This thread is person after person saying “oh wow, person who sells terrible thing for humanity doesn’t let their kids have unlimited access to terrible thing! It’s so obvious. This isn’t news.”
The news is that the CEO of youtube is saying that Youtube is something that should be limited and he thinks harm will come to his children if he does not. This may be obvious to people on this site but a lot of normal people think it’s fine. It’s shocking as for a lot of people it’s more like “CEO of cucumber farm limits cucumbers for their child!” As that’s how Google markets youtube for kids.
Lots of parents limited their kids' TV (television, you know) time back in the day (mine sure did, thanks mum and dad, even though I didn't particularly approve of the restriction back then).
Now you have to limit smartphone (and tablet and PC and TV) time. Lots of parents do this already, CEOs are not alone.
The television set was never in every kids pocket, though.
And obviously "lol don't buy your kid a smartphone then lol". sure, easy to say, but the world is getting more and more connected.
Availability is definitely a factor, but I feel that a far more important aspect is that a YouTube feel is personalised. It's A/B testing you for weeks on end, and has a pretty good idea of how to get maximum engagement. TV was never this targeted, nor was there feedback to ratchet up what it suggested to you.
Kids don’t stand a chance against decades of data/research and billions of dollars weaponized against human psychology to garner as much of your attention as possible at all times.
Kids should own a device with "adult" bit set to 0, so that they can only use government-approved applications and sites. Why government? Because parents are too lazy or dumb to configure anything and 90% will just let their children access whatever they want and the rest 10% will feel like losers who cannot watch the things all their classmates are allowed to watch.
What happens when the kid eventually becomes an adult? They have to buy a new device? That seems like an really great way to create a bunch of unnecessary e-waste.
Also, letting Big Daddy Government control what we show the kids has got to be one of the worst ideas I've heard. Propaganda machines that parents have no power over? No thanks. That seems like the most likely outcome of this sort of measure. Next thing you know, every computer will also have a "activist" and "journalist" bit; once you normalize role-based access controls, the catgories will only ever expand.
Ehhh I’m more of a “hybrid model” guy myself. I do think the government should be more involved in regulating what these companies can do to us and how they can use our data, but I’m not really in to your vision of how involved they are in apps directly (imagine that kind of power with the Trump administration).
Meanwhile I do think parents should not be expected to literally handle every element of this because it’s just not possible to have eyes on every bit of media/entertainment/etc our kids can find. That being said it is our responsibility to educate our kids on some level, so we can’t just expect to pass the buck entirely to external systems. I do think it’s reasonable to expect some basic guardrails though.
Needs to be a little bit of effort and restriction across the board.
To me it seems like basic parenting to limit access to tech.
It wasn’t healthy for kids to just play video games every day for 5hrs straight after school in the 90s either. But that also doesn’t mean they should never have had a PlayStation or all gaming is bad.
The research on video games indicates that it tends to enhance certain skills like spatial awareness and reflex time. They're also pretty decent social / competitive outlets.
The research on social media indicates that it lowers attention span and increases anxiety, depression, and anger. And my personal opinion is it's the reason we're seeing crazy things that I can't fathom happening without it like the measles resurgence.
Neither should be used for 5 hours a day but the consequences don't seem comparable to me. The only place they do align is you should probably be exercising more instead.
I personally think Youtube itself is just fine. It has parental controls and I can block channels etc.
What isn't fine is YOUTUBE FUCKING SHORTS. It's by far the worst of the infinite content producers in the world because automated uploads are so easy compared to the other platforms and there is no way to block it completely from kids without just banning all of Youtube. It _needs_ to have a separate setting.
It's a responsibility, probably (definitely, I think, but minimally probably) the most important job and responsibility one can have. If you're on HN, then you likely recognize the brain rotting effect of social media without moderation, and if that's the case, your responsibility is to parent to the minimum amount that you moderate your kids' usage.
honest question - do you really think that (most) parents do not know that it is bad?! This “CEO” stuff is not new, Steve Jobs famously said the same thing about his own devices…
Seems like a pathetic appeal to authority to me. Why should I care what weird idiosyncrasies billionaires have? I'm sure they have tons of things they don't want their children learning that a lot of people would consider to be trivial. In my mind this goes back to whether you model children as property that you own or individual humans you're hoping to introduce to the world in the best way you understand how. It sucks that other people's children are going to youtube to turn off their brains. But my kids are excelling because of it and similar services. My girls are constantly trying new things because of what they see on social media and youtube. My 12 year old daughter already plays flute, violin and cello but wants to pick up the saxophone because of content she has consumed. We get everything from weird science experiments to a desire to try sewing or knitting. When people talk about the "dangers" of the internet and social media I struggle to understand what they mean because it's always been an enabler to me to excel. Somewhere along the way so called "hackers" wanted to create safe spaces to completely isolate their children from any variables the world can throw at them and I just cannot understand the mentality.
All ages benefit from time-limited exposure to social media. We have a term for it now: brainrot. Fully convinced it is the cigarettes of our generation: ubiquitous enough to be pervasive despite negative externalities.
I think it’s a mistake to put even teen social media use in the same category as screens for young kids, and I suspect most problems are from the latter.
3 things should be studied:
screens for kids (regardless of app), short-form video for teens, and non-short-form peer-group social media (what teens had from 2008-2015 or so). I bet we’ll see very different impacts from each.
> I think it’s a mistake to put even teen social media use in the same category as screens for young kids
Dangerous for different reasons. Unregulated screen time for young kids teaches their brain to expect stimulation at all times, and will usually increase their discomfort when they don't have it.
We try really hard to limit screen time to a couple times a week for max 30-45 minutes. Nothing saddens me more than seeing a totally content kid in public being sat down and handed a screen as the default (because it's 'easier' for the parent), depriving them of enjoying the world. Also see a lot of young kids who will cry and cry until they get it.
In schools there should be a class about safe internet use and it should be mandatory to write an essay about the benefits children get personally from using social media as well as the downsides.
Saying this as a current high school student: there should be as few mandatory classes as possible. Your maths, sciences, and Englishes make sense. In Ontario, we also have to take French (bit more iffy, but I guess it's an official language), Civics (fluff), careers (more fluff), and technology and the skilled trades (I like technology, but still fluff). The more classes you stuff into school that don't relate to what a student wants to pursue, the more disengaged they become. Ironically, if this were a class, I, and most others would be on our phones for pretty much all of it.
There has been for like 15 years. At least around here, well withouth the essay. I'm not sure what the essay would do, it would be written by a LLM anyway. Don't worry, LLM usage and risks is the next class we're beginning to teach as a society. Of course my own generation won't get that, so we're going to be fun "boomers" that way.
I don't think this is what you really meant, but the way this is worded I strongly disagree. What you wrote implies everyone should be exposed to social media, just in a limited fashion. No exposure is still an option that would probably be ideal for most people.
I do strongly agree with the cigarette analogy though. I have actually said before that I think we would all be better off if social media use was both legally and socially treated like smoking. (Not to say I think we should be age gating websites because that opens a whole other can of worms, but it would probably be better for societal mental health if we did).
Screen time features exist on most devices. Parents - please set them up. It doesn’t take a lot of effort. I limit my kids for 1/2 hr of screen time per day. I exclude apps like iMessage, phone and maps.
Yeah - they do ask for more time here and there. But it’s pretty well controlled and they adjust to it
Personally (as parent of two high schoolers) I think leaving texting unmanaged is wild. We block social media apps (Snap, IG, etc) and also regular media (YT, Netflix, Disney+, Tubi, etc). Social media because of toxic content and regular media because of distractions. We limit messaging app time to 30min/day, whether it's SMS/RCS, Whatsapp, Telegram, or something else.
By far the most distracting thing for kids is persistent notifications. Snap is the worst for this, but messaging apps are a close second.
Apple’s screen time parental settings are some of the most obtuse and frustrating features I’ve had to navigate on their devices (so much, that I honestly wonder if the people behind it even have kids).
I’m glad they exist but they could be so much better.
My son is too young to use a phone but I plan to use screentime when he’s ready for a phone.
I use screen time for myself, with a 1minute limit for weekdays and 1 hour limit for weekends, for all social media, news and media consumption apps, and my wife has the password (because I have zero self control)
Younger kids are happy to hit the one more minute button for hours to continue doing what they are doing in one minute increments. Older kids are happy to download the shadiest weirdest browsers you haven't explicitly blocked and keep them uninstalled by running them directly from the dmg without dragging them over to the applications folder.
Do you not find unrestricted iMessages to be problematic? Dont groups and content sharing in them end-up fomenting a similar doomscroll dynamic as access to other content rich apps?
Not a whole lot of doomscrolling. There is more engagement - but I’ve resigned to the fact that it’s how kids communicate. For example - if they need to discuss homework or projects or even something simple as plan for boba tea.
