Not owning a TV is pushing my kid to watch a lot of YouTube. I'm seriously considering buying a TV, after living for 30 years without one, just so that I can have a quality entertainment feed that doesn't bend to the new media's idea of what my kid should watch, because what that ends up being is endless advertisements ("open this egg! What's inside? A Ken doll!! Wow!!") and videos of pandas killing each other with chainsaws, then reaching into the body cavity to find their surprise egg.
I’m worried that my kid is not getting a ‘big’ view of the world, and is instead seeing it via YouTube, and anti-Trump playground conversations (which I agree with, to be sure, but it’s not a very deep or diverse understanding of the world).
When I think back to my childhood, my view of what the world, and human society (civic society?) ‘is’ came from TV news my parents happened to be watching - and occasional glances at their newspapers.
Even though I try to consume news from wide ranging sources, my kid sees none of that; it’s all an individual pursuit.
I fear there’s also a lack of ‘coherence’ in society today, and suspect that everyone watching the same news programme was something that provided it. When we think of current events, I don’t think that we’re all even aware of things outside our ‘bubbles’ - adults are sort of aware of this. What must growing up like this be like though?
I’m considering starting to watch evening network news. One problem with that is that we don’t have a TV - just iPads, laptops, and a projector for watching movies.
I’ve also subscribed to a delivery of the newspaper on Sunday (though it’s been a month and it’s never actually been successfully delivered to my home yet...)
Who’d’ve thought we’d be lamenting the decline of TV the same way our parents lamented the decline of newspapers?!
Yep. My FB feed seems to be 50% pictures of food and travel and 50% anti-Trump articles.
Even if you agree with the general sentiment, imagine a child growing up whose main media sources are the informational equivalent of a cross between crack cocaine and junk food.
I've limited it to Netflix on the big screen. I don't want the constant jumping from video to video either, pick one and then be stuck with it 'til it's done (or turn it off).
I am considering Amazon FreeTime Unlimited as well, I would recommend trying that before a TV though I would appreciate any anecdata on it.
Depending on the age of your kids, I suggest total YouTube curation. I've only got up to a nine-year-old but I'm thinking it's going to have to go up to at least 13 or 14 before I can have a serious discussion about just what is out there and how people are trying to manipulate them.
Five years ago that would have been more to avoid them from stumbling across the various types of adult content that for various reasons I would have preferred them not to view, and perhaps the HN zeitgeist would have called me a puritan (although I'm not just thinking sex and violence here, but also things like conspiracy theories and politics they are currently incapable of processing and other things [1]). Now, unfortunately, it's more about avoiding the brain hackers that you describe that know how to hack their brains into getting low-level addicted to that sort of garbage, and now perhaps the HN zeitgeist will be less offended at my policy that a poor defenseless six-year-old or nine-year-old in my case can't be expected to defend themselves against this level of sophistication.
(Because however stupid those videos may strike you as an adult, they are sophisticated, in their own way. The "cartoons that were just toy commercials" of my youth were nothing compared to what modern kids are being targeted by.)
The good news is that we're actually finding some channels where we have some common ground. For instance, they're really digging Homestar Runner now, and I've got some others that I can pick and choose from that we all like.
I increasingly pity the "digital natives" that didn't get to ease themselves into this world like I did. I'm not saying they're hopelessly lost; today's article about kids rebelling against social media is heartening. I'm just saying, I had a much easier on-ramp than they did. My first few years worth of youthful indiscretions are now utterly obliterated, because the dial-in BBS they were on is now long gone. I wasn't fucking up on Facebook or where the Internet Archive could find me. By the time I got on to the real internet, oh, I'm sure I could find things that would make me cringe now, but I'm pretty confident I wasn't blowing my foot off anymore.
[1]: Oh, and I'm pleased to say that they both seem to be on track to be voracious book readers, which I think is the strongest Step One to being able to deal with the onslaught they will eventually face. My strategy here is not just mere "denial of access", as I am well aware that doesn't work into their adulthood, and my goal is to raise good adults, not good children. I'm still feeling through what my strategy is, on what is shifting sand anyhow, but there's more to it than just "shield them forever."
