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.
It's what happens when you monetize childhood education in the absolute worst way (and there aren't any good ways)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, the syringe spiderman pregnant Elsa surgery videos are going to be a lot of kids childhood memories and that's creepy as fuck.
In amongst the vapid shit there’s a sizeable portion of actively harmful shit, usually focusing on Spiderman and/or Elsa and usually involving surgery, pregnancy, injections, toilets, dentistry and occasionally drug use and sexual content. It all feels procedurally generated and like fetish content at the same time, sometimes it’s cartoon and sometimes it features adult actors. It’s a very weird rabbit hole with lots of theories about where it’s coming from.
I think YouTube’s now cracked down on the most egregious channels but here’s an example (and this is the lighter side of things)
THE TITLE CONTAINS THE PHRASE "ASS INJURY" WHAT THE FUCK. THIS IS NOT FOR CHILDREN, THIS IS FOR STONNERS
Alright I watched the video and this is deffinitely for stonners, I wanna get drunk and watch them with friends.
From the comments:
I loved these when I was younger.
:agony-limitless:
Before youtube cracked down on kids content there were really creepy videos that the algorithm was showing kids that had titles like that. Parents rightfully freaked out and youtube has attempted to get rid of the weird shit but predictably does a pretty bad job. Kids will still get weird shit every now and then. It's really bizarre and creepy.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/youtube-for-kids-videos-problems-algorithm-recommend
Can't believe people figuring out the six key phrases/images that will promote a video to the top of the algorithm would result in videos that are literally just compositions of those phrases/images without rhyme or reason.
The content was always deliberately made to abuse children's sexuality because they're curious about bodies and don't understand sexuality
deliberately made to abuse children’s sexuality
They appear to exist to solicit clicks, full stop.
By abusing the fact that children are curious about that kind of stuff. There's a reason "doctor games" are so common among young children of any gender.
It's the counterpoint to the Prestige TV shit. Rather than spending $10M/episode for cinema-quality TV, you get to just expropriate the minimalist near-zero budget crap people will churn out for free.
YouTube's model is the purest incarnation of click-bait.
Does China really have the capacity to employ 56% of its population as astronauts?
No, but that's not the point. It's the aspirations and hopes of the kids that let's them have different plans and options as they get older. Not all of the US kids will always want to be you tubers, but the time spent there is time they could learn about another field that's more interesting to them, which is more viable. This would be true even under socialism, as not everyone can be entertainers.
With China the students aspirations are more directly involved in math and the sciences, and specifically sciences which currently don't have major military implications, it's just doing experiments in space. (arguably changing, not the point). That can be more readily applied to other career paths and interests which can serve others.
Eh, I remember when I was a child the dream job for girls was model.
Rich children showing off expensive toys.
A big part of "adult" youtube is exactly just that.
As a kid I liked watching ridiculous infomercials cuz they were stupidly funny, but instead of toys it was about knife kitchen and stupid house gadgets. But it was fun cuz I knew those bullshit were crap, and it was funny to look at them trying to sell it anyways.
The spider-man Elsa shit dosen't have me too worried but what does have me worried is when those kids start hitting pre-teen and teen and start clicking on intellectual dark web shit and we have a whole new crop of young fascists.
TFW you realize YouTube's STEMlord employees are anti SJW pro American imperialist gamers
:agony-immense:
What alarms me is the video games, and it makes me feel like a hypocrite because as a child I was exposed to the Columbine shootings.
I remember how badly the politicians wanted to blame Duke Nukem and Doom for the shooting. In those games you play some character who is being portrayed as a "good" guy stopping evil, whether it was the demons of hell or the corrupted state police.
Now every shooting video game targets the fellow man, Fortnite and every battle royal game is fighting your fellow man for these scarce resources in hopes of coming out on top. On top of that these war games are revising history to further obfuscate the youth.
I really like when Matt Christman challenges the idea that the youth is the future. I saw what millennials my age have done the moment the capitalists provide them with bread and circuses. The kids are not alright.
I really like when Matt Christman challenges the idea that the youth is the future. I saw what millennials my age have done the moment the capitalists provide them with bread and circuses. The kids are not alright.
I listened to an older ep just the other day where he goes off on how he finds the zoomers terrifying because they're all "dead-eyed psycopaths" lmao
I can’t say for sure it’s because of that kids youtube shit, but they are just mindlessly consumerists of toys and toy reviews (ugh), extremely moody and fight each other all the time, and I feel like they are just all around way more dull than you’d expect kids of their age to be.
That's basically all kids forever.
Like, there's a certain garbage-in / garbage-out factor, but I think you underestimate how much of it simply boils down to kids being kids and having kid brains, kid experiences, and kid vocabularies.
If you think they're terrible now, wait till you actually try to raise one from infant (literally, all this thing cares about is eating, shitting, sleeping, and being the center of attention) to a teenager (literally all this thing cares about is eating, fucking, sleeping, and being the center of attention). Kids aren't going to be woke post-college intellectuals unless they've lived a truly shitty hard-knock existence.