I’d rather they walk to their friends’ place. But now they make the plan and then walk to where they need to be.
Sorry, but that's where you're wrong (at least, if you mean enforcing effective limits). What you're asking is for parents to spend their scarce time and energy on fighting a technical battle, against a system that is designed to capture attention, and kids with nothing but energy and time.
>But it’s pretty well controlled and they adjust to it
Or they did 10 seconds of googling and have all the access they want.
On that note, I'm happy to let my daughter play switch, because it has the best system for limiting screentime that I've see to date. I can set a limit, and then I can increase that limit for the day or lock it down again, remotely from the app. Very streamlined experience, clearly made by someone with user experience. In comparison, on iOS the system is janky and the Chromecast it's close to broken (and feels like abandonware).
Switch is an overall better choice for kids anyway, lots of kid friendly high quality games and they can even get some exercise in (switch sports, warioware, fitness boxing, Mario tennis)
Ye and Zuckerberg plugs the laptop mic with a dud cable.
I guess most parents try to limit screen time. But some have a hard time doing it since it is a great babysitter.
I try to do a total blockade of YT at home for kids. Watching other kids be hypnothized by the feed years ago was enough. The algorithm seems to converge to unboxing videos and surreal spam.
> But some have a hard time doing it since it is a great babysitter.
We should be clearer on what it means. An iPad will satisfy their need for stimulation but not their developmental emotional and social needs, nor their fine motor skills and executive functioning skills (and it likely harms the latter two, unlike old-school toys). Boredom and non-excessive stimulation levels are essential to letting the child’s inner world develop. Giving young kids iPads so they’ll be quiet is a normalized form of neglect.
It's worse, iPads don't satisfy the simulation but instead create a harmful dependency on it. I'll go as far to say that giving young kids iPads is a form of abuse that doesn't get called out.
Significant emotional neglect will put you in the 1st or 2nd decile of emotional health. It can make you a total train wreck. I don’t think every bad thing needs to be abuse.
iPads are so easy to lockdown though, Apple did a good job on their parental controls. Roblox is the main brain stealer these days with a horrible social component, we only give our kid an hour a week now and even Thats probably too much.
In this occurrence I mean "distract the kids with something such that they don't hurt them self, fight or destroy stuff so the parent can do X" such as doing the disches or resting.
Not like, great at raising the kids in some moral sense. In which YT etc is terrible.
I cheat on fancy restaurants and might hand the kids some screen (not YT) to give us a chance to finnish the meal. Stuff like that, but overused.
Harm is a spectrum, but being able to sit still, and not harm yourself and destroy things, is a skill kids need to learn and using an iPad for that can stunt their growth.
Sure I agree. I am trying to understand parents that capitulate. I think it mainly is a stamina and mental energy issue. Like those parents that give kids too much kandy too handle outbursts short term or something.
> Giving young kids iPads so they’ll be quiet is a normalized form of neglect.
I'd say it's closer to outright abuse. One of the better things you can do is a parent is seek out a community where this sort of thing is frowned upon. It's much harder to control when those around you think it's ok. I wish that were easier for people to find.
A lot of parents also drug their kids A LOT to get them to behave the way they want, sleep the way they want. "Kids melatonin", Benadryl, essential oils (plenty of which DO have some drug effect though not often what is claimed)
An iPad addiction is arguably better than being sedated so you don't bother your parents.
What they're saying is these folks don't trust the privacy of their hardware, they use a dud cable to block the microphone from listening.
I think what they're getting at is people close to the situation (not sure why Ye is in the privacy discussion, but Zuck certainly is) don't trust the controls in place.
Do you think the Pfizer CEO lets their kids have unlimited Viagra? Or the Anheuser-Busch CEO's kids have unlimited Bud Light? I don't think this is the gotcha it's painted as.
The hypocrisy is not because they are limiting access to their kids.
It is because they are limiting access to their kids, while actively creating and executing algorithms to increase user engagement even to the point of making people addictive and dependent on their platforms.
And the reason is that those products are (rightly) regulated. Would there be beer marketed to kids if it were legal? Would it be fine if it were the parents' sole responsibility to ensure their kids weren't drinking beer, including at school, at friends' homes where the parents may have different rules, etc., absent a general social consensus that kids shouldn't have beer?
This is anecdotal evidence for the emerging consensus that social media is bad for you and especially for kids. There's a legitimate question whether the people pushing these products know this and don't care or actively suppress evidence.
Tobacco companies famously did this and it caused a lot of harm. It's about that more than just a chance for a cheap shot "hypocrisy" accusation.
I think social media has clear positive and negative aspects. That makes it closer to food than cigarettes in my mind.
We can all immediately conjure up images where food or social media has brought something positive into our lives.
News.yc is something I visit almost every day and it has added value to my life, including introducing me to a few people I’ve met in real life and to interesting tech.
Equally, we can all pretty readily conjure up images where excess food or social media has harmed people.
Indeed, it's still not exactly clear what the right place of social media in society is. Perhaps we could even get rid of some of its pernicious aspects without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Even food is not unregulated! And not because too much food is bad for you, but because bad food can harm you.
A disanalogy with food is that there are natural limits to how much food you can/want to eat at one time. Another is that food is necessary for life. Neither is true of social media.
It’s hypocrisy insofar as neither Viagra nor Bud Light has a child demographic in their market. The CEOs of those companies don’t let their kids have them because they’re not for kids; YouTube designates at least some its product as for kids.
(In this way, it would be hypocrisy if Anheuser-Busch’s executive suite were all teetotalers.)
It’s always some other persons poor kid in their imagination with bad parents.
Basically the only solutions I see suggested is some world where all tech companies in multiple countries band together to ban kid/teens from the internet or that government will start aggressively controlling access to the internet.
A big movement to have better education on parenting with tech and evolving via cultural changes is hard. Writing a law sounds simple.
Their point is that despite being the designers of such systems, they prevent their own children from using them. Akin to a drug dealer not consuming what he sells.
>“We do limit their time on YouTube and other platforms and other forms of media. On weekdays we tend to be more strict, on weekends we tend to be less so. We’re not perfect by any stretch,”
>He stressed “everything in moderation” is what works best for him and his wife, and that extends to other online services and platforms.
>YouTube’s former CEO Susan Wojcicki, also barred her children from browsing videos on the app, unless they were using YouTube Kids. She also limited the amount of time they spent on the platform.
So they're not completely banning their kids from using YouTube. The current YouTube CEO uses a time limit. The previous YouTube CEO uses a time limit and limits usage to the YouTube Kids app.
The issue is that the business models of these platforms (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, tik tok) are based on maximizing engagement. And maximizing engagement in this context means spending ever increased amounts of time on one platform over another or over doing offline activities like reading a book and going outside.
So the tech leaders preach moderation but the design of all these apps are built to be addictive and to maximize the time that other people and other people’s kids spend on it. It seems to be poor kids who have overworked stressed parents who seem to spend the largest chuck of time endlessly scrolling on these apps harming their minds and mental health and so on
That’s because internet addiction isn’t sufficiently taken seriously as a society, even for adults. We haven’t fully adapted properly to this reality on a social level because it’s very new so people are panicking. It will eventually become standard parenting and as far as I can tell it already is becoming standard. More adults need to look at their own behaviour to fix their kids.
Every cellphone already comes with the ability to limit those things. It doesn’t require coming home from work early to toggle parental controls at a certain time.
My kids aren’t allowed on YouTube. I run a local system that mirrors approved channels to our home server and serves them through Plex. Creators lose ad revenue; that’s unfortunate. The alternative was nonstop ads on children’s content and a recommendation system pushing garbage. That trade-off was unacceptable.
I always think if I had kids this is how I'd do it also. I'm an adult who I think has fairly decent critical thinking skills and also is familiar with the state of technology etc etc. Well, I was following the news on 3I/ATLAS and I caught myself watching a youtube channel that I genuinely thought was Michio Kaku, I'd heard him talk once and it sounded and looked like him, so I put it on, switch tabs and listen as I work. I didn't notice it was AI (in retrospect I should have) but after a couple of days of watching it, I started to think...either this guy is worse than Avi Lobe or this channel is fake, the channel was fake and the content was, probably.. 2 or 3 steps removed from reality.
Regarding ads, wouldn't YouTube Premium solve that? Regarding recommendations, YouTube kids allows you to select certain videos, channels, or collections, and only allow your kids to view those that you've selected.
> I run a local system that mirrors approved channels to our home server and serves them through Plex. Creators lose ad revenue; that’s unfortunate.
Have your home server note when the kids are watching one of your mirrored channels and launch a browser on a computer the kids cannot see that is watching the same video on YouTube without an ad blocker.
The video creators then get exactly the same ad revenue and view counts they would have gotten had the kids used YouTube.
