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.
Yeah but TV isn’t much better.
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.
There are a lot of people here comparing youtube to TV. The thing with TV was it was hard to just watch it ALL day. Youtube /internet kids can be on it for 5-10 hours a day easy. There’s endless content, like all social media nowadays it is intended to keep you using as long as physically possible. Yeah there were people who rotted their brains watching TV all damn day, but it seemed much rarer than it is with kids who are given personal devices when they were toddlers.
I fear parents who don’t limit screen time are setting their kids up to become chronically anxious NEETs.
I am kind of glad I didn’t start wasting hours on Youtube till I was in high school
