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Comment by Sendotsh | Hacker News Reader

> 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).

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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?

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