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Comment by vmurthy | Hacker News Reader

> Every time my young daughter is watching youtube, I can see how what it is recommending and how easy it is to manipulate her.

I hear you. While it may be impossible to stop the tracking or the fingerprinting, I follow the steps below to somewhat limit the damage from the cesspool that is Youtube.

  - No Youtube Kids app
  - I use the iPhone app on which I have a setting to "Pause Watch History" and "Pause Search History"
  - Clear the watch history once my son is finished viewing( this is weird I know considering the above setting but I've found it helps )
  - I stream the video to the TV so that my kid doesn't keep swiping on random crap
  - I and my wife have a plan to wean him off Youtube by making him watch something like NatGeo on TV.

Edit: formatting.

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Personally, I'm setting up a NAS in anticipation of my kid reaching the age in which we'll allow her to watch kid videos. Streaming stuff you manually curated and youtube-dl'ed to serve over LAN solves all problems with YouTube.

Great idea! One word of advice though: Kids get bored very very soon. Better have a large and good collection of videos :-)

I'll be trying to keep up with dumping URLs into the downloading script. Right now, we do have a couple series in mind of the TV shows from our childhood, back when kid cartoons weren't meant to push merchandise; it should last for a little while :).

Taking off my nostalgia-colored glasses, every cartoon I remember watching as a kid pushed merchandise in some form or another, even if it was only the licensed character figures and graphic tee-shirts.

It has been a long while since I have seen Woody Woodpecker, Chilly Willy, or Tom and Jerry in stores, though. I hated The Flintstones and The Jetsons, and never watched reruns of them. By the time we got GI Joe, MASK, Jem, Strawberry Shortcake, My Little Pony, He-Man, Care Bears, Thundercats, Voltron, etc. they were just wall-to-wall toy ad. That saturation ad-bombing backed off as cable TV ramped up, because then you could get Disney Channel and Nickelodeon.

Classic Looney Tunes; Tiny Toon Adventures; The Real Ghostbusters; Robotech; Animaniacs; Batman: the Animated Series; Rugrats; Doug; Hey, Arnold!; Rocko's Modern Life; CatDog; Ed, Edd, and Eddy; Dexter's Laboratory; Cow and Chicken; I Am Weasel; Ren and Stimpy; Powerpuff Girls; Freakazoid; Spongebob Squarepants; Avatar: the Last Airbender; Ducktales; Rescue Rangers; Adventures of the Gummi Bears; TaleSpin; Darkwing Duck; Goof Troop; Phineas and Ferb; Gravity Falls; The Proud Family; Kim Possible; Star vs. the Forces of Evil; Homestar Runner; Wallace and Gromit.

Those ought to keep anybody's kids off YouTube.

> Taking off my nostalgia-colored glasses, every cartoon I remember watching as a kid pushed merchandise in some form or another, even if it was only the licensed character figures and graphic tee-shirts.

I'll guess that's because you lived in the US :). I grew up in a post-Soviet country; for all the downsides they had, at least our cartoons were really top-notch and not yet touched by commercialization. You can bet that Reksio the dog, or Krecik the mole, or Filemon the cat weren't pushing any merchandise. They were just relaxing cartoons for children.

(In the 90s we had some western classics in private TV stations too; I watched plenty of Dexter's Lab, Bugs Bunny, Woody Woodpecker, Tom&Jerry, Wile E. Coyote & the Road Runner, etc. Somewhere around pre-teens we got access to Nickelodeon/Fox Kids, and I got my fair taste of Marvel & DC-based animations too. Most of that I'd consider a-ok for my kid.)

I'm wondering what ages both of you have in mind. Up to some point, they seem to be happy to watch the same season of their favourite series in a loop.

I know some adults who at 21 and 30 y.o. are still happy watching the same couple seasons of Friends on a loop, day in, day out, so this may not always depend on age :).

youtube-dl can take a playlist or channel as the URL and download the latest videos from pre-approved sources, so you can curate and also have plenty of fresh videos. Combined with Plex, this works really well for kids.

That's exactly what a friend and I (but mostly him) built. He has two kids, I think 6 and 4 now, and he's got a simple website accessible in his Lan that has kids stuff grouped by show with big thumbnails. It's remembering what has already been watched, and last we talked about it he wanted to limit watchtime per day. I mostly built the crude parent interface where you create new categories and paste links to pages you wanna scrape with youtube-dl. He's planning to put it on github eventually after removing all the hard coded stuff...

That sounds pretty neat. I'd love to set the code when he's ready to share.

Same here

Why are you opposed to the YouTube Kids app? I haven’t seen it, nor do I have kids, but if your choice is YouTube or YouTube Kids, I would assume the latter is far preferable.

> if your choice is YouTube or YouTube Kids, I would assume the latter is far preferable.

It is intuitive to think of it that way,yes but my friends have had bad experiences with what it recommends. In addition, reading articles like this[1] somewhat makes me feel wary about living with a false sense of security. I figure I'm better off with Youtube (I don't consume content on this. So no recommendations from my viewing habits)

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/28/parent...

I'm an SRE who never worked on YouTube and a parent of two. From what I gathered, YouTube Kids is made by passionate people, who are trying their best. But the question of "is this video good for kids" seems to be genuinely hard. Hence, I prefer to show my kids videos that I had a chance to curate myself. In a pinch I will let them watch YouTube, but only if I'm in range to preempt once they leave the range of sanity for their age group. I still strongly prefer YT to TV though.

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