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

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.

frogbs the long medium article that never quite gets to the point like it can't say what it saw at the mountains of madness does say somewhere that many of those viewers are probably bots too.

xp - but we're fretting about infants and toddlers seeing these, and I feel like we are perceiving these as adults, rather than as the, er, intended audience.

also, some of these could be perceived as slapstick. I mean, Peppa Pig's family drinking bleach vs. Wile E. Coyote being immolated by a tree ...

xxp right - I just wonder how many. like a video with 100k views, how many of those were children? I wouldn't be surprised if the actual number was very very small.

So essentially your point is... It's not that bad? I'm trying to understand your stance on here, besides playing down the effect it can have on kids (which I agree on, but it's not the whole story here)

*on this

my point is that content-wise it doesn't seem that horrific, though the idea of technology subverting parental control is novel and creepy, however, I also feel like this is happening at a time where parents have/want more control over their children than in previous generations.

i'm creeped out by this too but it's funny that we_on_the_left suddenly have a mass child abuse theory of our very own, except being on the left it's not individual jews and catholics that are doing it (in a metaphor for their secret perversion of everything) but the architecture of the system itself (in a metaphor for its open etc)

are these all animated/cartoons, or are ones where people are editing in footage of actual rape, murder, or concentration camp victims or similar?

content wise these are way more horrific than old cartoons.

I guess for me, growing up, the news and real things like dying in a nuclear war were more disturbing than violent/nihilistic cartoons

well for me too but this is a step beyond. this is devoid of story, devoid of anything...it's just random images of characters with heads swapped out for meat zombies, stabbing or raping each other, etc. I know you and I grew up with things like Eraserhead and the Butthole Surfers and shit but not when we were like, 2.

it's like a great empty chasm of violent nothing. maybe it's the perfect entertainment for the US, maybe it's what we deserve.

the algorithmic CGI stuff is bad, but jfc those Toy Freaks videos

that guy needs to be in jail

I don't remember any media content from when I was 2, except for things like general color schemes

Please tell me Sara is doing D- trolling instead of expressing F+ opinions

Please tell me that Whiney just vomited out the details of his post and didn't actually believe the details made sense/were realistic.

this is written by the guy who made "tickled"

https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/21-11-2016/hello-my-name-is-ally-how-children-are-being-exploited-by-youtube-predators/

are these all animated/cartoons, or are ones where people are editing in footage of actual rape, murder, or concentration camp victims or similar?

― sarahell, Wednesday, November 8, 2017 9:13 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Gotcha Sarahell. On the above, the ones that disturb me most are those with actual children - I've seen both Russian and American ones - being made to act out a 'story' that borders on, or veers into adult fetish/violent fantasies. Kids are acting out things probably not knowing what they are doing. They're being used. The scat videos, acted out as a pun or mere potty training, a child acting she's Elsa and is pregnant and is getting aborted ("that's a baaad baby in your belly! We need to get rid of bad baby!" with a cheerful tune underneath... For kids it reads: bad needs to go away. For adults: fuck if I know. Letting a kid lie there pretending to be pregnant, hand reaching under skirt but 'innocent' enough to not be offensive in the literal sense).

It's the ones with children acting, where they seem to believe they are acting in a story whole for adults that same story is a very different one, preying on them, are the worst. And this is a genre, apparently.

You started out this thread with, like, "parents should just have their full time nannies take their kids to art class and hiking adventures" and have now gone into "2 year olds are dumb, they won't really remember watching IRON MAN SHITS IN DORA THE EXPLORERS MOUTH FOR TWO HOURS HD"

xp to sara