to YouTube 90% of the time anyway)
I've disabled YouTube history now and it's almost exactly what I'd hoped for. Shorts are disabled, no 'feed', no suggestions, just my subscriptions. I owe you a beer.
My pleasure, I went down that rabbit hole myself until I saw a comment in reddit that helped me to make youtube the way I like it. I am just passing it forward and glad to hear it helped you.
Have you considered switching to Nebula? A lot of the YouTubers I like and tend to trust are also active on that platform. Will there is still some fluff, Nebula does seem to be far more discerning about the content it hosts.
Yeah. From time to time, you hear that reading books is somehow obsolete, and that valuing books reflects an undue emphasis on medium rather than content. This view is mistaken. The form in which information is delivered is not irrelevant to how it is processed, understood, or retained. There is a crucial difference between sustained engagement with a coherent body of thought and the piecemeal consumption of isolated informational fragments.
Short-form content, whether in the form of articles, posts, or "snippets", habituates the reader to a fragmented mode of attention. Over time, this practice undermines the capacity for deep focus and coherent understanding. The effects are cumulative: what is lost is not merely quantity of information, but quality of comprehension. Certain kinds of understanding only emerge over time, in context, and in continuity. A complex argument, or a meaningful dialogue, cannot be replaced by a summary or a highlight reel. To suggest it can overlooks the way serious thought takes place.
Continuously frustrated to see the YouTube app return to my Apple TV home screen. I can appreciate why Google makes it hard for me to block their apps on their platforms, but why won't Apple allow me to explicitly allow or disallow which apps can be installed on my Apple TV? Why don't screen time limits apply to the Apple TV?
Google has created Family Link app to allow parents to control the allowed screen time, apps they can see and sites they can open etc. Conveniently, they allow blacklist/whitelist only at a domain level and YouTube shorts have the same domain as YouTube i.e. https://www.youtube.com/shorts - they could have very easily provided a regex/pattern based blacklist/whitelist feature. Blocking YouTube in its entirety is not feasible because lots of educational videos are hosted on it. The only option is to externalize the filtering via pihole etc.
I suppose allowing parents to prevent their kids from watching the inane garbage that is shorts is a step too far in Google's books.
I noticed just last week Youtube Shorts (and long vids too) have become so full of fake AI Generated stuff it's not even worth watching. Sure it looks perfectly real,even if it's fake, but as an adult I find it just a waste of time. However children cannot TELL which things are fake quite as well as an adult can, so they'll end up basically going insane watching that crap, and end up with a very distorted view of the world.
It's truly a National Security issue at this point. I hope America bans TikTok, and if I had children they wouldn't be allowed to watch this garbage. Sadly most Americans value their "friendship" with their kids more than they value their parenting responsibilities, and so they let the kids do whatever they want just so they stay on good terms with them without the kids being mad all the time.
Also today's generation of moms and dads all grew up in the internet world, so to them, blocking technology from their kids seems like abuse of a sort, when it's not.
I commented on here before about this. I'm certainly not perfect, but what I've done is basically YouTube is something the kid doesn't watch on their own. They can watch documentaries with me or whatever (occasionally some video game stuff), but almost all YouTube kids is awful. There are a lot of really good kids shows out there across different streaming services with actual plots and character development that make them think without frying their brains. For a kid in the 8-14 year range: Avatar the Last Airbender, Gravity Falls, Owl House, Dragon Prince...etc are prob fine depending on the kid (dragon Prince is a bit darker). As a parent you need to make sure they're not watching content you object to though. I'll also find some episodes of something like Star Trek that is interesting with some moral dilemmas and just talk it out with them. TV is fine in moderation. Make sure you keep reading to them as well.
I'll only respond to this but I do see a lot of people share your viewpoint. I think I agree with you partially. There are ways to rot the brain on YouTube. I noticed it maybe 8-9 years ago for me. I unsubscribed from all the gaming channels and only watched tech/EE/CS videos. It got to the point where in college I had weeks of 40+ hours of YouTube (does it adjust for 2x speed? Unsure) but it was mostly on STEM content. I believe that's what let me ace my classes in my later years. I just learned better from them than reading textbooks.