Same here as well as for other streaming. They want to watch the show more than a couple times, I’ll download it. No way I let my kids get brainwashed by these people with their weird algorithms they don’t understand themselves.
Those ads are optional. You can just pay for it. Its actually pretty good value for the money.
Edit: I forgot to mention Family Link. Once you have a family membership (maybe even before?) You can also use Googles family link to enable a restricted mode that hides adult content for specific accounts.
You actually get a pretty great experience for the whole family for about $20/month.
Ads are only half the problem. The real problem with kids using YouTube is it's too easy for them to access any of the content on the platform.
If I could pay YouTube for the privilege of using an app where I choose exactly which videos are available, and no other video will ever appear on or can be accessed from that app, then I might pay for it.
IMO the only way YouTube can be kid-friendly is if there is an app where the primary utility is the ability to whitelist on a per video basis. There could be convenience methods like whitelisting an entire channel's videos with one action, but the whitelist needs to be built around a per video model.
Last I checked, they had nothing remotely like this as an option.
I can't speak for your adolescents, but my kids make generally good decisions. I don't relate to the kids are stupid automatons with no agency or valid opinion mindset that is so prevalent with HN contributors. If your kids would only ever pick junk food, maybe that is a reflection on you more than them?
I myself was recently an adolescent, and still know many adolescents myself. My take is coming from my anecdotal experience, and the behaviour I've observed from my peers. Perhaps your kids don't show that side of them in front of you? I know my peers and I certainly didn't go out of our way to advertise such activities to our parents when we were younger.
That misses the point by a mile and a half: nobody let's their children eat unlimited amounts of chocolate. They do, however, let their children access Tiltok, Youtube, etc.
Except that's not true. Plenty of parents let their kids have unlimited access to junk food and candy. Neighbor kids come over and they don't know what to do because I only have water, fruit, and pretzels. I have been to so many parent's houses who have whole pantries of just sugary snacks.
I wanted to eat unlimited junk food when I was a kid but my parents wouldn't let me.
You can change it even to unlimited protein shakes. It is the same point. It is almost like kids are kind of stupid if you let them do whatever they want.
could you highlight what in the original article made you think they were banning their kids from social media entirely? or were you trying to explain something else?
Although I hate social media with a passion and would be fine if the government banned it outright, I don’t think this is a fair reading.
Do toy manufacturers let their kids play with their toys 24 hours a day and not go outside or do homework? Video game devs? Parents are supposed to help their kids limit their time in everything.
There are actually some pretty big risks especially in terms of like motor development, and considering now they’re adding a splash of AI to everything and a ton of toys have screens, well.
You don’t have to put your kids in front of a TV or tablet. You can simply establish boundaries and leave them to themselves. They will engage in imaginative play for hours on end just like kids have for thousands of years.
Source: my kids have been doing it since 5AM while I lay in bed sick.
You’re the one bringing the conversation back to superficials (blaming society and stuff you have no control over) instead of digging deeper. You don’t need to be rich or stay-at-home to talk to your kids or read books to them, which an increasing fraction of parents don’t do. Restricting tech use is common-sense and free. Books are cheaper than an iPad for each kid.
I’m from Europe. We have early childcare. Kindergarten teachers (I don’t know if that’s the right term) are still seeing obvious issues with screens and really neglected kids that the parents barely interact with. Don’t try to reduce everything issue down to one, the world can face multiple issues simultaneously. So can we talk about tech addiction in kids and parents without changing the topic to a different one?
You also have to think deeper than that, media in the west is propaganda, you have to ask why are they all pushing the "children are in danger from social media" narrative? You should never make the mistake to be so naive to trust in their genuine good intentions, this has nothing to do with children.
The real purpose is to build broad consensus for surveillance, control and censorship of social media, "to protect the children" is the thing they tell you to justify it. They are recognizing they have lost the narrative control. How do you manufacture consent for war and genocide when you have completely lost young people, they see the wall of carnage and dead children and will not be persuadable by the legacy media telling them to close their eyes and ears.
I've certainly spent a lot of my life on social media - even as a child. It's just that back then the media was the forum that my friends and I ran; the other forums we talked on; and then later the video-games we played. There certainly is an increase in the amount of addictiveness now of the feed. I was always easily addicted to writing and reading a lot of online text (a lot of which was just garbage on both sides) but the habit seems stronger now. I wonder what changed. I'm trying a couple of experiments: one is to reduce engagement bait stuff by blocking users who say it; and the other is to try to end infinite-feeds.
I think I have a desire to 'correct' other people and a desire to 'complete' the feed. If I can eliminate these two, I wonder if I can reduce the problem.
Just throw it out of the window. I'm not going to give my 6y son access to a smart phone until he is much older, ideally when he is in senior high school. The only issue is that his future friends may not have the same idea, so it's going to be extremely difficult when he grows older. Fortunately we have a mobile ban in the school, so at least they know this is not a good thing.
The problem with this approach is their peers. Prohibition culture does not work if it’s so easy to access it elsewhere. My parents learned this when they tried to restrict video games strictly to the weekends when I was a kid haha!
I find having conversations with parents at school and the parents of their friends leads to the best results (so far, I’ve only been at it a few years for my kiddos so we’ll see I guess longterm). If you’re all vaguely on the same page it just seems to make things a little easier. If that’s not an option, then just don’t be the first person to buy one and when all their peers start having certain technology you give them access too, but you sit down and talk to them about it or find ways to restrict the faucet.
For instance, when it became clear YouTube was not going to be completely eradicated from my house, I just ripped a few videos and added them to my Plex server. They get to watch a little bit of nonsense content, but they’re not just getting flooded with more of it constantly (or ads). As a result those YT videos are just one among several things they watch. It isn’t special or all consuming.
Video games have also been interesting. Most of the parents I know have, like me, adopted to use older stuff and/or just not let them get on the Internet.
Ultimately at some point you have to do some combination of “controlling the faucet,” watching what your kids are watching so you know what’s going on, and ultimately educating them/giving them context to the media they are enjoying.
Yeah we are doing that now. But I don’t know what to do if all his peers are on social media. I already know some of his friends have extensive screen time — their parents don’t care.
> The only issue is that his future friends may not have the same idea, so it's going to be extremely difficult when he grows older.
Third grade and it’s already happening: My kid has already had trouble in his social circle at school because we made him cut back his Roblox time by a lot. It’s not even that anyone plays at school, but supposedly almost all the boys (and many girls) are playing after school.
My son has a friend that went the sports route. He is always trying to sneak Roblox screen time when he is over on a play date and when my kid goes over to his house, his parents are very strict about no screen time and they have a great time.
It’s still up to the parent to enforce limitations even if you can distract them with other things.
Yeah we are doing that. And I added camping and hiking into the game. The problem is, we need to find other parents that share the same mind, but I’m too shy to reach out:/
Just ban it. My kid is in that age group and roblox is banned. Her feelings on the matter are irrelevant. I don't know why people hand wring about "oh they'll be left out". Oh well? I'm a millennial. I remember being just a poor kid at a school with kkds much wealthier than me. There were a lot of things my friends had that I didn't. Like a cellphone. I wasn't in the group chats and somehow I still survived.
My kid is disappointed, but it's fine. She has friends play the games she does have and she has a lot of other games. She had a lot of other ways to socialize with them. I honestly don't see roblox as different than any other social fad. Roblox is just the default digital hangout spot for kids, but it doesn't have to be for your kid's friend circle.
My guess is your kid is a little older than mine. Do you find she has actually adhered to the ban? Or do you think she plays it with her friends when you’re not around (such as at their homes)?
YouTube Kids itself has a parental locked section where you can set a timer. The rest just don’t feel like they’re meant for kids at all. And that leaves adolescents in such a vulnerable spot.
The kids or non kids distinction is irrelevant. It’ll be clear once most of the world implements child block (which I personally disagree with). They’re gonna get decimated.
My kid found work arounds for that. For example she reset the ipad's clock to give herself more time. It really is like a drug to these children and they will lash out at you if you take it away.
The problem with this is you’re creating a dichotomy. Some apps have good content that could be consumed indefinitely, which is beyond the scope of these controls.
Simplest example to point this out is if the parental controls only had things to limit phone usage generally without per app controls.
Yeah I just took it away from her and she no longer lashes out at me like a crack addict trying to bargain for her fix, that's been a much better move for both of us I've found.
Exactly, it's a to easy to when people go "Simply set boundaries", "just do this", "use this". A lot of parents don't have a resources, either in terms of mental, energy, resource, knowledge and what not to fight and protect their children from things that are designed to be addictive, hell most of them are stuck in the same hell as their kids.
Not acknowledging that this stuff is hard, and being made unnecessarily hard by commercial interest show a lack of understand and respect for the situations. These also aren't bad parents, they try, but it's an uphill battle for many.
