I was working in a house this week that had a ~4 year kid in another room. They were on the mums phone watching YouTube shorts and I think I had an aneurysm listening to it. It was godawful and the attention span was so low they constantly flicked through so most didn't even play for more than a second or two of incomprehensible gibberish before they'd flicked onto the next one.
I feel really sorry for anyone who has to grow up surrounded by this bombardment of shite.
A 4yo has no business having unrestricted access to media, let alone YouTube. Current recommendations are 20 to 45 minutes a day at that age, depending on country / organization.
YouTube has so much questionable content, kids shouldn't be in a position to be able to click next and consume that crap.
YouTube kids exists since 2015, but Elsagate happened around 2017/18, so I don't exactly trust their content moderation.
Right, this is simple stuff - for a 4 year old, content of any kind must be curated, and I'd argue that stays true in different ways for quite a while.
Yeesh. Before ever turning over entire decision-making power on a very uncontrolled platform to a kid, ya gotta help walk them through stuff and spend time curating / selecting content together. And also wait for them to grow up some and demonstrate readiness.
And certainly never trust YouTube's curation, ever, agreed.
4 yo rawdogging modern AI slop YouTube shorts, solo, is wild.
Is that YouTube trying to compete with Tiktok for the no-attention-span brain rot market? I never saw the appeal.
Tbh YouTube is even worse.
I want my kid to watch YouTube in moderation, there are good content creators in there.
BUT there is no way for me to block their access to the brain rot shithole that is YouTube Shorts. None, zero, nada. No parental controls work.
With TikTok I can just block it completely with parental controls, no problems.
Disabling watch history and deleting all previous history stops the shorts from being recommended. You can still search for individual shorts but you can’t scroll infinitely. I’m not sure if you can lock that setting with parental controls or not, but may be helpful.
Nebula has mostly quality content and no "shorts", where as YT even without shorts has mountains of garbage.
Use a software like newpipe with a subscription feed only. There are no ads, no recommended videos, and no shorts.
There is a browser plugin "YouTube enhancer" that lets you disable shorts, comments, recommended videos and other crap.
Caught my 7yo niece consuming disney princess cosplay ahegao content on youtube shorts yesterday. =\ she's not allowed on YouTube anymore, the platform is too unsafe for children.
the platform was never safe, parents are just ignorant
I have a 12 year old. I considered YouTube unsafe for her unsupervised, when she was growing up (and largely still do, we have a healthy teamwork approach to it). The place is just magnitudes worse now. And yep, parents are super ignorant (and have been), they have no idea what the kids are even watching, many don't really restrict the time they spend at all.
And parents in my generation clutched their pearls at Looney Toons cartoons. What the actual fuck?
It's the number of views they're getting that worries me the most.
more like sloptube slops
I'm a grown adult and I think those thumbnails are gonna give me nightmares holy shit
This is terrifying looking, just activates every part of my hind brain.
Yup that’s why it’s so effective on children, they don’t have the foresight to think about the video being bad, and multiple parts of their brain light up and then they feed the addiction
my eyes are bleeding
This reminds me of garbage pail kids cards.
I hope my child inherits my lack of reaction to this stuff. I find short form video content immensely boring. I cannot relate at all to people's ability to spend more than a couple of minutes with it.
gross, we are so doomed
I have a young child who will be using the web eventually and it terrifies me. I'm going to have to do something to lock it down to keep out the brain rot
They seem to go well together tho.
Evolution was a mistake.
What in tarnation?
I made a new youtube account recently. I use youtube shorts a decent amount. Fortunately, I never see shitty ai videos like these. I just get Invincible and GTA/Rdr2 edits. For some reason.
Do people not curate their content? I never have any issues with YouTube. Even Twitter was fine. The only reason I deleted my Twitter account was because Musk bought the platform. I get recommendations for science stuff and that's it. Even the shorts.
r u ok dwayne
Is… this real?
