This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
youtube? the place with free quality documentaries, free knowledge in the easiest to digest video form about a huge variety of topics? the spot where you can learn life skills, cooking, hobbies, maths, physics, programming, among many others, with visualised tutorials showing every part of every step with explenations?
what on earth is happening to the internet these days? absolute insanity
social media is shit and i get restricting twitter or tiktok, but youtube? it seems so bizarre to me
While all of that might be true, YouTube is also a for-profit cesspool of trash content, hate speech, and misinformation. An entire generation of gen z manosphere Nazi bootlickers got where they are watching "gaming videos" on YouTube.
It auto plays by default and their algorithms are dogshit, so you might start watching an educational video with your kid, but end up on a flat earth video fifteen minutes later, or much much worse.
When my son was younger, we severely limited his YouTube time and closely monitored what he was watching on it. Most parents don't do that.
I dislike legislation like this too, but we're not talking about PBS or a library here. Kids truly shouldn't be on YouTube unattended.
Parenting should stay with parents. The more power the government gets, the more they will abuse it. When companies are restricted, they will see this as an opportunity to better identify adults better.
The expression "it takes a village to raise a child" applies here. It's impossible for a parent to be with their child at all times. Children aren't always at home, and a lot of parents suck, don't care, or are just misinformed. YouTube is available everywhere, including at schools and libraries. Look at it like smoking. We recognize that cigarettes are dangerous and cause cancer, therefore children can't buy them. Social media companies - and let's stop pretending YouTube isn't social media, it very much is - are today's big tobacco. They need regulated, and not doing so is causing tremendous societal harm.
I understand parents can't be around their children 24/7. Companies and organizations have a lot of products already to restrict and limit internet access. Schools and libraries should use these tools as they or as their community sees fit.
If you want to compare it to tobacco products, the main difference is to identify as an adult all you need is an ID. One person at the cashier sees it and it's done. Online activity is more personal. It allows companies and social media to be even more toxic to adults by being able to identify adults better.
Also kids, no matter how restricted it is, will smoke if they wanted to. The same will happen with these social media restrictions excepts that adults will suffer. This will be only the beginning. More and more restrictions will come from this. That's just how governments work.
Red flags should go up automatically with these "save the children" laws.
What's the deal with gaming videos? Do game streamers tend to be Nazis? Seems like a strange place to push right-wing propaganda.
Look up gamergate and Steve Bannon. The gamer to Nazi pipeline is, unfortunately, very real.
Seems like a strange place to push right-wing propaganda.
Gamers are easy to rile up, already have exposure to a lot of counter culture language in VC, and generally young or ignorant enough that they can't see the obvious propaganda they're being fed. Add into that content creators that intermix rightwing talking points and you can slowly poison their minds into becoming Nazi shitbags.
As the other commenter mentioned, gamergate is where all this shit first came up, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't there with the people who fell for the poison. I was just aware enough of what I was seeing to pull away from that culture before it really poisoned my mind.
I think there's not much Nazi gamer shit out there because it's incredibly rare for any to slip into my recommendations.
But if I let YouTube go it would probably take me from normal people like anyaustin to hype people like xQc. And then from there all the popular people can show up, including asmonmold. And people like him are legit brain rot.
Edit: for overwhelming Nazi content in your feed, try gun YouTubers. I binged gun Jesus and nothing. Watched Brandon Herrera (spelling?) build aks and look at cursed weapon memes and somehow that means I'm a flaming Trumper.
Currently my kids can only watch YouTube on a shared account on the TV. They haven't been exposed to any of the gift stuff as far as I can tell but we do regularly weed the history and subscriptions to keep it vaguely on track. While each of the kids have their own favourite creators we also have found a number of educational and comedy channels we'll watch with them on the account.
The bigger challenge comes with homework as once in secondary school the teachers regularly link to YouTube videos as an intro to a particular homework topic. Although their accounts are registered as kids accounts under our indirect control I keep having to move their pc out of the restricted group on the router because for some reason Eero prevents some videos from playing which from my point of view are fine. I dread to think what parents who aren't comfortable debugging network failures do, probably drop restrictions all together in frustration.
I have struggled to filter with YouTube Kids what is allowed. The setup is default allow with channel denies (opposite of a good firewall), so I have taken to yt-dlp and Jellyfin to get around it. I don't agree with the law as written, but I get the intent. Parents should be more active in their kids's lives versus the state.
