Completely banning all of YouTube feels like throwing out the baby—valuable educational content—with the bathwater—everything else. It seems more effective for YouTube to offer a dedicated educational platform, like education.youtube.com, with content filters built in. That way, students could access channels like 3blue1brown without exposure to unrelated or less appropriate content like MrBeast or Jubilee. Heck, I might personally prefer to use that version of YT myself.
As a parent (who also btw uses Google products every single effin day) I just can't agree.
This is entirely Google's issue to fix. Yes, YouTube has amazing educational content. I'd really like to make it available for my kids to see.
YouTube, however, makes it completely impossible to permanently filter/hide/disable the bane that is YouTube Shorts. I don't let my kids on TikTok not because it's Chinese, but because it's trash. I don't allow them near Instagram either.
The chances of kids growing an attention span by seeing interesting stuff in installments of 30 seconds approaches zero really, really fast. Yes there's the possibility telling a fun joke, demonstrating an optical illusion, or some interesting curiosity in under a minute. But it's far more likely that it's trash, and teaching kids (and adults) that if they don't get a kick of something within the first 10 seconds, it should be skipped.
And it's not necessarily age/quality rating of content; UX matters. It's totally different to find that your kid wasted an hour of their life doom scrolling over 150 videos of which they didn't even complete half, or that they spent it seeing half a dozen things videos of dubious quality: if it's half a dozen it's at least feasible to discuss with them why some are better than others.
So, I'm very close to just banning YouTube (at the DNS level if required). Which is a shame, because I then can't share the interesting stuff with them, and neither can their teachers.
> Imagine you're the one running a business where you keep repeatedly trying to shove some feature down your user's throat.
> What's that called in business school?
Pretty sure it's called inflating metrics. Things that get pushed on you (see many AI features, my pet peeve, especially at google) are not wanted (or they wouldn't need to be pushed) but someone has a big stake in showing uptake, e.g. promises made to investors that this would drive revenue.
> But Alphabet is doing nothing to stop the content maker and you from reaching a deal.
They bought DoubleClick, which Microsoft and others felt strongly enough about to warn the FTC that might give Google too much control over online advertising. Seems like Meta is their only real competition on that front these days.
You can completely disable Shorts by turning off your YouTube history.
No idea why, but it works and it's blissful. Plus you can still like videos, subscribe to channels and curate your own lists if you want to bookmark stuff to come back to.
OK, I didn't know that, though it's not very intuitive. Thanks!
Now, as a parent, I face a tough choice: I have history on the kids accounts precisely because I want to check on it and discuss with them what's good, or less so, to watch.
unfortunately turning off history kills all forms of suggestions, including ones like "you're subscribed to these things, so perhaps you might also be interested in...", which is the form of recommendation I want the most since it's driven by what I chose to be watching rather than what I've previously watched.
I had assumed the behavior was malicious compliance on Google's part against California law that said no history had to actually mean no history.
I have had history turned off for years. It won't recommend anything on the main feed, but when I watch a video, it recommends more as usual. There's plausible deniability that the recommendations are based on just what I'm watching but in practice that's obviously not true, many recommendations are based on either my subscriptions or my watch history, as they are not related to the video I am watching but are related to my interests.
Since there's not supposed to be any history, I have to trust it's just based on subscriptions. It seems like that could be the case, I guess? But I do have doubts that they do in fact have my history somewhere that's accessible to this recommendation engine.
So then block google/YT and call it a day? It's absolutely not Google's problem.
This isn't a "real life" thing - it's not like there's a strip club with open windows next door to your house for your children to look into. We're talking about a computer/iPad/mobile phone - block YT at the DNS level or better yet, don't even give one to your kids. Problem solved.
Other people shouldn't have to be punished with breaches to their privacy because people can't manage their childs online time.
A functional adult doesn't need to ever go to a strip club.
A functional adult in the 2020s needs to learn how to use Google and YouTube. It's actually part of the curriculum at school.
The school also uses Gmail, and Classroom, and teaches kids to use Docs, Slides and Sheets (rather than Office 365). I dunno how much money changes hands, but this benefits Google in the long run, otherwise they wouldn't offer the service.
The problem here is Google feeling the need to compete with TikTok, and then mixing it with their educational offerings.
I have been able to somewhat reasonably block youtube shorts with the following custom filter ublock origin rules (on firefox at least).
Note that it might accidentally hide some legitimate stuff but from my experience it should be pretty minimal if any. I think to hide the shorts from the left sidebar it hides one of your subscribed channels but that's all I've noticed so far.
I feel you about short content, I've taken to using uBlock origin with a custom filter to eliminate shorts from the front page. On the other hand when a youtuber makes a video 10-40 minutes long when the brunt of the information could be 1-5 minutes that gets my goat as well. My children do benefit from the amazing assortment of educational and entertaining options, but we watch together and talk about what we see, they're becoming media savvy and complain when sponsor block misses a segment. If we all skipped the ads we would see a new internet emerge.
Let's watch together starts to fall flat when the primary use they have for a device is to chat with family and friends, where it's natural to want a modicum of privacy. I wanna know who they're talking to, not everything they say.