So, please don't give up on trying to only block the brainrot. Also, kids are crafty and usually have more time than adults so be prepared to fight an uphill battle once they figure out VPNs, DNS, and other ways.
I wish YouTube allowed a filter for minimum video length. I don’t want my kid watching anything under 5 minutes, ideally 10 minutes long.
My biggest concern is the attention thrashing. If they’re going to watch some garbage, at least be stuck with it for 10 minutes so you’ll get bored of it…
Some of my relatives and colleagues actually actively encourage this. They give them an iPad with YouTube on it after meals and so on. It acts as a pacifier.
There are alternatives to YT for educational content, like Nebula. However, even that platform lacks control and it's slowly getting flooded with non educational content. It sucks because there is no solution here short of curating your content via ytdl and rolling your own YT like software.
An awesome app would be something that could hijack algorithms for various social media apps on home WiFi and feed kids parent-approved content silently without them even knowing, and messing with search results so they struggle to find things you don’t want them to see.
Related: I pay for YouTube premium and there is still no way to hide/ignore Shorts in the entire platform or any of their apps. It’s infuriating, and a feature that is badly needed. It should be there for free but at the very least allow premium paying users to hide that garbage.
Why do you pay for a platform that is actively hostile to you and the creators who produce content you like?
This is the primary reason I won't ever pay for premium. Youtube actively works against the interests of creators I have been following since before Youtube even existed. There's always some bullshit going on. I'm a grown ass man watching other grown ass men (they had to click the checkbox that their content is NOT FOR KIDS), but if they say "Fuck" too many times they still make zero dollars.
If I could see the ads, I know they are often softcore pornography or literal scams, but god forbid those companies get placed next to someone saying fuck I guess.
Google has spent near two decades reducing how much money they pay you for your content, despite their market only increasing. They treat content creators like dirt.
Google doesn't want ten thousand Simon Gertz and BPS.Space and AvEs and Applied Science and Practical Engineerings and Stuff Made Heres. Google doesn't want the channel that covered WW1 and WW2 in "real time". Google doesn't want Dan Olsen (Folding Ideas) content. Google doesn't want LGR.
Google wants 100 Mr Beasts. Google wants a hundred more fake "crafts" channels. Why pay money to that?
Download content of your choosing (yeah, you can even DL from youtube), put it offline and let kids watch from a playlist you curated yourself. Yank off any wifi connectivity, it’s poison finds ways to dumb down the kids.
You should have never introduced them to it in the first place.
Not trying to be mean- just trying to be frank.
Our kids get almost no screen time. We watch a movie once a week as a family. That's it. We have no problems because we have never introduced screens to them beyond that.
It will be blocked again and just handpickes local videos and games to choose from. I never thought I would have to do this as an adult, but what else you do?
You have to filter it manually for them. There's no other way, though in a year or two we might start to see products backed by true multimodal models that are actually worth looking at.
I don't mean to seem blunt or rude. I don't actually have kids, so even if I were inclined to judge, I've no basis. But just looking at what YouTube has been doing over the last couple of years, even as a premium subscriber and so never seeing ads - I mean, it's terrible, it's as if it is actively trying to drag me down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole, in the sense that I might watch a half dozen videos today about simulated jet-plane gunfights in DCS, and tomorrow I'm seeing recommendations for what I only recognize as "Intro to 5G Covid Conspiracy (CONT 101, 3 credits)" because I have studied the subject. I report these videos and they stop coming, until the next time.
It isn't as though there is a game here on the other side of which for there to be an adversarial mind, but there are times when it feels enough that way - when I'm half asleep, perhaps, and most especially - that I just don't even open the app or website entirely, but listen to an old podcast episode instead because those at least I can trust. (I pay subscriptions or buy copies; anything 'ad-supported' is a hard stop. I prefer people just say outright 'this is what I have and what I think it's worth, let's see if we can make an honest deal' because I am an American.)