People give this excuse but somehow I feel like they would be less charitable if it was any othet addictive thing. "Oh, Timmy had a drinking problem at 13? Well we can't blame the parents. They don't have the mental or emotional strength to keep their kid out of the liquor cabinet. How ever could they know about locks?" That's what this feels like to me. As someone who is watching this happen in real time with my kid's peers, a lot parents just don't want to be bothered. And that's their right, but setting up the parental controls baked into all these devices is dead simple. They could, but they don't want to deal with whining or the exception moments. That's their right as a parent, but I don't subscribe to the "poor exhausted parents" theory when they had enough energy to buy these devices and set them up for the kid to use in the first place. It's a couple more minutes to enable the parent controls.
I don’t think this idea is that controversial? Most (?) people would agree watching YouTube 16 hrs a day is bad, but agree there is also a benefit to some of the content available.
It's almost as if ... being able to download specific content for offline viewing ... might be a far preferable option in terms of selection, control, and not getting sucked into an algorithmic wormhole.
Or perhaps that algorithms are just a scapegoat for the ignorant and superstitious and yet another example of the oh so trendy serf mentality that takes no responsibility for their own life and its progreession.
The world is going to be underwater in a couple decades and we're fighting the world's biggest companies from eviscerating children's public education. It's not looking good.
If there's any lesson to come from this (ha, learning) it's that we need to stop venerating successful business people. It turns out they're just people who like money and don't think about the consequences of their actions.
We parents are in a constant war with screen use by our children. It causes a cognitive dependence that is translated to a chemical one (dopamine etc). I don't blame the mega corps and their CEOs, they are legal money makers not cultural leaders. We are winning and losing battles everyday and that depends on factors like child temperament and age, school, peers etc. I believe my children will thank me for that later.
Somehow we've not had the problem (yet). They get bored quickly and self-limit themselves, though we reserve the right to look at what they're up to whenever we see fit. Having lots of extracurricular activities might be helping, but my introverted, nerdy self spent way more time glued to a CRT as a teen. Hmm, maybe that's the secret.. having a nerd for a dad makes tech look uncool! :-D
"Recommendations" should be optional. I can recall early days of "recommendation engines". Never thought it would lead to this
The "algorithmic feeds" in Facebook, YouTube are greed-based
No user ever asked for them. They could be optional. But they are mandatory. A significant amount of user control is transferred to the company. ByteDance took this even further, arguably it has 100% control. Now Facebook and YouTube, and others, all have some form of this, rolls, shorts, whatever
What's interesting is the companies, no matter what the harm alleged to stem from the "algorithmic feeds", will not back down on "recommending" content. No compromise
I think that's telling. Perhaps traffic would plummet, stock price would tank
No one should be surprised by the legislation this had spurned
Does it really matter? Even if a billionaire’s kid gets hooked on Coca-Cola or social media, they still have vastly more resources (therapy, education, support) to overcome it. Meanwhile, kids in underprivileged communities don’t get that safety net. For CEOs like Zuckerberg or Coca-Cola’s leadership, that disparity is just a small price to pay for the profits their products generate.
It's part of the parental responsibility to provide enough structure and instill enough discipline to your kids so that they grow to be complete persons. Sure it will be nice if social media was restricted like tobacco, and I am sure one day it will, but you can't relegate all responsibility for everything to the state. I don't want to live in a bubble wrapped society for the sake of the children.
All Waldorf schools aren’t created equal, but things I’ve seen are anti-vax beliefs, hard belief in mystical karmic stuff, a sort of groupthink that encourages conformity and obedience and shunning of people who question authority, and (and this one is really strange IMO) a prohibition on fantasy play among the children (eg you aren’t allowed to pretend you’re running a restaurant and your friends are guests —- for reasons of crackpottery).
The problem with spaces like this is that manipulative people easily take over the rudder for the whole school combined with that it attracts a certain kind of free-thinking and liberal people who get wooed in and enable it all.
Edit: there is a Swedish documentary about one of the schools my brother went to.
The planet doesn’t operate under the same time zone and that’d be easy to bypass. Just take your kids phone away or set up parental screen time or network controls.
This thread is person after person saying “oh wow, person who sells terrible thing for humanity doesn’t let their kids have unlimited access to terrible thing! It’s so obvious. This isn’t news.”
The news is that the CEO of youtube is saying that Youtube is something that should be limited and he thinks harm will come to his children if he does not. This may be obvious to people on this site but a lot of normal people think it’s fine. It’s shocking as for a lot of people it’s more like “CEO of cucumber farm limits cucumbers for their child!” As that’s how Google markets youtube for kids.
Lots of normal people don't think it's fine.
Lots of parents limited their kids' TV (television, you know) time back in the day (mine sure did, thanks mum and dad, even though I didn't particularly approve of the restriction back then).
Now you have to limit smartphone (and tablet and PC and TV) time. Lots of parents do this already, CEOs are not alone.
The television set was never in every kids pocket, though. And obviously "lol don't buy your kid a smartphone then lol". sure, easy to say, but the world is getting more and more connected.
Availability is definitely a factor, but I feel that a far more important aspect is that a YouTube feel is personalised. It's A/B testing you for weeks on end, and has a pretty good idea of how to get maximum engagement. TV was never this targeted, nor was there feedback to ratchet up what it suggested to you.
Kids don’t stand a chance against decades of data/research and billions of dollars weaponized against human psychology to garner as much of your attention as possible at all times.
Kids should own a device with "adult" bit set to 0, so that they can only use government-approved applications and sites. Why government? Because parents are too lazy or dumb to configure anything and 90% will just let their children access whatever they want and the rest 10% will feel like losers who cannot watch the things all their classmates are allowed to watch.
What happens when the kid eventually becomes an adult? They have to buy a new device? That seems like an really great way to create a bunch of unnecessary e-waste.
Also, letting Big Daddy Government control what we show the kids has got to be one of the worst ideas I've heard. Propaganda machines that parents have no power over? No thanks. That seems like the most likely outcome of this sort of measure. Next thing you know, every computer will also have a "activist" and "journalist" bit; once you normalize role-based access controls, the catgories will only ever expand.
Ehhh I’m more of a “hybrid model” guy myself. I do think the government should be more involved in regulating what these companies can do to us and how they can use our data, but I’m not really in to your vision of how involved they are in apps directly (imagine that kind of power with the Trump administration).
Meanwhile I do think parents should not be expected to literally handle every element of this because it’s just not possible to have eyes on every bit of media/entertainment/etc our kids can find. That being said it is our responsibility to educate our kids on some level, so we can’t just expect to pass the buck entirely to external systems. I do think it’s reasonable to expect some basic guardrails though.
Needs to be a little bit of effort and restriction across the board.
By our generations “best and brightest”, supposedly.
At least, most well compensated.
Shame on you, if you work for these organisations.
Plus a lot of the times there was nothing interesting to watch on TV even if you did have it in front of you.
What is a better way to get your kids to behave than to let them scroll TikTok with headphones on for hours? Phone is a babysitter nowadays.
To me it seems like basic parenting to limit access to tech.
It wasn’t healthy for kids to just play video games every day for 5hrs straight after school in the 90s either. But that also doesn’t mean they should never have had a PlayStation or all gaming is bad.
The research on video games indicates that it tends to enhance certain skills like spatial awareness and reflex time. They're also pretty decent social / competitive outlets.
The research on social media indicates that it lowers attention span and increases anxiety, depression, and anger. And my personal opinion is it's the reason we're seeing crazy things that I can't fathom happening without it like the measles resurgence.
Neither should be used for 5 hours a day but the consequences don't seem comparable to me. The only place they do align is you should probably be exercising more instead.
I personally think Youtube itself is just fine. It has parental controls and I can block channels etc.
What isn't fine is YOUTUBE FUCKING SHORTS. It's by far the worst of the infinite content producers in the world because automated uploads are so easy compared to the other platforms and there is no way to block it completely from kids without just banning all of Youtube. It _needs_ to have a separate setting.
Hacker News is not representative of the average person in often very bad ways.
So you kinda saying youtube for kids should limit itself to N hours per day per IP address / device?
Perhaps australia should’ve implemented such limitations. Burden of enforcement on big tech since the have billions to spend anyway.
It's also person after person telling people to parent harder.
It's a responsibility, probably (definitely, I think, but minimally probably) the most important job and responsibility one can have. If you're on HN, then you likely recognize the brain rotting effect of social media without moderation, and if that's the case, your responsibility is to parent to the minimum amount that you moderate your kids' usage.