Then, they start watching what their friends share in group chats. I can mostly avoid social media doom scrolling by preventing them having accounts, but not so YouTube.
And it's a tough decision to blanket ban YouTube, since it is used for educational purposes, including by teachers (a teacher wouldn't point a 13 yo pupil to TikTok).
YouTube didn't need to compete with TikTok or Reels; they chose to.
3. Have a "show me more content like this" button, but again, no auto algorithmic feeds
4. Filter out age inappropriate content.
would be great for teenagers. I think the problem for YouTube is that it would be great for everyone else, too, so they'd get bombarded by "Hey, I want that version" requests, which would clearly make them less money.
There is no moral high ground with basically any online platforms, it's all solely based on financials, and people should realize this.
Yeah, but there is a gaping difference between content for kids (i.e. 12 and under) and content for teenagers.
Most teenage-appropriate content would be enjoyed by adults too (e.g. lots of how-tos, educational content, music, entertainment, etc.) Most adults are not going to be into watching Blues Clues or whatever, which is why YouTube doesn't have to worry about cannibalizing more profitable content/algorithms for adults due to the existence of YouTube Kids.
It doesn't meet requirement #4 (Filter out age inappropriate content). You can find many articles and videos, over the years, about all the inappropriate stuff making it into YouTube Kids.
I think Google/YouTube would slow-walk the hell out of this only because they are making a ton off of the worst, basest of content and more filters = less eyeballs.
See also: Facebook "efforts" to stop scam advertisements and Marketplace fuckery
But this is basically the way for Australian government to try to make YouTube do that isn't it? There's already YouTube Kids, so maybe this makes YouTube think ok we need YouTube Teenz, or YouTube Educational or whatever.
YouTube Kids is also full of garbage. The bar to get content into YouTube Kids is substantially higher than YouTube but still the average video's educational quality is abysmal.
There are people at YouTube/Google/Alphabet who care but at the end of the day we get what the invisible hand gives us. Market forces have not yielded a well-curated educational video experience on YouTube.
No, the bill says they must take reasonable steps to prevent underage persons from accessing their services. Arguably, this means embedded videos will need to be restricted just as the regular site will be.
Grant Sanderson's mathematical animations and visualizations are famously excellent, though. He developed his own mathematics animation software just for his channel. I wouldn't think of video as preferable to textbooks for math education in general, but for his sort of videos, I might!
Oh, is that the majority of their content, traditional educational content? I must be mistaken in thinking they were funneling their audience into “shorts” and that kids obviously naturally recoil from “shorts” as much as they do green veggies and chores…
The amount of bathwater is increasing rapidly, whilst the baby is about the same size.
And it's almost purely bathwater that gets put in my face on the YT front page. The occasional baby pops up.
(as someone who rarely logs in, and only with a couple of throw away-ish accounts because I don't like being tracked and don't like YT/Google - so this will affect my perception of the baby:bathwater ratio)
YouTube has so much good content with sub-5000 views. Lectures or interviews with quality thinkers who avoid the podcast bro drama circuit. Hard to discover with Youtube's junk-food recommendation engine.
Putting that aside, the reality is that kids are bored, highly motivated, and networked with each other across the planet. Even more than porn, which is only going to appeal to a subset of kids, "all of Youtube" is definitely a bit more universal.
The major outcome of this legislation should be nothing more than Australian kids being the most familiar with VPN's and very little else, along with other tricks to bypass this.
Youtube is optimized for engagement and ad revenue. In my experience, there's more click/rage bait and entertainment than educational content (perhaps that reflects my algorithm haha). Unless there's improved content moderation or media training, I can see how this would ultimately benefit teens as they're minds are still developing.
The bathwater is not any specific piece of content but the YouTube discovery and recommendation algorithm. As long as that's in place, there will be incentive to create terrible "slop" content to get into "education.youtube.com" and collect ad revenue. The same thing happened with kids.youtube.com[1] and I don't see a solution other than hand-curating channels for inclusion.
Well put. I do not agree with the clumsy approach taken by countries like Australia, UK, and Texas, but I absolutely consider youtube and social media problems responsible for the tsunami of lowest-common-denominator slop. Free market/user choice idealists need to face up to the fact that slops is bad and lowers standards rather than elevating them, because the economic incentives tilt in favor of low quality, sensationalism, and so on. To some extent that's a reflection of the viewing/clicking population, but that doesn't mean that you should always just give people more of what they want. We tried that with high fructose corn syrup and the result is whole populations ravaged by obesity and diabetes.
Youtube has gotten so much worse in the last 6 months tho, introduction of shorts has devalued the platform terribly and it seems like all the good educational creators are moving off it anyway and now its just ripped crap that is often AI produced. Hopefully this move makes some actual competition show up for Youtube, because it sorely needs it.
Yeah but how do you decide who's educational content and who isn't? Mr Beast does tons of "educational" videos in the context of "$1 vs $10,000,000 house" or "living in Antarctica for a week". Same with Jubilee.
The real big-brain move is understanding this isn't about protecting kids, and there isn't really anything YouTube can do long-term. Australia has been going after US big tech for a long time
