KIDEODROME: scary "Kid's Youtube" algorithms, fringe programming, insert conspiracy theory here

honestly, if the concern is about their development, they should be reading and drawing and engaging in physical activities rather than watching inane youtube videos.

I would say ages 7-8 would be more disturbing.

Yeah, I remember the video store's posted for Child's Play scaring the shit out of me as a kid, to the extent that I'd never face that section of the store.

Agree that parenting-by-youtube is the issue here, over that of the actual content

they should be reading and drawing and engaging in physical activities rather than watching inane youtube videos.

see Whiney's post above about how that option is increasingly tied to class/income

bull fucking shit that reading, drawing or outside play are more expensive than a fucking ipad

read the fucking post

income, not really. the cost of the data plan to accommodate that isn't cheap -- compared to checking things out from the public library. Class = yes, unfortunately.

yeah "don't let your kids watch TV or YouTube" sounds good until you have a 2nd one

Whiney OTM

Experiences like these make me never want to deal with 'platforms' that exist to sell ads. (I'm on Mastodon, Fastmail for email, won't use Uber, etc. Twitter I can't seem to pry myself off) Which reminds me .. I have never given a dime to ILX. I'm ashamed that I've never asked if there was a mechanism. Is there?

Agree that parenting-by-youtube is the issue here, over that of the actual content

xp yes, but you missed it this time around and it was fully funded, it's historically been difficult to contribute before the fundraising targets are reached

The world is shit, and people are horrible -- the issue is how long do you wait until a child is forced to find this out.

yeah "don't let your kids watch TV or YouTube" sounds good until you have a 2nd one

I have two kids. My 4yo son watches (exclusively, and under the supervision of either me or my wife) National Geographic animal videos in cases of emergency (ie he needs to be pacified while we're at a doctor's appointment or some shit like that). My 9yo daughter does not have access to youtube.

Agree that parenting-by-youtube is the issue here, over that of the actual content

Have you seen the actual content?

i would not be at all surprised if corey pein's conspiracy theory (that the usual chanoid suspects are creating and seeding these kid-torturing videos to humiliate youtube's management) turned out to be substantially true

the issue is how long do you wait until a child is forced to find this out.

afaict the answer is until they are old enough to navigate the world on their own ie, once my daughter is old enough to go/be somewhere by herself (ie without the supervision of myself or another adult) then she is going to need a phone, and after that all bets are off. Currently my estimation is that this tends to be around the age of 10-11.

xp

they always start the fundraising drive during UK hours for a start :P

yeah, you can do both, obviously! but just plugging a child in and letting the videos play strikes me as extremely problematic. at that age, parents should guide their children through the internet imo - independence can wait until their defences have formed, surely

the actual content here is clearly awful in a lot of ways but there's a clear risk when kids are left to wander youtube unsupervised - for me that's the most hazardous aspect of this

I watched some old Goofy cartoons w my son in the parking lot on Sunday while we were waiting for my wife, I guess. Not something I would ever let him do himself, no way am I just handing him my phone.

xp

and by kids I mean toddlers, the very young

and yea I can absolutely see how this stuff can be harmful to children, even if they won't necessarily remember it. my older one is nearly 3 and it's kind of incredible how much of a blank slate he is

he really likes this old Claymation show called "Mio Mao" and in most episodes there is some form of cartoonish violence. he thinks it's hilarious but he'll say things like "Daddy...is Red hitting???" ("Red" is one of the characters), and he knows that hitting is wrong and will get him a time out. I can only imagine what having him watch videos where characters are throwing giant syringes into other characters and making them cry would do to him.