I am seriously considering hosting a local Invidious instance, or similar, and terminating my now about ten-year YouTube Premium subscription. Ads are a technical problem that I was happy to pay a few bucks a month rather than however many hours to solve. I did enough years of sysadmin work for a living that I no longer enjoy it even slightly, so that's no small trade for me to consider. But now I'm really looking hard at what that money's going to, and by the sound of things lately, I'm among the least enthusiastic of such critics.
Kind of weird, because I use youtube premium, a LOT. I don't get anything political, or conspiracy theory. I do get WAY too many wood working suggestions, AI tech, and astrophysics stuff. However, these are at the expense of the other channels on topics that I've subscribed to, like body weight fitness, health nutrition, some music stuff.
The YouTube alg is obviously broken. By broken, it's optimized for monetary profit. I get tired of specifically having to search out my other channels that I subscribe to, that I'm contemplating giving up Premium, and only using it on an as needed basis, since I need to search for my workout channels anyway.
I don't even know how it makes sense for it to do what I see it doing!
It isn't as though I would be asked to pay more or less either way, and I can't imagine the ad placements on that malignant pareidolia slurry are worth as much as on actual content: I recall reading that Premium distributions to creators are scaled to predicted revenue on the ads that would've been shown - or actual revenue? I don't actually know they don't auction the slot as normal, and it would make a lot of sense if they did. In any case, I would think that would tend to make the slop worth less to try to divert me into, because whether or not I actually see those ads, they're still going to only sell to fringe psychos and so sell for much less than when I'm watching the LPs and stream VODs that are the vast bulk of what I actually do watch - nothing highbrow I grant, but nothing I or anyone else need be embarrassed to be seen with, either: just plain old 21st-century light entertainment you can sell razor blades or home loans next to, no problem.
I can't model it in my head in a way that doesn't have YouTube hurting itself massively with this, and though it's titanic enough to survive like that for decades, it won't last forever. It would help explain all the new revenue streams we see them lately and somewhat desperately adding. But a really convincing just-so story is always first and easiest sold oneself, and maybe there's something here I'm missing.
My theory is that brain-dead slop gets more view time.
Similar to the theory that Netflix movies are optimized to be mediocre without a satisfying ending because it keeps you unsatisfied enough to keep watching something else
Think of it: challenging satisfying content is like a plate of fresh fruit or veggies. You can only spend so much time consuming it before you're full.
AI-generated viral conspiracy SHOCKING FACE content is like chocolate-coated salted nuts for your brain: no fiber, you can consume unlimited amounts for an infinite amount of time (which means watching aaaaall the included ads)
Well sure, obviously, superstimulus is superstimulus, what I'm saying is I think the engagement maximizer must be running totally unclutched from reality and I think it's started burning down YouTube because it can want nothing in the universe save to transform all matter and energy into wonderfully, infinitely rewarding eyeballs. You know, the classic failure mode.
I guess we've just found what the "paperclip maximizer" will really be maximizing... one AGI paving the universe with infinitesimally short synthetic MrBeast videos, and another one doing the eyeball thing.
Ever thus. This is what Yudkowsky and his whole passel of too-clever-by-half puppies lack the nous to realize they are quite correctly afraid of - more specifically, of when it starts happening to things whose destruction for recycling would be a lot more real and impactful than one video website and a few thousand jobs.
Sorry. I don't really have a joke to play that off with, unless it's what always happens when some of the very cleverest people on Earth get together and stop listening to anyone else for too long. Five to ten milliseconds is enough to get that ball rolling, I think, but everything goes faster these days.
War gaming and anything related to war really seems to have a pull into videos that tend to "Hello, would you like to become a Nazi".
