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Comment by saudioger | Hacker News Reader

That's my experience, and why I pulled the plug on it. Unless you're on top of your kid the entire time, it's incredibly difficult to keep an eye on that. YouTube is designed to just shove as much content in front of your face as possible, quality, content, age-appropriateness, be damned.

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I've read this on hackernews a few times and have experienced some objectionable "kids" content on YouTube myself. Plus, there's a ton of mindless stuff like opening toys or kinder eggs.

I wonder if there's some kind of startup here. A service that whitelists YouTube content and curates the list. There could be an app you sign into before you hand it off to the child, it permits only whitelisted YouTube videos to be played. Possibly the videos are separated into tiers - educational, entertainment, prosocial. Then, you come up with a mix that you want to expose your child to for auto play - e.g. 40, 20, 40. Content could also be flagged for themes that are potentially undesirable - death, sex, religion, etc.

Pay 15-20 dollars an hour for people to watch and annotate videos. Get the same video to go through the process two or three times to catch potential errors. Your evaluators can easily watch content at 2x speed and not miss much. How much does processing an hour's worth of YouTube video cost? 60 dollars?

Invest a hundred grand, whitelist a thousand hours of YouTube content (assuming you reject half), build a simple mobile app to play your whitelisted YouTube videos, sign people up for 5 dollars a month and you can use the proceeds to keep growing your whitelist.

There are apps for this. Most are parent curated.

Other than YouTube kids that is owned by Google itself what other apps are there? Can you recommend?

There's Jellies and a bunch of apps that offer whitelists for Youtube.

I thought about that, there was an app doing that for iOS called Jellies

Why reinvent the wheel? There's lots of great, timeless kids content, like Sesame Street. There's tons of episodes spanning decades. The only problem to solve is getting it all in one conveniently accessed place.

PBS Kids Video and Games apps.

A lot of the DVD collections of Sesame Street now has warnings that they're for adults due to content that they consider dated and not suitable for small children any more... I don't know how much I agree with that, but a lot of content that seems 'timeless' to people who grew up with it will seem wildly out of place to younger people.

....like what for example?

That's interesting, I had no idea. Nor can I possibly think of anything that might serve as an example of "adult" on Sesame Street. Though I watched it mostly in the early 90s so maybe some of the older stuff is what's at "fault" here? Perhaps some of the themes might seem inappropriate for children if you're living in a homogeneous, middle-class suburb or town as many episodes did deal with things that kids growing up in city like New York might encounter.

The one I have here is from '69-'74, and note that it's still certified "U", it simply starts with a verbal notice that "these early Sesame Street episodes are intended for grownups and may not suit the needs of today's preschool child," so it's a pretty mild warning. Milder than I remembered actually.

I found an article talking about it. It's pretty mild stuff, but an interesting illustration of how what we consider appropriate changes in all kinds of small ways:

> What parent today would want their child to see kids running through a construction site or jumping on an old box spring? Scenes like the ones included on the new DVD would probably not make it into today's program now.

> "We wouldn't have children on the set riding without a bicycle helmet," Rollins Westin says.

> And what's that little girl doing with that man?

> "In the very first episode, Gordon takes a little girl's hand who he's just met on the street, befriends her and takes her into his home to give her ice cream," Rollins Westin said. "That's something we wouldn't do on the show today."

(From https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sesame-street-for-adults-only/ )

> "In the very first episode, Gordon takes a little girl's hand who he's just met on the street, befriends her and takes her into his home to give her ice cream"

With this kind of normalization of hanging out with strangers on TV, I am not really surprised that children were more likely to be abducted in the 70's and 80's.

^ This. View it as a teaching tool to make yourself a more effective parent. Don't view it as a babysitter.

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