Yep. And people parent harder by banning social media entirely. Problem solved!
this is exactly what hard parenting is all about. I do “as long as you under my roof…” bit (6 more years to go…) :)
I think the problem is that parents don't know that it's bad so they don't limit but this CEO apparently knows! Many parents are addicts themselves
honest question - do you really think that (most) parents do not know that it is bad?! This “CEO” stuff is not new, Steve Jobs famously said the same thing about his own devices…
I doubt “a lot of people” think spending all day watching YouTube is fine; this sounds hyperbolic.
Studies on screen time with toddlers and infants don’t paint a rosy picture on it.
Seems like a pathetic appeal to authority to me. Why should I care what weird idiosyncrasies billionaires have? I'm sure they have tons of things they don't want their children learning that a lot of people would consider to be trivial. In my mind this goes back to whether you model children as property that you own or individual humans you're hoping to introduce to the world in the best way you understand how. It sucks that other people's children are going to youtube to turn off their brains. But my kids are excelling because of it and similar services. My girls are constantly trying new things because of what they see on social media and youtube. My 12 year old daughter already plays flute, violin and cello but wants to pick up the saxophone because of content she has consumed. We get everything from weird science experiments to a desire to try sewing or knitting. When people talk about the "dangers" of the internet and social media I struggle to understand what they mean because it's always been an enabler to me to excel. Somewhere along the way so called "hackers" wanted to create safe spaces to completely isolate their children from any variables the world can throw at them and I just cannot understand the mentality.
All ages benefit from time-limited exposure to social media. We have a term for it now: brainrot. Fully convinced it is the cigarettes of our generation: ubiquitous enough to be pervasive despite negative externalities.
I think it’s a mistake to put even teen social media use in the same category as screens for young kids, and I suspect most problems are from the latter.
3 things should be studied: screens for kids (regardless of app), short-form video for teens, and non-short-form peer-group social media (what teens had from 2008-2015 or so). I bet we’ll see very different impacts from each.
> I think it’s a mistake to put even teen social media use in the same category as screens for young kids
Dangerous for different reasons. Unregulated screen time for young kids teaches their brain to expect stimulation at all times, and will usually increase their discomfort when they don't have it.
We try really hard to limit screen time to a couple times a week for max 30-45 minutes. Nothing saddens me more than seeing a totally content kid in public being sat down and handed a screen as the default (because it's 'easier' for the parent), depriving them of enjoying the world. Also see a lot of young kids who will cry and cry until they get it.
In schools there should be a class about safe internet use and it should be mandatory to write an essay about the benefits children get personally from using social media as well as the downsides.
Saying this as a current high school student: there should be as few mandatory classes as possible. Your maths, sciences, and Englishes make sense. In Ontario, we also have to take French (bit more iffy, but I guess it's an official language), Civics (fluff), careers (more fluff), and technology and the skilled trades (I like technology, but still fluff). The more classes you stuff into school that don't relate to what a student wants to pursue, the more disengaged they become. Ironically, if this were a class, I, and most others would be on our phones for pretty much all of it.
There has been for like 15 years. At least around here, well withouth the essay. I'm not sure what the essay would do, it would be written by a LLM anyway. Don't worry, LLM usage and risks is the next class we're beginning to teach as a society. Of course my own generation won't get that, so we're going to be fun "boomers" that way.
>All ages benefit from time-limited exposure to social media.
As compared to what? To no exposure? Or to unlimited exposure?
As opposed to unlimited exposure. There are also many adults that spend several hours per day on social media. It’s not good for society.
Unlimited.
I don't think this is what you really meant, but the way this is worded I strongly disagree. What you wrote implies everyone should be exposed to social media, just in a limited fashion. No exposure is still an option that would probably be ideal for most people.
I do strongly agree with the cigarette analogy though. I have actually said before that I think we would all be better off if social media use was both legally and socially treated like smoking. (Not to say I think we should be age gating websites because that opens a whole other can of worms, but it would probably be better for societal mental health if we did).
"brainrot" is not used that way
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=brainrot
The best definition I see is
> the crippling addiction to low effort content
But also have seen it used plenty to refer to the low effort content itself
Brainrot is a small portion of social media
I have seen it used plenty by younger people even in a positive sense as a genre label for the aesthetics and humor of their generation.
Screen time features exist on most devices. Parents - please set them up. It doesn’t take a lot of effort. I limit my kids for 1/2 hr of screen time per day. I exclude apps like iMessage, phone and maps.
Yeah - they do ask for more time here and there. But it’s pretty well controlled and they adjust to it
Personally (as parent of two high schoolers) I think leaving texting unmanaged is wild. We block social media apps (Snap, IG, etc) and also regular media (YT, Netflix, Disney+, Tubi, etc). Social media because of toxic content and regular media because of distractions. We limit messaging app time to 30min/day, whether it's SMS/RCS, Whatsapp, Telegram, or something else.
By far the most distracting thing for kids is persistent notifications. Snap is the worst for this, but messaging apps are a close second.
Great point. We need parental controls for throttling non-critical notifications.
Study: Average teen received more than 200 app notifications a day https://www.michiganmedicine.org/health-lab/study-average-te...
Apple’s screen time parental settings are some of the most obtuse and frustrating features I’ve had to navigate on their devices (so much, that I honestly wonder if the people behind it even have kids).
I’m glad they exist but they could be so much better.
Can you be more specific? I’m curious.
My son is too young to use a phone but I plan to use screentime when he’s ready for a phone.
I use screen time for myself, with a 1minute limit for weekdays and 1 hour limit for weekends, for all social media, news and media consumption apps, and my wife has the password (because I have zero self control)
Younger kids are happy to hit the one more minute button for hours to continue doing what they are doing in one minute increments. Older kids are happy to download the shadiest weirdest browsers you haven't explicitly blocked and keep them uninstalled by running them directly from the dmg without dragging them over to the applications folder.
Interesting. The one more minute button is only available once a day for me
They may have improved it recently, which would be great
Do you not find unrestricted iMessages to be problematic? Dont groups and content sharing in them end-up fomenting a similar doomscroll dynamic as access to other content rich apps?
Not a whole lot of doomscrolling. There is more engagement - but I’ve resigned to the fact that it’s how kids communicate. For example - if they need to discuss homework or projects or even something simple as plan for boba tea.
I’d rather they walk to their friends’ place. But now they make the plan and then walk to where they need to be.
>It doesn’t take a lot of effort
Sorry, but that's where you're wrong (at least, if you mean enforcing effective limits). What you're asking is for parents to spend their scarce time and energy on fighting a technical battle, against a system that is designed to capture attention, and kids with nothing but energy and time.
>But it’s pretty well controlled and they adjust to it
Or they did 10 seconds of googling and have all the access they want.
On that note, I'm happy to let my daughter play switch, because it has the best system for limiting screentime that I've see to date. I can set a limit, and then I can increase that limit for the day or lock it down again, remotely from the app. Very streamlined experience, clearly made by someone with user experience. In comparison, on iOS the system is janky and the Chromecast it's close to broken (and feels like abandonware).
Switch is an overall better choice for kids anyway, lots of kid friendly high quality games and they can even get some exercise in (switch sports, warioware, fitness boxing, Mario tennis)
Ye and Zuckerberg plugs the laptop mic with a dud cable.
I guess most parents try to limit screen time. But some have a hard time doing it since it is a great babysitter.
I try to do a total blockade of YT at home for kids. Watching other kids be hypnothized by the feed years ago was enough. The algorithm seems to converge to unboxing videos and surreal spam.
> But some have a hard time doing it since it is a great babysitter.
We should be clearer on what it means. An iPad will satisfy their need for stimulation but not their developmental emotional and social needs, nor their fine motor skills and executive functioning skills (and it likely harms the latter two, unlike old-school toys). Boredom and non-excessive stimulation levels are essential to letting the child’s inner world develop. Giving young kids iPads so they’ll be quiet is a normalized form of neglect.
It's worse, iPads don't satisfy the simulation but instead create a harmful dependency on it. I'll go as far to say that giving young kids iPads is a form of abuse that doesn't get called out.
Significant emotional neglect will put you in the 1st or 2nd decile of emotional health. It can make you a total train wreck. I don’t think every bad thing needs to be abuse.
iPads are so easy to lockdown though, Apple did a good job on their parental controls. Roblox is the main brain stealer these days with a horrible social component, we only give our kid an hour a week now and even Thats probably too much.
> We should be clearer on what it means.
In this occurrence I mean "distract the kids with something such that they don't hurt them self, fight or destroy stuff so the parent can do X" such as doing the disches or resting.
Not like, great at raising the kids in some moral sense. In which YT etc is terrible.
I cheat on fancy restaurants and might hand the kids some screen (not YT) to give us a chance to finnish the meal. Stuff like that, but overused.
Harm is a spectrum, but being able to sit still, and not harm yourself and destroy things, is a skill kids need to learn and using an iPad for that can stunt their growth.
