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.
The spider-man Elsa shit dosen’t have me too worried but what does have me worried is when those kids start hitting pre-teen and teen and start clicking on intellectual dark web shit and we have a whole new crop of young fascists.
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.
It’s what happens when you monetize childhood education in the absolute worst way (and there aren’t any good ways)
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.
We need an Adorno emote
