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.
My opinion switches between the two sides on this issue. On one hand, i spent a lot of my time growing up watching tv and playing video games because my parents were working all of the time, so i had to take care of myself, which meant tv and microwave meals.
On the other hand, the kids i know who are being raised on it are also being raised by parents who don’t want their kids to go outside in fear they might get hurt or lost. This is gonna mess up the kids socially, and i don’t like the implications that’s gonna have.
Just watched like 45 seconds of that video. jesus fucking christ i feel so empty
What alarms me is the video games, and it makes me feel like a hypocrite because as a child I was exposed to the Columbine shootings.
I remember how badly the politicians wanted to blame Duke Nukem and Doom for the shooting. In those games you play some character who is being portrayed as a “good” guy stopping evil, whether it was the demons of hell or the corrupted state police.
Now every shooting video game targets the fellow man, Fortnite and every battle royal game is fighting your fellow man for these scarce resources in hopes of coming out on top. On top of that these war games are revising history to further obfuscate the youth.
I really like when Matt Christman challenges the idea that the youth is the future. I saw what millennials my age have done the moment the capitalists provide them with bread and circuses. The kids are not alright.
I really like when Matt Christman challenges the idea that the youth is the future. I saw what millennials my age have done the moment the capitalists provide them with bread and circuses. The kids are not alright.
I listened to an older ep just the other day where he goes off on how he finds the zoomers terrifying because they’re all “dead-eyed psycopaths” lmao
Meh, the math behind orbiting is pretty well understood. The issue is that we’ve found asteroids that could level a city or more after they’ve crossed our orbit. There’s simply not a many eyes out looking for them. Also the event of an impact is exceedingly rare. It’s far more likely that a serious climatic event will occur.
In the geologic record only the K-Pg extinction can be reliably attributed to an impactor. The rest seemed to have happened because volcanoes erupted and changed the climate very quickly. In fact the PT extinction, the worst known, experienced rapid warming and ocean acidification associated with the Siberian traps, a series of volcanoes in northern Russia. A lot of the symptoms of that extinction seem somewhat similar to today’s warming.
I mean, weren’t most Saturday morning cartoons in the 70s and 80s just elaborate ads for toys?
A lot of them yes, but some no. Especially on PBS, while the shows do have toys I don’t feel like that’s the primary purpose of the shows, instead education is. Some shows still definitely are US propaganda, but most are like “hey maybe don’t get angry and punch people,” or “hey some people are in wheelchairs, and they can still do things too, be inclusive”
I grew up on pbs and I am very thankful to my parents for making sure that happened. Almost everyone I know that watched pbs nearly exclusively is generally a nicer, smarker, and more thoughtful person.
A friend and I both watched a lot of PBS growing up. My friend only had an antenna, and before the switch to digital there were no channels that only showed re-runs and catheter commercials, so it was either PBS kids programming or soap operas.
I had basic cable and was alone for hours with my TV, so I’d channel surf and even as a small child I gravitated to watching PBS. But my other choices were Nickolodeon or Cartoon Network, not sexy Elsa or toy unboxing videos.
My own kids will only have access to a Plex server of PBS shows that focus on books (reading rainbow), history(Wishbone), animals (Kratts), being a good person (Mr Rogers, Sesame Street), etc. YouTube Kids is brain poison that ends up promoting individualism and consumerism.