Sure I agree. I am trying to understand parents that capitulate. I think it mainly is a stamina and mental energy issue. Like those parents that give kids too much kandy too handle outbursts short term or something.
> Giving young kids iPads so they’ll be quiet is a normalized form of neglect.
I'd say it's closer to outright abuse. One of the better things you can do is a parent is seek out a community where this sort of thing is frowned upon. It's much harder to control when those around you think it's ok. I wish that were easier for people to find.
A lot of parents also drug their kids A LOT to get them to behave the way they want, sleep the way they want. "Kids melatonin", Benadryl, essential oils (plenty of which DO have some drug effect though not often what is claimed)
An iPad addiction is arguably better than being sedated so you don't bother your parents.
> Ye and Zuckerberg plugs the laptop mic with a dud cable.
Are you talking about Kanye West ? also can you expand what this means? "plugs the laptop mic with a dud cable"
What they're saying is these folks don't trust the privacy of their hardware, they use a dud cable to block the microphone from listening.
I think what they're getting at is people close to the situation (not sure why Ye is in the privacy discussion, but Zuck certainly is) don't trust the controls in place.
Appearantly there is a mixup risk using "ye" between "Kayne West" and "yeah" I wasn't aware of.
ah, yeah Kanye goes by "Ye"
I've never heard of "Ye" as meaning "Yeah" but I'm not as online as I once was (also from the US, maybe this is used elsewhere)
I can think of a lot of reasons why someone like Zuck would be targeted for surveillance but the rest of us are fine.
who has a dedicated mic input port in 2025? I doubt any CEOs do.
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It is easy to limit at home, but what if all of his/her friends are on social media? It is so difficult nowadays because many parents DGAF.
This isn't hypocrisy, it's parenting.
Do you think the Pfizer CEO lets their kids have unlimited Viagra? Or the Anheuser-Busch CEO's kids have unlimited Bud Light? I don't think this is the gotcha it's painted as.
The hypocrisy is not because they are limiting access to their kids.
It is because they are limiting access to their kids, while actively creating and executing algorithms to increase user engagement even to the point of making people addictive and dependent on their platforms.
But that would affect their children exactly the same. It doesn't, because they do some parenting. (Or subcontract it, which is the same thing.)
You didn’t pick particularly good examples. YouTube Kids [0] is an actual product owned and marketed by Google.
Pfizer and Anheiser-Busch don’t market their products to kids.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_Kids
And the reason is that those products are (rightly) regulated. Would there be beer marketed to kids if it were legal? Would it be fine if it were the parents' sole responsibility to ensure their kids weren't drinking beer, including at school, at friends' homes where the parents may have different rules, etc., absent a general social consensus that kids shouldn't have beer?
This is anecdotal evidence for the emerging consensus that social media is bad for you and especially for kids. There's a legitimate question whether the people pushing these products know this and don't care or actively suppress evidence.
Tobacco companies famously did this and it caused a lot of harm. It's about that more than just a chance for a cheap shot "hypocrisy" accusation.
I think social media has clear positive and negative aspects. That makes it closer to food than cigarettes in my mind.
We can all immediately conjure up images where food or social media has brought something positive into our lives.
News.yc is something I visit almost every day and it has added value to my life, including introducing me to a few people I’ve met in real life and to interesting tech.
Equally, we can all pretty readily conjure up images where excess food or social media has harmed people.
Indeed, it's still not exactly clear what the right place of social media in society is. Perhaps we could even get rid of some of its pernicious aspects without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Even food is not unregulated! And not because too much food is bad for you, but because bad food can harm you.
A disanalogy with food is that there are natural limits to how much food you can/want to eat at one time. Another is that food is necessary for life. Neither is true of social media.
I think you'd have a stronger point if stores sold Bud Kidz, a non-alcoholic beverage with all the great Bud taste and fun mascots.
Indeed, the beer companies are far above having Clydesdales and puppies in their ads, or fun dog mascots like Spuds MacKenzie or Alex from Stroh's.
It’s hypocrisy insofar as neither Viagra nor Bud Light has a child demographic in their market. The CEOs of those companies don’t let their kids have them because they’re not for kids; YouTube designates at least some its product as for kids.
(In this way, it would be hypocrisy if Anheuser-Busch’s executive suite were all teetotalers.)
It’s always some other persons poor kid in their imagination with bad parents.
Basically the only solutions I see suggested is some world where all tech companies in multiple countries band together to ban kid/teens from the internet or that government will start aggressively controlling access to the internet.
A big movement to have better education on parenting with tech and evolving via cultural changes is hard. Writing a law sounds simple.
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Their point is that despite being the designers of such systems, they prevent their own children from using them. Akin to a drug dealer not consuming what he sells.
>“We do limit their time on YouTube and other platforms and other forms of media. On weekdays we tend to be more strict, on weekends we tend to be less so. We’re not perfect by any stretch,”
>He stressed “everything in moderation” is what works best for him and his wife, and that extends to other online services and platforms.
>YouTube’s former CEO Susan Wojcicki, also barred her children from browsing videos on the app, unless they were using YouTube Kids. She also limited the amount of time they spent on the platform.
So they're not completely banning their kids from using YouTube. The current YouTube CEO uses a time limit. The previous YouTube CEO uses a time limit and limits usage to the YouTube Kids app.
Disclosure: I work at Google but not on YouTube.
The issue is that the business models of these platforms (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, tik tok) are based on maximizing engagement. And maximizing engagement in this context means spending ever increased amounts of time on one platform over another or over doing offline activities like reading a book and going outside.
So the tech leaders preach moderation but the design of all these apps are built to be addictive and to maximize the time that other people and other people’s kids spend on it. It seems to be poor kids who have overworked stressed parents who seem to spend the largest chuck of time endlessly scrolling on these apps harming their minds and mental health and so on
YouTube Kids has a built-in timer to limit the amount of time kids can watch.
https://www.youtube.com/intl/ALL_us/kids/parent-resources/
That’s because internet addiction isn’t sufficiently taken seriously as a society, even for adults. We haven’t fully adapted properly to this reality on a social level because it’s very new so people are panicking. It will eventually become standard parenting and as far as I can tell it already is becoming standard. More adults need to look at their own behaviour to fix their kids.
Every cellphone already comes with the ability to limit those things. It doesn’t require coming home from work early to toggle parental controls at a certain time.
My kids aren’t allowed on YouTube. I run a local system that mirrors approved channels to our home server and serves them through Plex. Creators lose ad revenue; that’s unfortunate. The alternative was nonstop ads on children’s content and a recommendation system pushing garbage. That trade-off was unacceptable.
I always think if I had kids this is how I'd do it also. I'm an adult who I think has fairly decent critical thinking skills and also is familiar with the state of technology etc etc. Well, I was following the news on 3I/ATLAS and I caught myself watching a youtube channel that I genuinely thought was Michio Kaku, I'd heard him talk once and it sounded and looked like him, so I put it on, switch tabs and listen as I work. I didn't notice it was AI (in retrospect I should have) but after a couple of days of watching it, I started to think...either this guy is worse than Avi Lobe or this channel is fake, the channel was fake and the content was, probably.. 2 or 3 steps removed from reality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMAFnTANx6A / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXxGWD_dtL0 / https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=michio+kaku+3i+...
Regarding ads, wouldn't YouTube Premium solve that? Regarding recommendations, YouTube kids allows you to select certain videos, channels, or collections, and only allow your kids to view those that you've selected.
https://www.youtube.com/intl/ALL_us/kids/parent-resources/
> I run a local system that mirrors approved channels to our home server and serves them through Plex. Creators lose ad revenue; that’s unfortunate.
Have your home server note when the kids are watching one of your mirrored channels and launch a browser on a computer the kids cannot see that is watching the same video on YouTube without an ad blocker.
The video creators then get exactly the same ad revenue and view counts they would have gotten had the kids used YouTube.
Same here as well as for other streaming. They want to watch the show more than a couple times, I’ll download it. No way I let my kids get brainwashed by these people with their weird algorithms they don’t understand themselves.
Those ads are optional. You can just pay for it. Its actually pretty good value for the money.
Edit: I forgot to mention Family Link. Once you have a family membership (maybe even before?) You can also use Googles family link to enable a restricted mode that hides adult content for specific accounts.
You actually get a pretty great experience for the whole family for about $20/month.
Ads are only half the problem. The real problem with kids using YouTube is it's too easy for them to access any of the content on the platform.
If I could pay YouTube for the privilege of using an app where I choose exactly which videos are available, and no other video will ever appear on or can be accessed from that app, then I might pay for it.
IMO the only way YouTube can be kid-friendly is if there is an app where the primary utility is the ability to whitelist on a per video basis. There could be convenience methods like whitelisting an entire channel's videos with one action, but the whitelist needs to be built around a per video model.
