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> You also can't just white list things in the Youtube Kids app. There's straight up no option to be able to affirmatively choose what your kids get to pick from.

I "whitelist" YouTube for my kids by using youtube-dl to scrape the few good channels for them (Lah Lah, Peppa Pig, etc). I pay for YouTube Premium already, and I only scrape from official channels, so I'm not pirating anything but rather directly accessing channels I paid to view, without having to go through YouTube's horrible interface which constantly (and purposely) pushes crap into my kids view that I never asked for.

Other than that, my kids aren't allowed on YouTube. They can watch scraped videos from our NAS or ABC Kids (Australian Gov-Curated kids TV).

Sounds like that could easily be a Chrome extension, though?

Say, a whitelist for Youtube. In instances where Youtube recommendations fail, they'll just see a black thumbnail/ no text, and won't click it. If they do, can just block the playing of the video too. It will teach them skills with finding what they want online, etc, while you're at it.

I'm guessing this is modern ABC Kids too, because a decade or so ago, ABC Kids had some oddly dark stuff that's stuck with me for a while now...

Your way's probably sleeker, especially if it's hooked up to a NAS + XBMC or something of that sort, though :)

My kids are only toddlers so not sure what ABC Kids was like before, but at least for the last 5 years it's been incredible. Play School, Peppa Pig, Wiggles, Daniel Tiger, Lah Lah, basically nothing but educational shows or clean entertainment (apparently vetted by educators? I can't confirm that though, just something I read somewhere).

We're pretty strict about screen-based entertainment never being wasted time and always having some practical benefit, and ABC Kids has been great.

For our YouTube stuff I simply have a youtube-dl bash script I pass a URL or playlist too and it scrapes it at highest quality MP4 then copies it to the /Kids/YouTube/ folder on the NAS, which the TV can natively play from. I'm working on a web app running local-only so we can do it from our phones too.

Is this a common thing or parents just usually give free access to youtube?

It is uncommon for people to download YouTube content. A home server is also right out.

Whenever I see people recommending peppa pig to other people as "good material for kids" I am reminded of the at this point disturbingly many diatribes I've read and seen of people trying to educate others about its fundamentally sexist rhetoric. Is that something that has ceased to be the case? Is it perhaps something you don't notice/mind? Is it something you see differently?

How about when my kids and I are watching low quality nursery rhymes sung in an Eastern European accent, then I see ads for horror movies, isn't that just great?

> So now YouTube is just straight forbidden unless I'm picking the videos and that effectively means my kids don't see it at all outside of when I have a fun video to share... and even then I'm wary of what YouTube might suggest what to watch next...

Youtube-dl

That's just a more efficient method for retrieving the videos after already picking them.

I think the point is that you don't have to worry about what Youtube might suggest.

If you use Firefox and uBlock Origin, you can hide the suggestions on YouTube:

https://hakon.gylterud.net/tutorials/youtube.html

You can navigate youtube to find what you're looking for with most of the javascript disabled. It renders a lot of what makes youtube awful mostly ineffective.

I've come to mostly search youtube explicitly for things or visit bookmarks of channels I enjoy, with most of the javascript turned off. When something looks interesting, it goes to youtube-dl and I close the tab to watch the video effectively offline.

This can't work forever as it effectively removes all the advertising, at some point they're going to start injecting the ads and suggestions directly into the video stream so even tools like youtube-dl consume the garbage.

But it's a marked improvement over using youtube as Alphabet intends, for now.

I also blocked YT Kids from our house. I also would prefer it if it could whitelist only selected videos (they only really like certain topics).

I am fine with Netflix as a reasonably decent filter as well.

There have to be other options...

I built a suite for self hosting videos on a RasPi or AWS, as CDN friendly static html and segmented video chunk files played back via VideoJS. It has scripts for vloggers to import their videos/playlists/channel. You might explore building a little app with a YouTube importing queue. For fair use and archival purposes only, naturally. It’s missing docs due to lack of outside interest, but I’ve been vlogging with it for a year and it’s solid and it’s basically simple bash scripts and docker images. Search engine: “ispooge live”

ispooge? Did you know "spooge" is UK slang for "cum [all over the place]".

It means the same in the US. It must be an intentional choice. It is surprising to me that when choosing a name for a project a person wouldn’t google it first to see if the name is already in use at least.

It seems like a third party site/app for recommending youtube videos would be appropriate but I also suspect that might hit youtube's terms of use. If not, seems like an opportunity, if so, the ball's in Google's court.

I'm curious: as a parent who is wary of what YouTube would suggest next, do you have any intuitions of what a better recommendation algorithm would be?

I've been wondering about this for a while but I don't have any great ideas.

I have no idea how the existing recommendation algorithms work.

But as a parent without white listing ... not sure I trust them.

As far as google goes they were founded based on search, and search doesn't ask you what you want. Google doesn't ask me what ads I want, they don't ask me what news I want. In fact when they let me say "no news from this source" or "i'm not interested in this topic".... they still just sent me that news anyway, even over things I said I wanted to see.

It seems clear at this point that AI, or whatever overly complected Python script everyone uses will be pointed AT US, not for us.

There used to be aggregators around but they’ve all seemed to have disappeared now. Anyone know more about that?

YouTube doesn't allow aggregator sites. You can embed a video in a blog post or page but you aren't allowed to provide an alternate method of "browsing" YouTube.

Pure curiosity: have they tested that in court, or do they tie it to an API EULA or something?

I thought one of the big takeaways of the recent LinkedIn court case was, "if you're making it publicly available online, you can't use the law to distinguish between scrapers and regular people." And it doesn't seem like an aggregator would be breaking any copyright laws just by linking to content.