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.