"Are you always there with them when they're on YouTube,"
That one. They currently have no independent access to YouTube. (Well... technically if they knew what buttons to push where they do. I'm not using high-tech to block them. But they don't know and I'm not teaching them yet.)
Even a few years ago I might have considered this a bit much. But since "Elsa-gate" my mind on that has been changed. I know it's not just a weird conspiracy theory or something because I've even seen a couple of them pop up in my "related videos" list myself, and I don't really have a viewing profile that looks like a kids profile. (The reason why Elsa-gate is happening may be conspiracy theory related, but the brute fact that it is a thing is something I've seen first hand in my own feeds.)
The increasingly aggressive targeting behavior across the Internet is I think something not to be taken lightly. Unfortunately we're going to have to raise our children to deal with it, but my considered opinion is that the best solution before the teen age years is to just cut it off entirely. It is not as if we are leaving them adrift, the only ones without tech in an increasingly technical world; my kids play Minecraft, they've seen enough of the current YouTube videos that they can discuss them at school, their school is using technology in a halfway sensible manner so the nine-year old can already type and the six-year-old is on the way. It's only certain segments of the Internet that they are better off just locked away from.
Heck, it's not even terribly hypocritical of me... I lock myself away from those very same segments for the very same reason! I use uBlock origin pretty extensively, and whenever I see one of those bullshit Taboola blocks, I'm actively annoyed that they are so tuned that I find myself wanting to click through myself. (I'll know I've gone senile when I no longer can resist it.) I'm not magically immune to this crap, and I know it, so I avoid it. I rely on my own discipline to do it. But relying on a pre-teen's discipline is probably not a good plan.
Not the OP, but there is no way that I'm aware of to whitelist (or blacklist!) specific channels on youtube. And thanks to HTTPS, I can't even intercept + modify youtube pages at the network level. Thank you, privacy folks, hope you're happy!
Alternatively, there is always kids.youtube.com which is weirdly just an app for Ios/Android. I haven't tried it, and myself have actively disabled/removed all Youtube from being accessible by the younglings. Curated media, decided by me is all they get to watch then.
A manually trusted cert overrides pinning, it's only protecting against certs signed by another of the default installed certs (otherwise Google and others simply wouldn't work in many corporate environments).
The YouTube Kids app has a really nice interface, but there's no whitelist option unfortunately. I wish there was. It does let you block videos or channels individually, but you can imagine how much good that does on a site as big as YouTube.
As you say, it's also iOS/Android only. No PC option for kids at all.
I'd look into youtube-dl. I tried all the parental controls on Youtube, Netflix, Amazon and devices only to finally realize that my idea of what's suitable doesn't have an equivalent rating.
There are so many safe for any age videos that have a bunch of kids with the worst, most cynical attitudes and no respect for authority and then wholesome shows with "intense emotion" or whatever that get rated tv-14.
So I download everything and put it on a USB hard drive hooked to a media hub.
I've got an Intel NUC I could do this with. Is there a video player app for iOS that kids could use (i.e. Interface isn't super complex), that'd play remote media?
Edit: Looked into this myself just now. VLC Streamer looks decent, as does Infuse by Firecore.
The inability to blacklist channels is a major PITA.
The Power of Block is powerful, and denial of it a major Internet dysfunction.
I do believe you can hack at Squid to intercept HTTPS and terminate if for you, as well as run filtering (Squidguard), also possibly Dansguardian. Though I've not fully researched this yet.
I occasionally hear people complaining about ads on youtube, but I have never seen a youtube ad aside from when random people try to show me a video on their computer. Do people just not use adblock+ any more?
You can't avoid the ads if they are presented as videos.
It's actually a cultural phenomenon of people making a living by buying toys and making you tube videos about them. You tube then pipes children's eyeballs to these videos.
I really just meant the "I left Facebook" posts have the same kind of feel as the old "I don't even own a TV" cliché, but yeah, I know what you mean as well, and it's a problem. I wish the YouTube Kids app let you optionally whitelist a set of channels instead of only allowing a blacklist. It's nice that you can block a video or a channel, but there are thousands of low-quality channels.
What a world.