I get what you are saying and there is some great stuff on YouTube, but they do not do enough to moderate content or comments.
If they can't guarantee or even take reasonable steps to ensure content is safe then it gets treated the same as other social media.
I would put the blame with Alphabet not anyone else.
The degree to which some of you stick your heads in the sand is stunning. How do you even reply to this in good faith? Between the algorithms, mis/disinformation, propaganda, hate speech, bullying, and general bullshit, I don’t understand how someone can either be this naive or this fucking dishonest.
There is tons of useless and polarizing stuff on YouTube.
YT well known for radicalizing users. It as bad as ticktock or Instagram. there's a lot of quality educational content on public TV.
There's a lot of really bad slop on YouTube. Your algorithm might be curated to "documentaries", but that's far from the norm
it's mostly "curated" to long form video essays about random bullshit, but i see your point
YouTube is totally blocked for my son at home and on his phone and I myself avoid it as the plague as well. If he wants to learn stuff, I'm eager to buy him all the books he wants. The moderate amount of useful resources on YT is 100% available elsewhere, on less addictive platforms or media.
Youtube is the second largest Social Network
I never saw it that way I till I saw a report on what the preferred social media platforms for teens… and it was the number one slot at that time. Apparently teens (and others) have entire conversations in the comments, share videos with friends, and doom scroll YouTube.
And I don’t know if you’ve read YouTube comment threads (I don’t usually) but they can get pretty toxic, even on tame content. Not to mention all the FUD and propaganda being distributed there.
Elsagate
You can say all those same things about Xitter and TikTok.
The trend of using child abuse as argument to implement media control mechanisms, is dangerous for society. There, i said it.
I was thinking about this being wrong. But then I realized that parents can still grant access to YT for their children. However the unattended restriction age should be lower imo.
The problem is too many parents not supervising their children at all, and letting the algo make them go down in a truly despicable pile of shit of auto-play queues. My oldest one is six, and if I leave her alone on her tablet or the family room TV with YT, setting her on a path of kpop dance practice videos or some popular non-english kids show, if I check back half an hour later, sure enough the thematic changes from (likely with the help of recommended videos as well) to mindless marble/magnet builder videos, some yanky animated minecraft story or even worse.
So now imagine a kid that gets no supervision at all, and an impressionable youth without critical thinking is seeking answers and then believes whatever they are told by a late millennial just saying bogus shit for the views.
I am not sure what the right solution is, and this may not be it, but at least Australia is trying something. Let's see how it works out.
IMHO the best parental control is to disable the recommended videos sidebar on platforms like YT, be it via uBlock element hiding picker or via usercss.
And more geneeally, the browser setting a JS signal as well a CSS media query.
All this child safety is just because they don't want to do proper moderation. What about user safety? Scams and hate speech don't belong for adults either
Sure, but adults should make their own decisions. I don't know about you, but I don't want to live in a nanny state.
Oh boy, it's Online Safety Act 2: Electic Boogaloo! Get ready for:
...and much more!
Can someone explain what "Albanese" means, please? Obviously not Albanian, but I'm still confused.
edit: got it, his name is "Albanese"
Albanese is the name of the prime minister
Anthony Albanese is the name of Australia's prime minister.
Oh. Thanks. I'm not a native English speaker, but it seems the phrasing of "The Albanese Labor Government" is a bit unfortunate if you don't know that?
It's no different to saying "The Trump Repliblican Government".
I guess this was written for Australia.
It’s no different
But it is. Try to substitute "Albanese" for "Lebanese", maybe you'll understand what I mean.
I'm with you on this, and English is my first language. This feels like a foreign-to-australia sort of issue rather than a foreign-to-english one.
I would usually say this is bad, but with the ungodly amount of AI generated slop flooding YT this is good actually
I wager it isn't the 16 year olds making this.
Rare Australia W
How difficult would it be to mirror most popular youtube channels to peertube if instance operators picked a few channels each and kept them updated?
Wonderful. It’s already banned in my household.
You sound fun and I'm sure they're bypassing that...
They are not.
How can you be sure 🤔
They are, you just don't know it.
Source: your kids are geniuses when it comes to skirting around rules.
They are most definitely not. It’s pretty easy to put controls in place/control access to devices.
