Honey, YouTubers are poisoning the kids | Hacker News Reader

Honey, YouTubers are poisoning the kids

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68 pointsherbertl84 comments

I don't feel like this problem is limited to kids. Youtube is a cesspool of people trying to find anything that will make them money and increase their subscribers. 80-90% of the stuff youtube recommends to me is just random people posting whatever they think will get them clicks. I'm into tech and 4 of 5 tech recommendations are just some random no one repeating the latest tech news with some sensational spin and click-bait title.

And, that's not even going into the non-tech world where it's 10x worse. Years ago that guy got in trouble for posting a dead body from a forest in Japan but just looking at what's recommended it's clear 90% for the content is just people trying to find some random non-topic and hyping it up.

Checking top recommendations right now

"Should I Buy This Chinook Helicopter? Craziest Barn Find Ever!"

"I Played Fortnite on World’s SMALLEST Keyboards"

"10 NEW Costco Deals You NEED To Buy in September 2024"

"I Bought VINTAGE vs NEW Beauty Products"

"My Daughter Survives WORLD'S TINIEST HOUSE"

I supposed the world was always this way given that there was a market for "World Weekly News" but "at scale" with millions more schlock producers it's horrifiying.

> "World Weekly News"

At least it was relegated to the magazine stands and check out line at the grocery market. You had to physically travel to see yet alone obtain a copy. Now it's in your pocket 24/7. Bat boy would be displeased.

> I don't feel like this problem is limited to kids.

It’s not, but the point is that they are typically the most vulnerable group of people. What the author wrote doesn’t imply that the problem is limited to kids.

The dead body guy is Logan Paul, he is doing a collab with MrBeast, it’s in the article.

I find it hilarious that repeat scammers like Logan Paul have a growing audience.

Same with the shit Mr Beast pulls. Viewers just don't care, the dumber and more extreme the content is, the bigger the audience ultimately becomes.

It was the same with Linus Tech Tips before, completely bogus and amature opinions dressed up by tech bros with lots of noise and people actually watch it. While he lost some of his audience last year on his narcissistic rant, his views seem to have mostly recovered by now. Truly mind blowing.

What about LTT is objectionable?

They're all paid advertisements, paid for by the producer of the gadget they're presenting.

The ads are generally made by people that have about 30 minutes to form their opinion on the product, and have very little industry experience. (And if they had, they'd quickly leave considering how massively underpaid the staff reportedly is)

But don't take my word, there was a bit of coverage last year after Linus previously mentioned narcissistic rant on the WAN show, where he said only his team is producing benchmarks without reusing previous runs. Which is false, and shows that he's probably the only channel that entertains the idea of doing that for more profit (but the last post is speculation by me)

It's a bummer that NetworkChuck makes use of very similarly-styled titles [0], so it feels like I have to take an extra step when recommending his content to friends/coworkers, but I think he's one of a select few creators who is still worth watching even if it's just for some surface-level introductions to new topics or fun simple projects.

[0] e.g. "you STILL need a website RIGHT NOW!! (yes, even in 2024)"

Someone needs to fork freetube and add an llm to dehype the videos

edit: just found DeArrow kinda does this - crowdsources titles

What aggravates me about YouTube is there's some great content that would be amazing for kids, but it's mixed with lots of garbage. Since YouTube doesn't provide any reasonable way for people to curate and share these allow lists with others, I end up completely blocking it on various devices, resulting in less hours of viewership for YouTube.

The way they handle YouTube Kids is bizarre, the YT moderators can unilaterally decide that a channel is appropriate for kids with no easy way for the channel owner to contest that decision. That's repeatedly led to adult-oriented animations and mature parodies of kids shows getting the official YouTube Kids seal of approval against the wishes of the actual creator.

Maybe I'm being too generous by assuming there are moderators making the decisions, it's probably an algorithm.

YouTube Kids is bizarre in many ways. Why can‘t I add such a video to a play list (or at least „watch later“), if it‘s marked as for children?

And why can't I play the audio in the background? These decisions make zero sense.

That's deliberate, they do let you play audio in the background if you pay for YT Premium. I think hacked clients like ReVanced can enable it for free.

Yeah I use revanced, but find that if I minimize the video, it pauses; I don't have this issue with other vids. I need to switch focus out of the app entirely to actually get it to continue playing.