And while I'll spot you that the education system is falling apart and Online Learning is turning into a very elaborate Speak-And-Spell, I think a lot of criticism aimed at kids boils down to "Why aren't they adults yet?"
I’ve known kids like this. Went out to dinner with family friends who brought their kids and they didn’t even try to get them to stop using their phones through the whole meal. They barely spoke, just used their phones. Apparently it had got to the point where the following behaviour would be so bad it was just easier to let them stay on. These kids were over 10 too, well past tantrum age.
Talk to each other? They were all cousins and shit of roughly the same ages
When I have a child I don't want it watching those Instagram "influencer" channels that feature hyper-sexualized women and men. Just like the Elsa/Spiderman shit they deliberately use children's sexuality for views. I feel like the instagram stuff is worse because when they're little there's no social pressure to give them a phone. But as children get older they will want a phone and an instagram profile as to not be an outcast. It worries me a lot. I don't know how I will balance my child's need to socialise on the phone without pureeing their brain into mush.
Same here. Instagram can be ruinious for mental health because, no matter what you're good at, there's someone else doing it better than you on Instagram (and looking better at the same time). Luckily I missed out on TikTok, because that look even worse and extremely hypersexualised. If you're a girl on there you better be conventionally hot, because if you're overweight or have a big nose or an asymmetrical face you can bet there'll be an army of strangers letting you know about it.
TV has always been trash and Online TV is just more of the same.
I'm no more worried about a kid in the '20s being radicalized by YouTube than I am of a kind in the '90s being radicalized by Crossfire or GI Joe.
This has a quarter of a billion views and it’s just… nothing.
It's kids having fun in a big house with their dad and their cool toys. The 6-year-old equivalent of watching Twitch streams. The most inoffensive banal white noise imaginable for someone to watch.
I’m genuinely concerned about kids being brought up on what is essentially mental junk food through their most formative years.
That's just television, generally speaking. I agree its toxic to sit in front of a screen and absorb images/noises continuously for hours a day. But the history of latch-key kids is long, and this particular brand of bland consumerist crap isn't materially worse than what we grew up with in the 80s or 00s. Go back and watch Teletubies or Barney. It's basically the same shit.
I hate to be a "I was raised in the wrong generation" type, but honestly, I do think social media (including Youtube) has really ruined the younger generation. I'm in my early 20s, and I wasn't fully raised on the Internet like my nieces and nephews, but it was still pretty online for the most part by middle school age. It really did fuck me up as I'm sure it did for most of the younger people on here. There were times I should have been playing outside or with in-person friends, but was scrolling on Tumblr instead. Now I see my nieces and nephews hardly ever go outside and play or even mess with their regular toys. They just always want their IPads or Xbox. And there are good things on these electronics, but I do feel they suffer from a lack of creativity and imagination they would have if they were playing with other toys more. And then an entire year in quarantine (for USA kids) with classes online for a long time. Yeah, I'm sure kids under the age of 18 right now are going to be socially deficient.
Meh, the math behind orbiting is pretty well understood. The issue is that we've found asteroids that could level a city or more after they've crossed our orbit. There's simply not a many eyes out looking for them. Also the event of an impact is exceedingly rare. It's far more likely that a serious climatic event will occur.
In the geologic record only the K-Pg extinction can be reliably attributed to an impactor. The rest seemed to have happened because volcanoes erupted and changed the climate very quickly. In fact the PT extinction, the worst known, experienced rapid warming and ocean acidification associated with the Siberian traps, a series of volcanoes in northern Russia. A lot of the symptoms of that extinction seem somewhat similar to today's warming.
I mean, weren’t most Saturday morning cartoons in the 70s and 80s just elaborate ads for toys?
A lot of them yes, but some no. Especially on PBS, while the shows do have toys I don't feel like that's the primary purpose of the shows, instead education is. Some shows still definitely are US propaganda, but most are like "hey maybe don't get angry and punch people," or "hey some people are in wheelchairs, and they can still do things too, be inclusive"
I grew up on pbs and I am very thankful to my parents for making sure that happened. Almost everyone I know that watched pbs nearly exclusively is generally a nicer, smarker, and more thoughtful person.
Smark is an actual word, I'm sure that's what they meant! ("Smart" wrestling fan: derogatory.)
A friend and I both watched a lot of PBS growing up. My friend only had an antenna, and before the switch to digital there were no channels that only showed re-runs and catheter commercials, so it was either PBS kids programming or soap operas.
I had basic cable and was alone for hours with my TV, so I'd channel surf and even as a small child I gravitated to watching PBS. But my other choices were Nickolodeon or Cartoon Network, not sexy Elsa or toy unboxing videos.
My own kids will only have access to a Plex server of PBS shows that focus on books (reading rainbow), history(Wishbone), animals (Kratts), being a good person (Mr Rogers, Sesame Street), etc. YouTube Kids is brain poison that ends up promoting individualism and consumerism.
