YouTube Kids is massively popular and also the actual worst content the world has to offer. The most successful content, racking up hundreds of millions of views, is extremely vapid and just consists of sounds and colours punctuated by disguised adverts for expensive toys. No narrative, no speech, nothing educational. Kids are so malleable and early development is so important, yet a sizeable chunk are watching people in knock-off Spider-Man costumes unwrap toys and chase around knock-off Elsas all day. I won’t even get into the unsettling uncanny valley side of things and the creepy procedurally generated animation on there.

I’m genuinely concerned about kids being brought up on what is essentially mental junk food through their most formative years. I’m not saying they all need to be listening to violin concertos all day, but I feel that when I was a kid straight up garbage like this didn’t even exist and every kids show had at least something you could learn from it, like Sesame Street, or was decently produced entertainment, like Pokemon. This has a quarter of a billion views and it’s just... nothing.

  • MarxMadness [comrade/them]
    ·
    4 years ago

    On one hand, you have a point.

    On the other hand, this is exactly what people were saying about TV for decades, and I'm not convinced the difference is that big.

    • borisjohnson [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      I'm aware it sounds boomer-brained, but I just don't see how kids watching hours of straight up shit could be anything but detrimental. At least with TV there was a degree of quality control and, in most cases, at least some effort to make stimulating content. I'm hoping I'm proven wrong though.

      • medium_adult_son [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        TV is filled with advertisements for toys and anti-socialist propaganda. Not to mention how John Stossel got ABC and 20/20 to sponsor libertarian educational videos for schools, or how Prager U is making its way into the classroom. If TV is replaced with complete nonsense, like many of these YouTube videos, I'm not sure which is worse.

        I presume there is a long-term study on the effects of this media on children - many parents, in the USA at least, use YouTube as a babysitter for children that are far too young. I'm interested in the effects on attention span, or how Youtuber is the most common career goal for kids now. I wonder how they will react after realizing it is very hard to make a living doing it in a saturated market.

        • MarxMadness [comrade/them]
          ·
          4 years ago

          how Youtuber is the most common career goal for kids now

          This one isn't too surprising. Kids don't really know about career options (hence the need for career days), so when you ask them what they want to be they gravitate towards stuff that's visible to them. This is part of why plenty of kids follow their parents' career footsteps almost by default -- it's probably the job they have the most information about.

      • GalaxyBrain [they/them]
        ·
        4 years ago

        Barney was the hottest kid show when I was super young. It's a dude in a mascot costume doing a bunch of nonsense on a single set. It was drek. Those cheap Disney Channel shows of the mid to late 2000s were super popular and absolute trash pablum. Pokemon was a commercial for the games, cards, toys and other merch through and through. Each episode is Ash meeting some new Pokemon that is available to buy in some way or another. Digimon was good slop however.

        Going further back to the era of Hannah Barbara and FUNimation and the quality was lower. Kids have always had dump trucks of swill tossed on em.