In the "How to work for Mr Beast" leak, the "no doesn't mean no" section absolutely boggles my mind.

For decades (probably centuries!), the phrase "don't take no for an answer" has always been a common sales technique. If the customer says they aren't interested, you don't necessarily just walk away from the sale. You can continue to try. Why wouldn't they have used that extraordinarily common phrase? The paragraph under the header only ever describes the same concept.

Who thought it was appropriate to negate the "no means no" phrasing that has almost exclusively referred to sexual consent for all recent memory?

> Who thought it was appropriate to negate the "no means no" phrasing that has almost exclusively referred to sexual consent for all recent memory?

Most likely he did it for the same reason any of his video titles are what they are. He's an influencer (or these days, a corporation pretending to be an influencer); he lives and breathes clickbait.

Only way to watch YT by kids is FreeTube.io with blocked ads, skipping sponsored content, disabled autoplay and disabled recommendations.

Or browser with uBlock Origin and plugin Unhook, that lets you block recommendations, shorts, trends, autoplay, etc.

Was PRIME juice the inspiration for the South Park CRED drink? Or is it just the latest brand to exploit this marketing channel?

Yes, it was.

Yes, CRED is a satire of PRIME, the design is very similar.

For folks who didn’t watch the episode, South Park (Ep. 327) highlighted the issue of peer pressure among kids in school. All kids had to have a COOL drink bottle to be accepted. Your status was linked to the rarity of your COOL bottle.

It’s even worse than just marketing to kids, it affects their social life and school time.

Social media is poisoning kids? No. You don't say. It's poisoning society.

each platform provides a different flavor of poison too

While true, I don't think it's something new and unique, and by no means it's "consequence of technology entering their lives far too early". If anything, it's author's inability to see a plank in his own eye. In the hindsight, it was 100% the same thing with us (me specifically) watching TV cartoons with sketchy ads in between. That was before MrBeast was even born, and while I may dislike him more than others because of his creepy face, he is literally an amateur compared to Coca-Cola and Paramount.

I grew up with TV in the 80's. I remember the myriad of shows created solely to sell toys. Those shilled toys and food items required a lot of money and production. Plus the FCC and parental orgs kept those TV people on their toes. Now any doofus with a phone is a "youtuber" and there is little if any over-site.

Also realize you usually had one TV in the house and when mom or dad wanted to watch it was their turn no matter what. Cartoons were limited from ~2-5PM on weekdays and Saturday mornings till noon. Sundays were a wash. You had these small slots where you were captivated then you did other things, usually homework on weekdays or go play with friends on weekends. Even when I got older and got my own TV it was OTA limited with time slots.

Kids dont have that separation anymore. These things live with them 24/7 and they have little if any regulation.

Exactly, imagine if TVs had tried to grab our attention every time a new episode became available.

I have never watched a 'Mr. Beast' video in full but I've caught clips here and there. From the very first time I saw his style of content I knew that it was something I would never let my kids watch willingly. His fake authenticity is sickening, and to be blunt I don't know how he's conned so many people into believing he is a genuinely good person that makes good content.

My kids are still far too young for unsupervised YouTube/TV time and are still firmly in the "Bluey or Ms. Rachel" age, but there's already a hardline Mr. Beast ban in my house. Hopefully by the time they're old enough to want that kind of content Mr. Beast is but a memory and YouTube will have much better content controls in place.

Sadly that seems unlikely - and AI-generated content is not going to help.

Beast and so many other YouTubers that target the very malleable 10-13 years are causing brain rot like we've never seen before.

> I don't know how he's conned so many people into believing he is a genuinely good person that makes good content.

A lot of people seem to genuinely believe that he is really doing good for the world and purely out of good will — these people literally believe what they see on camera and they don’t think twice about why someone would ensure that every act of philanthropy _must_ be on camera (MrBeast has said that on many occasions and even wrote it down).

I don't have a problem with Mr. Beast doing charity as a business model. Better to reward good behaviors over demonstration of private virtue. It doesn't matter if Mr. Beast is a genuinely nice or good person if he's actually improving the world.

However, his content is fundamentally uninteresting, and ironically non-addicting. In other words, it's boring, especially after a dozen or so videos. So it doesn't actually appears in my youtube recommendations, which I mercilessly and aggressively curate.