My typical viewing on YT sounds kind of like yours. Wood working, AI, Astro, some rebuilding of heavy equipment. That's all fine. It's when you get into any war tech that it quickly spirals off into some rather insane conspiracy crap, even if the videos you watch are just reasonable documentaries.
Eh, I would say yes and no, for a couple of reasons.
First, it definitely isn't just miltech, though you are absolutely correct it is heavily that. That was top of mind for me today, but I would say there is also, for example, "light side" and "dark side" machining/mechanical content. Abom79 and Blondihacks are pure "light side". Zip Ties and Bias Plies was "dark side," though as a fellow Borderer-descended redneck asshole, I am sure that as with many former "Canadian American Patriots," he has smartened up pretty damn fast in recent months. (I wouldn't know; I got fed up with his ignorant, drunk, belligerent, impertinent comments on my government quite a long time ago.) AvE started out light side, lost his way for a while, and lately is with genuinely admirable sheepishness comporting himself so as to suggest embarrassed recognition of his prior excesses. And there are lots I just "don't recommend channel"/"not interested" as soon as I see it. I also see the same for gaming - I like some classic Doom mods that some fascist infants also have strongly stupid opinions about, for example - and from this I conclude that there is something in essentially any genre that could be pressed to support this sort of subtext-to-text transition in at least some stage. I doubt I would observe the same in makeup tutorials, for example, but the days when eyeliner improved my looks lie decades behind me now. And who knows anyway? I haven't actually checked. For all I know, half an hour of that, maybe I start hearing about "DID sfw agere unalived" and the trans-flavored "stranger danger" moral panic of the moment.
Second, miltech and history content on YT does not remotely for the most part constitute "reasonable documentaries," unless you refer to forgotten VHS and DVD transfers that are nearly never surfaced anywhere unless you search for them by name, and when you do, they spin for a glacial age before playback can begin. Not to indict modern "creators" (screenwriters, actors, directors, artists etc) en masse, of course. But few today even strive for the standard that older stuff, made before mere record-high count of eyeballs was taken as the only end, reached as a matter of course.
People do as good a quality of work today as ever, of course. It becomes available for streaming over the web only by accident and happenstance, and if that sounds like what a conspiracist would say, keep reading: sure, you'll find a million people on YT talking about the stupid Nazi UFO sex fantasy, and what the hell good is any of them? No one there will help you decide whether you think, if Lee Atwater didn't die of that damned brain tumor, we could've never ended up with Trump in the White House at all. Few I suspect could even appreciate the question.
> tomorrow I'm seeing recommendations for what I only recognize as "Intro to 5G Covid Conspiracy
A simple trick to see what conspiracy stuff is being pushed in your area is to open yt in incognito, accept cookies, and then watch one or two videos with titles in non-latin languages. Kpop fancams, NHK news, that kind of thing. Then look at the recommendation column. You will see two types:
- "related videos" (similar topic and language to what you were watching)
- "geo-IP videos" (not in the language that you were just watching, but clearly based in your country. These are almost always garbage)
Yeah, I see this as a side effect whenever I drop a YT link into a private tab that I don't want even theoretically influencing what happens on my actual account.
Usually links like that come from here. It's quite eye-opening, like turning on showdead in your profile and just rolling around in the [flagged] [dead] "politics" for awhile.
But you will want to take a shower after, and you should; when Nietzsche said it looks back, this is what he meant, and it will ruin you if you let it. We all eventually become what we pay enough attention to, and we always pay a great deal of attention to what we hate. That's why it's worth so much money to get us doing it.
(I know I'm not saying anything new to you the extremely veteran commenter to whom I reply, of course. But as of course you also know, there are always young 'uns here who hadn't seen it said so plainly yet.)
I really wish that the EU would step in and force Google to either kill Shorts or give us full control over the crap they're pushing down our throats.
As this is HN and full of smart people - if there are any workable (OSS) options to filtering YouTube to remove shorts (and the far-right/Nazi crap) then please let us know.