Last I checked, they had nothing remotely like this as an option.
Youtube Kids has this. You can turn on a whitelisted content only mode. Then only content you share with the kids account shows up.
Approved content only mode.
Thanks, good to know. Either it didn't exist when I last tried to research it, or I just couldn't find it.
At which point I might as well put it on plex, same effort for tech savvy people.
Plex + archive.org is the best. So many great kids shows on there to grab.
Then you'd be giving money to the Google company as well. You can also look up the content creators and donate directly.
What is your objection to paying for the thing you seem to enjoy using?
Most content creators I've heard of appreciate those who subscribe to YouTube premium. 55% of the cost goes to creators.
Will creators also serve you their content directly?
Breaking: Willy Wonka execs don’t let their kids eat unlimited amount of candy.
See how uninteresting and obvious that is?
Only if your mental model equates youtube to junk food.
And yet, would that be wrong?
Youtube is a grocery store. So yes, if you view everything coming out of it as junk you're ignorant and wrong.
And yet, when going to a grocery store where everything is free, what content would adolescents be most likely to consume?
Your analogy was more apt than you could ever imagine.
I can't speak for your adolescents, but my kids make generally good decisions. I don't relate to the kids are stupid automatons with no agency or valid opinion mindset that is so prevalent with HN contributors. If your kids would only ever pick junk food, maybe that is a reflection on you more than them?
I myself was recently an adolescent, and still know many adolescents myself. My take is coming from my anecdotal experience, and the behaviour I've observed from my peers. Perhaps your kids don't show that side of them in front of you? I know my peers and I certainly didn't go out of our way to advertise such activities to our parents when we were younger.
That misses the point by a mile and a half: nobody let's their children eat unlimited amounts of chocolate. They do, however, let their children access Tiltok, Youtube, etc.
Except that's not true. Plenty of parents let their kids have unlimited access to junk food and candy. Neighbor kids come over and they don't know what to do because I only have water, fruit, and pretzels. I have been to so many parent's houses who have whole pantries of just sugary snacks.
No this misses the point.
I wanted to eat unlimited junk food when I was a kid but my parents wouldn't let me.
You can change it even to unlimited protein shakes. It is the same point. It is almost like kids are kind of stupid if you let them do whatever they want.
Personally haven’t met any parents who don’t know this already.
The problem is childcare not knowledge.
They prevent their kids from having unlimited time with YouTube. Does YouTube ever suggest that kids should be able to use it asich as they want?
I would expect an x-ray technician to limit their kid's time in x-rays.
It doesn't mean kids should never get an x-ray.
Sometimes moderation means complete abstinence but generally not.
You cannot be serious with this comparison.
could you highlight what in the original article made you think they were banning their kids from social media entirely? or were you trying to explain something else?
The GGP, not the original article, said "they prevent [emp. mine] their kids from using them".
Although I hate social media with a passion and would be fine if the government banned it outright, I don’t think this is a fair reading.
Do toy manufacturers let their kids play with their toys 24 hours a day and not go outside or do homework? Video game devs? Parents are supposed to help their kids limit their time in everything.
‘He stressed “everything in moderation”’
> Do toy manufacturers let their kids play with their toys 24 hours a day and not go outside or do homework?
I bet toy manufacturers have never had to think: "is this toy bad for my child's development?"
Is any YouTube bad for their child's development? Or just spending large amounts of time on it with no adult supervision?
Really?
10 of the worst toys for your child’s learning and development:
https://ilslearningcorner.com/2018-12-learning-toys-10-of-th...
There are actually some pretty big risks especially in terms of like motor development, and considering now they’re adding a splash of AI to everything and a ton of toys have screens, well.
This is a cop out.
You don’t have to put your kids in front of a TV or tablet. You can simply establish boundaries and leave them to themselves. They will engage in imaginative play for hours on end just like kids have for thousands of years.
Source: my kids have been doing it since 5AM while I lay in bed sick.
You’re the one bringing the conversation back to superficials (blaming society and stuff you have no control over) instead of digging deeper. You don’t need to be rich or stay-at-home to talk to your kids or read books to them, which an increasing fraction of parents don’t do. Restricting tech use is common-sense and free. Books are cheaper than an iPad for each kid.
I’m from Europe. We have early childcare. Kindergarten teachers (I don’t know if that’s the right term) are still seeing obvious issues with screens and really neglected kids that the parents barely interact with. Don’t try to reduce everything issue down to one, the world can face multiple issues simultaneously. So can we talk about tech addiction in kids and parents without changing the topic to a different one?
Social media is not a substitute for child care
You also have to think deeper than that, media in the west is propaganda, you have to ask why are they all pushing the "children are in danger from social media" narrative? You should never make the mistake to be so naive to trust in their genuine good intentions, this has nothing to do with children.
The real purpose is to build broad consensus for surveillance, control and censorship of social media, "to protect the children" is the thing they tell you to justify it. They are recognizing they have lost the narrative control. How do you manufacture consent for war and genocide when you have completely lost young people, they see the wall of carnage and dead children and will not be persuadable by the legacy media telling them to close their eyes and ears.
Giving your kids the attention and protection they need is not just something to be "purchased".
I know this is HN and the everything-as-a-service mentality is prevalent, but come on.
I've certainly spent a lot of my life on social media - even as a child. It's just that back then the media was the forum that my friends and I ran; the other forums we talked on; and then later the video-games we played. There certainly is an increase in the amount of addictiveness now of the feed. I was always easily addicted to writing and reading a lot of online text (a lot of which was just garbage on both sides) but the habit seems stronger now. I wonder what changed. I'm trying a couple of experiments: one is to reduce engagement bait stuff by blocking users who say it; and the other is to try to end infinite-feeds.
I think I have a desire to 'correct' other people and a desire to 'complete' the feed. If I can eliminate these two, I wonder if I can reduce the problem.
Just throw it out of the window. I'm not going to give my 6y son access to a smart phone until he is much older, ideally when he is in senior high school. The only issue is that his future friends may not have the same idea, so it's going to be extremely difficult when he grows older. Fortunately we have a mobile ban in the school, so at least they know this is not a good thing.
The problem with this approach is their peers. Prohibition culture does not work if it’s so easy to access it elsewhere. My parents learned this when they tried to restrict video games strictly to the weekends when I was a kid haha!
I find having conversations with parents at school and the parents of their friends leads to the best results (so far, I’ve only been at it a few years for my kiddos so we’ll see I guess longterm). If you’re all vaguely on the same page it just seems to make things a little easier. If that’s not an option, then just don’t be the first person to buy one and when all their peers start having certain technology you give them access too, but you sit down and talk to them about it or find ways to restrict the faucet.
For instance, when it became clear YouTube was not going to be completely eradicated from my house, I just ripped a few videos and added them to my Plex server. They get to watch a little bit of nonsense content, but they’re not just getting flooded with more of it constantly (or ads). As a result those YT videos are just one among several things they watch. It isn’t special or all consuming.
Video games have also been interesting. Most of the parents I know have, like me, adopted to use older stuff and/or just not let them get on the Internet.
Ultimately at some point you have to do some combination of “controlling the faucet,” watching what your kids are watching so you know what’s going on, and ultimately educating them/giving them context to the media they are enjoying.
Yeah we are doing that now. But I don’t know what to do if all his peers are on social media. I already know some of his friends have extensive screen time — their parents don’t care.
I just try to keep up and provide a space for them to talk about what they see and here. We’ll see if it works lol
> The only issue is that his future friends may not have the same idea, so it's going to be extremely difficult when he grows older.
Third grade and it’s already happening: My kid has already had trouble in his social circle at school because we made him cut back his Roblox time by a lot. It’s not even that anyone plays at school, but supposedly almost all the boys (and many girls) are playing after school.
What do you plan to do? Mine is in preschool but it's just a few years away...I feel pretty desperate.
Find some other activities. Tee-ball, soccer, swimming, cub scouts, anything that involves interacting with other kids without technology.
My son has a friend that went the sports route. He is always trying to sneak Roblox screen time when he is over on a play date and when my kid goes over to his house, his parents are very strict about no screen time and they have a great time.
It’s still up to the parent to enforce limitations even if you can distract them with other things.
Agreed, but at least they have those hours outside doing something physical.
He’s also very good at sports. My kid not so much but we have him in a couple of things.
Doesn't matter as long as he's having fun.
Yeah we are doing that. And I added camping and hiking into the game. The problem is, we need to find other parents that share the same mind, but I’m too shy to reach out:/
Just ban it. My kid is in that age group and roblox is banned. Her feelings on the matter are irrelevant. I don't know why people hand wring about "oh they'll be left out". Oh well? I'm a millennial. I remember being just a poor kid at a school with kkds much wealthier than me. There were a lot of things my friends had that I didn't. Like a cellphone. I wasn't in the group chats and somehow I still survived.
