It would, but it would also decrease the video quality. I'm not opposed to letting my kids watch YouTube, there is a lot of good quality content there, but having some agency in what they pick would be a lot better than the current behavior of short after short after short. Just like snacking on fast food.
Interesting points and some things I've been exploring too:
Video quality does decrease, and sometimes that's good a good thing.. :)
- Lower video quality is lower resolution = less addictive.
- Decreasing saturated colors reduces children's brain heroin. (Try to put the tv in normal or movie color mode and see the addictiveness fall off).
- Lowering the sound helps kids hear less of the background addictive noises and strain their hearing a little more and can help them get tired.
- Lowering brightness can help with as well.
- Kids device for viewing could be different than adults to allow filtering and shaping.
As for content, I agree.
- Recently I heard there's more and more fraudulent content under official channels that includes bad content inside the good stuff. This needs to be caught.
- Managing access to shorts is important, if not limit outright.
Do you have a youtube premium account that removes ads by chance?
I never got used to shorts/reels/etc, but it is troubling to see kids addicted to them. I have been thinking that by forcing some pause between videos it would remove some of their addictiveness.
It does. Sometimes I click on an interesting short and then keep swiping to see if anything else is interesting. When the app takes ten seconds to load, I go do something else because there's no real value in the shorts.
I gotta say, I don’t get that perspective. The content is one thing, but YouTube is super reliable for me, streaming or watching. I can easily stream in 4k 60FPS from OBS and YouTube has never had issues ingesting it, though I generally do 1440p because my computer is slow. When watching, I have never had an interruption on my wired Apple TV even for 4k/60FPS.
I do hate the pushing of shorts and the algorithm that seems to have a 3 video memory, but aside from that I’m pretty happy, I don’t get the weird right wing stuff or creepy videos pushed at me or my kids.
For me the content is not the main problem, rather the consistent bloating and enshitification of the player and interface over the years. Nowadays I don't bother anymore and just use mpv and ytdlp to play the few videos I'm interested in.
I don't even bother using scripts, I just manually paste the URL of the video I want to watch into mpv. It's not slow enough for me to have to deal with the garbage Youtube interface.