The thing I’m most terrified of my kid seeing is Veggie Tales. Now that’s some toxic shit.

the idea of lazily or procedurally generated video going seriously off the rails is easy to understand (remember how much fun we had in that idakoos thread?? "proud mom of a branch davidian -- and i vote!" etc) but also provides a fertile ground for plausibly deniable purposeful sadism

xp thanks sleeve - I'll keep my eyes out for the next opportunity, appreciate the info

yea I mean the shitty thing about this is not necessarily that it *exists* but that it's aimed solely at gaming the YouTube algorithm and getting "discovered" by kids who just want to watch superhero videos. it's not like the "KEEP CALM AND RAPE A LOT" shirt that was just an algorithm gone bad and probably never actually existed in any physical form

"KEEP CALM AND RAPE A LOT" shirt that was just an algorithm gone bad and probably never actually existed in any physical form

damn, there goes one of my holiday gift ideas.

It's really surprising that youtube kids isn't completely curated. If an uploader with an approved video changes the file in any way, it simply gets dropped. I'm sure Google can employ 100 people to watch and approve enough content to last kids essentially forever.

It is pretty shocking that it wasn't moderated, I mean damn FB has entire buildings of people purging snuff videos

It's not surprising to me. The fuck does Google care whether their content breaks your kid?

god just thinking about the people who have to do that as their day job upsets me so much

Those Bad Baby live action ones, which I think are Russian, are very strange and silly. I don't know if they would seem as weird to Russians or not

didn't Sting address this issue in the 80s?

Booming post Whiney

there's been lots of research on children's safety online, see Sonia Livingstone's work: http://www.lse.ac.uk/researchAndExpertise/Experts/profile.aspx?KeyValue=s.livingstone%40lse.ac.uk (full disclosure: I work at LSE)

thanks for that!

np, she's a bit of a machine, there's loads of stuff listed there

The world is shit, and people are horrible -- the issue is how long do you wait until a child is forced to find this out.

― sarahell, Wednesday, November 8, 2017 1:04 PM (thirty-three minutes ago) Bookmark

the world is mean and man uncouth! answer: until your kid can handle the threepenny opera?

sorry
i have no real opinion about these videos to share just wanted to reiterate that the world is mean and people are terrible.

People tend toward antisocial behavior when they aren't held accountable for said behavior and when they don't directly see the negative effects of said behavior. Hence way too many people treating the internet like it's some sort of sociopathy RPG.

On the lighter side there is no way Aphex doesn't use these as backing videos for his next shows

As somebody who was freaked out by the opening credits of Wall Street Week as a kid, just thinking about what I would have turned into with a steady diet of this pure incoherence is terrifying

Keep kids away from Adult Swim.

yea, whiney really otm

i'd never seen any of these meat-dripping zombie superhero nonsense weird things, what a fucking weird world we live in. who is creating these and why?

lolz?

seems like an awful lot of work for lolz

^ solitary posts that ...!

Whiney's post is so otm. It's why I linked the Dutch article (wouldn't normally because useless if not in English), as it keeps me busy. And all this def feels like a completely new low I'd never imagined possible. The "why" question bothers me, as I don't have an answer. They could harvest clicks and would get some revenue from that, but clearly you'd earn way more if you actually make a good kids video, instead of injecting it with this deep, at times very subtle dread. Dark days.

idk it seems pretty clear to me, if you can game YT's algorithm somehow then you get a good chunk of ad revenue

the question is why people are just learning about this just now despite having something like 3 billion combined views. clicking around you see a lot of these vids with 100k views but only 50 up/down votes and 2-3 comments. that ratio isn't really possible organically.

but clearly you'd earn way more if you actually make a good kids video, instead of injecting it with this deep, at times very subtle dread.

yeah this is the thing worth exploring. I mean even if this is all AI-generated the fact that syringes and machine guns are part of the program is pretty disturbing in itself. My fear is that the "pregnant Elsa" stuff is done specifically to attract clicks from curious 7-year old kids with a lot of questions

pretty sure syringes and machine guns factored into multiple episodes of Roadrunner cartoons

my suspicion is that it's made for lols but then picked up on by the algorithms and recombinated/mass-produced specifically because "dark" stuff gets more obsessive emotional engagement (<--- obviously here is this post's sweeping and unproven assertion abt humans) and we built a big machine to produce emotional engagement for money

Sarahell, surely you can see the difference? They're used as instruments in cartoons to drive the pun or slapstick home. Nothing like that in these.