My kid is disappointed, but it's fine. She has friends play the games she does have and she has a lot of other games. She had a lot of other ways to socialize with them. I honestly don't see roblox as different than any other social fad. Roblox is just the default digital hangout spot for kids, but it doesn't have to be for your kid's friend circle.
My guess is your kid is a little older than mine. Do you find she has actually adhered to the ban? Or do you think she plays it with her friends when you’re not around (such as at their homes)?
It’s not just about limiting - why don’t these people make it easier on the apps themselves to do it? We know why.
YouTube Kids itself has a parental locked section where you can set a timer. The rest just don’t feel like they’re meant for kids at all. And that leaves adolescents in such a vulnerable spot.
The kids or non kids distinction is irrelevant. It’ll be clear once most of the world implements child block (which I personally disagree with). They’re gonna get decimated.
It’s more convenient to use Apple’s parental control feature because you can set limits in one place.
My kid found work arounds for that. For example she reset the ipad's clock to give herself more time. It really is like a drug to these children and they will lash out at you if you take it away.
If you are HN you know how to RTFM, I guess.
The Fix: Lock it Down:
Go to Settings > Screen Time.
Tap Turn On Screen Time (if not already on) and set it up for your child.
Tap Use Screen Time Passcode and create a passcode that the child doesn't know.
Go to Content & Privacy Restrictions (under Screen Time) and turn it on.
Tap Allowed Apps (to disable camera/other apps if needed) and Change Restrictions.
Under Content & Privacy Restrictions, find Date & Time Changes and set it to Don't Allow Changes or Require Password.
The problem with this is you’re creating a dichotomy. Some apps have good content that could be consumed indefinitely, which is beyond the scope of these controls.
Simplest example to point this out is if the parental controls only had things to limit phone usage generally without per app controls.
I don't think it's a good idea too let a kid "consume content" indefinitely from any platform.
Hell, same goes for adults...
Yeah I just took it away from her and she no longer lashes out at me like a crack addict trying to bargain for her fix, that's been a much better move for both of us I've found.
Yes, the behavior changes are very noticeable with strict screen time limits or even screen time bans.
Meanwhile “normal” (neglectful) parents give iPads or internet-connected computers to 5-year olds. They never stood a chance.
It’s rarely quite that simple and I would try being a little more charitable towards people.
Exactly, it's a to easy to when people go "Simply set boundaries", "just do this", "use this". A lot of parents don't have a resources, either in terms of mental, energy, resource, knowledge and what not to fight and protect their children from things that are designed to be addictive, hell most of them are stuck in the same hell as their kids.
Not acknowledging that this stuff is hard, and being made unnecessarily hard by commercial interest show a lack of understand and respect for the situations. These also aren't bad parents, they try, but it's an uphill battle for many.
People give this excuse but somehow I feel like they would be less charitable if it was any othet addictive thing. "Oh, Timmy had a drinking problem at 13? Well we can't blame the parents. They don't have the mental or emotional strength to keep their kid out of the liquor cabinet. How ever could they know about locks?" That's what this feels like to me. As someone who is watching this happen in real time with my kid's peers, a lot parents just don't want to be bothered. And that's their right, but setting up the parental controls baked into all these devices is dead simple. They could, but they don't want to deal with whining or the exception moments. That's their right as a parent, but I don't subscribe to the "poor exhausted parents" theory when they had enough energy to buy these devices and set them up for the kid to use in the first place. It's a couple more minutes to enable the parent controls.
You can have a healthy relationship with screens at 13. You can’t have a healthy relationship with alcohol at 13.
True, but that doesn't invalidate the GP's point.
If that example is supposed to illustrate his point then yes it does on some level. It’s a major flaw. That’s why I pointed it out.
I don’t think this idea is that controversial? Most (?) people would agree watching YouTube 16 hrs a day is bad, but agree there is also a benefit to some of the content available.
It's almost as if ... being able to download specific content for offline viewing ... might be a far preferable option in terms of selection, control, and not getting sucked into an algorithmic wormhole.
Or perhaps that algorithms are just a scapegoat for the ignorant and superstitious and yet another example of the oh so trendy serf mentality that takes no responsibility for their own life and its progreession.
The world is going to be underwater in a couple decades and we're fighting the world's biggest companies from eviscerating children's public education. It's not looking good.
If there's any lesson to come from this (ha, learning) it's that we need to stop venerating successful business people. It turns out they're just people who like money and don't think about the consequences of their actions.
We parents are in a constant war with screen use by our children. It causes a cognitive dependence that is translated to a chemical one (dopamine etc). I don't blame the mega corps and their CEOs, they are legal money makers not cultural leaders. We are winning and losing battles everyday and that depends on factors like child temperament and age, school, peers etc. I believe my children will thank me for that later.
Truth is that NOTHING beats parental involvement.
That's it. No law or tech will change that that.
That CEOs recognize this should be no surprise, same goes for non CEOs.
Somehow we've not had the problem (yet). They get bored quickly and self-limit themselves, though we reserve the right to look at what they're up to whenever we see fit. Having lots of extracurricular activities might be helping, but my introverted, nerdy self spent way more time glued to a CRT as a teen. Hmm, maybe that's the secret.. having a nerd for a dad makes tech look uncool! :-D
"Recommendations" should be optional. I can recall early days of "recommendation engines". Never thought it would lead to this
The "algorithmic feeds" in Facebook, YouTube are greed-based
No user ever asked for them. They could be optional. But they are mandatory. A significant amount of user control is transferred to the company. ByteDance took this even further, arguably it has 100% control. Now Facebook and YouTube, and others, all have some form of this, rolls, shorts, whatever
What's interesting is the companies, no matter what the harm alleged to stem from the "algorithmic feeds", will not back down on "recommending" content. No compromise
I think that's telling. Perhaps traffic would plummet, stock price would tank
No one should be surprised by the legislation this had spurned
I am sure the coca-cola boss limits his kids soft drink consumption too.
I expect Sergey and Brin run ad-blockers as well.
What about Larry and Page?
Them as well.
Does it really matter? Even if a billionaire’s kid gets hooked on Coca-Cola or social media, they still have vastly more resources (therapy, education, support) to overcome it. Meanwhile, kids in underprivileged communities don’t get that safety net. For CEOs like Zuckerberg or Coca-Cola’s leadership, that disparity is just a small price to pay for the profits their products generate.
It's part of the parental responsibility to provide enough structure and instill enough discipline to your kids so that they grow to be complete persons. Sure it will be nice if social media was restricted like tobacco, and I am sure one day it will, but you can't relegate all responsibility for everything to the state. I don't want to live in a bubble wrapped society for the sake of the children.
Dealers and dope peddlers don't get high on their own supply.
The way this article is written, saying "tech boss" implies de-facto boss of the home and the child's behavior, is flat and silly.
Both parents are bosses of the home.
If one parent does not co-operate to limit social media — it's unlimited by default for the kid.
No, in this context, "tech boss" refers to parents who are also executives of technology companies.
I agree with the point you make in the rest of your post, but it feels not really relevant given your misunderstanding?
This has been the case for a while. Look up Waldorf schools. Screen free.
I attended a screen free school, but back then we just called it a school.
Careful. Waldorf schools have some great ideas but they’re also rife with crackpottery and are somewhat cult-like in many ways.
Curious about the crackpottery and cultiness?
I’m on board with some of their rules, but no listening to prerecorded music is where they lose me.
All Waldorf schools aren’t created equal, but things I’ve seen are anti-vax beliefs, hard belief in mystical karmic stuff, a sort of groupthink that encourages conformity and obedience and shunning of people who question authority, and (and this one is really strange IMO) a prohibition on fantasy play among the children (eg you aren’t allowed to pretend you’re running a restaurant and your friends are guests —- for reasons of crackpottery).
The problem with spaces like this is that manipulative people easily take over the rudder for the whole school combined with that it attracts a certain kind of free-thinking and liberal people who get wooed in and enable it all.
Edit: there is a Swedish documentary about one of the schools my brother went to.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14688132
Can confirm. My brothers went to different ones and some were legit over the line.
But they do have great salads.
more likely his nanny manager enforces the rule
He probably also limits his kids exposure to public services
The previous CEO did the same thing.
how about a nighttime ban (10 p.m.–7 a.m.) for users under 18?
Remember when most TV stations went off the air after the late news?
The planet doesn’t operate under the same time zone and that’d be easy to bypass. Just take your kids phone away or set up parental screen time or network controls.
Instead of teaching kids self control they snatch stuff from them left and right.
You clearly don't have children.
In other news: Philip Morris CEO limits his kids' cigarette use.
CEO of tobacco do the same. What’s your point? We sell things that are bad for humans. It’s a significant part of our global GDP