YouTube Kids is massively popular and also the actual worst content the world has to offer. The most successful content, racking up hundreds of millions of views, is extremely vapid and just consists of sounds and colours punctuated by disguised adverts for expensive toys. No narrative, no speech, nothing educational. Kids are so malleable and early development is so important, yet a sizeable chunk are watching people in knock-off Spider-Man costumes unwrap toys and chase around knock-off Elsas all day. I won’t even get into the unsettling uncanny valley side of things and the creepy procedurally generated animation on there.
I’m genuinely concerned about kids being brought up on what is essentially mental junk food through their most formative years. I’m not saying they all need to be listening to violin concertos all day, but I feel that when I was a kid straight up garbage like this didn’t even exist and every kids show had at least something you could learn from it, like Sesame Street, or was decently produced entertainment, like Pokemon. This has a quarter of a billion views and it’s just… nothing.
It’s what happens when you monetize childhood education in the absolute worst way (and there aren’t any good ways)
On one hand, you have a point.
On the other hand, this is exactly what people were saying about TV for decades, and I’m not convinced the difference is that big.
I’m aware it sounds boomer-brained, but I just don’t see how kids watching hours of straight up shit could be anything but detrimental. At least with TV there was a degree of quality control and, in most cases, at least some effort to make stimulating content. I’m hoping I’m proven wrong though.
TV is filled with advertisements for toys and anti-socialist propaganda. Not to mention how John Stossel got ABC and 20/20 to sponsor libertarian educational videos for schools, or how Prager U is making its way into the classroom. If TV is replaced with complete nonsense, like many of these YouTube videos, I’m not sure which is worse.
I presume there is a long-term study on the effects of this media on children - many parents, in the USA at least, use YouTube as a babysitter for children that are far too young. I’m interested in the effects on attention span, or how Youtuber is the most common career goal for kids now. I wonder how they will react after realizing it is very hard to make a living doing it in a saturated market.
how Youtuber is the most common career goal for kids now
This one isn’t too surprising. Kids don’t really know about career options (hence the need for career days), so when you ask them what they want to be they gravitate towards stuff that’s visible to them. This is part of why plenty of kids follow their parents’ career footsteps almost by default – it’s probably the job they have the most information about.
Barney was the hottest kid show when I was super young. It’s a dude in a mascot costume doing a bunch of nonsense on a single set. It was drek. Those cheap Disney Channel shows of the mid to late 2000s were super popular and absolute trash pablum. Pokemon was a commercial for the games, cards, toys and other merch through and through. Each episode is Ash meeting some new Pokemon that is available to buy in some way or another. Digimon was good slop however.
Going further back to the era of Hannah Barbara and FUNimation and the quality was lower. Kids have always had dump trucks of swill tossed on em.
Yes, the syringe spiderman pregnant Elsa surgery videos are going to be a lot of kids childhood memories and that’s creepy as fuck.
In amongst the vapid shit there’s a sizeable portion of actively harmful shit, usually focusing on Spiderman and/or Elsa and usually involving surgery, pregnancy, injections, toilets, dentistry and occasionally drug use and sexual content. It all feels procedurally generated and like fetish content at the same time, sometimes it’s cartoon and sometimes it features adult actors. It’s a very weird rabbit hole with lots of theories about where it’s coming from.
Before youtube cracked down on kids content there were really creepy videos that the algorithm was showing kids that had titles like that. Parents rightfully freaked out and youtube has attempted to get rid of the weird shit but predictably does a pretty bad job. Kids will still get weird shit every now and then. It’s really bizarre and creepy.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/youtube-for-kids-videos-problems-algorithm-recommend
Can’t believe people figuring out the six key phrases/images that will promote a video to the top of the algorithm would result in videos that are literally just compositions of those phrases/images without rhyme or reason.
Does China really have the capacity to employ 56% of its population as astronauts?
No, but that’s not the point. It’s the aspirations and hopes of the kids that let’s them have different plans and options as they get older. Not all of the US kids will always want to be you tubers, but the time spent there is time they could learn about another field that’s more interesting to them, which is more viable. This would be true even under socialism, as not everyone can be entertainers.
With China the students aspirations are more directly involved in math and the sciences, and specifically sciences which currently don’t have major military implications, it’s just doing experiments in space. (arguably changing, not the point). That can be more readily applied to other career paths and interests which can serve others.
Rich children showing off expensive toys.
A big part of “adult” youtube is exactly just that.
As a kid I liked watching ridiculous infomercials cuz they were stupidly funny, but instead of toys it was about knife kitchen and stupid house gadgets. But it was fun cuz I knew those bullshit were crap, and it was funny to look at them trying to sell it anyways.