So, the better question is...how do you make these videos feel uninteresting and uninspired?

I don't know how to explain it but my teenage kids see right through Mr. Beast and are very skeptical about all other online content. Basically they won't believe anything on the Internet, and they decline to watch anything that has markers of popularity. If it has a lot of views or likes they close the tab. I don't really think that is my influence, it's their generation.

Do enough young people even watch TV for banning adverting junk food before 9pm will help anything? clearly advertisers will go to these less regulated platforms which are probably substantially more effective and cheaper.

it helps, because if there are /any/, then it affects them.

This focus on advertising junk food to children is ignoring the fact that it's a system wide issue, not limited to just children. Our food system as a whole is definitely helping to kill us.

Never mind the facts that most advertising is toxic sludge that support the generation of internet slops.

Advertising is a virus that will infect all ecosystems.

How are these children hearing about these products in the first place?

YouTube is not a place for children.

If you think kids watching youtube are outliers, I've got some shocking news.

Which rock have you been living under?

Parents used TV as a baby sitter. Parents then used VHS/DVDs as a baby sitter. Parents then used YouTube as a babysitter. It's just the next step on the ladder.

Schools use chromebooks as a babysitter/"teaching device"

My local elementary school gave every kid a chromebook and refused to take it away from my son when he was watching YT videos instead of doing classwork. We had to get him diagnosed with ADHD and file under the Americans with Disabilities Act to require the teacher take away the chromebook if he was using it for non-school related activities.

Same story for my kid, sadly.

Get a life. Some of my kids' favorite videos are on Youtube.

As many flaws as the platform has, Youtube breaks down gatekeepers because anyone can upload a video.

Because children have access to technology in various ways shapes and forms from their earliest years. It is inescapable. Youtuve requires an internet browser and a connection. That's a hell of a low bar.

We need to be teaching young people the skills for critical thinking when it comes to advertisements. These companies pay teams to work full time to outsmart our monkey-brains, and it's not fair to expect the average person to have the time to educate themselves about this. By making it part of the curriculum in social studies, we can empower the next generations to make informed decisions instead of being hoodwinked by the endless psychological strategies employed by advertising firms and influencers.

How do you plan to do that with 4 year olds?

I don't understand how the "think of the children" outrage hasn't spilled over into advertising. Must be good advertising.

Because parents are unwilling to admit that they have been allowing their children to be brainwashed.

Honestly it's half this and half the fact that the people who have the power to make the changes required are profiting from deceptive advertising practices by means of shell-owned stocks in OMC, IPG, and the like.

I can't speak for all countries, but generally speaking in Canada as well as USA, social studies isn't taught in kindergarten to that level.

To be clear: 4 year olds usually can't count high enough to understand that 100 pennies is akin to one dollar. So as far as being concerned about what they're spending their money on, you're a little early for that worry.

I feel like you already know this though. You're no fool Mike, surely you already knew this, so what's your endgame here? Are you looking for confrontation? Or do you have a better idea?

I found myself empathizing more with MrBeast and his kid audience than the grump who wrote this article.

Care to elaborate? It’s pretty reasonable to be emotional if you feel like your loved ones are being manipulated, especially if they’re children. The article isn’t even that grumpy that it doesn’t deserve reasonable considerations from readers.

Ironically, by complaining about MisterBeast being a grifter and using so much loaded language, the author comes off as a grifter to me. Or at a minimum (especially looking at his other output), “old man yells at clouds.”

Adult concerned the kids aren't all right. Tale as old as time.

Yes; however, the language used in the article is unapologetically wildly emotional to the point that the credibility falls apart. Maybe it’s just me, but honest people don’t feel like they are trying to manipulate me.

It may seem wildly unemotional but is it out of the realm of what surprise might feel like upon learning this?

I’m saying the impartiality of the author is out of the window, was thrown on the lawn, and then driven over by a lawnmower.

I’m sure I could make you look like a miserable failure if I spun your resumé hard enough.

Appreciate the Mr. Beast type hyperbole.

The fundamental issue is unmanaged exposure to devices and content does harm to children, and both platforms and content is complicit in it.

Too calm?

Alright then, I’ve got a great idea: age verification for the internet.

Don’t like it? That’s the future people like the author would endorse, and what every legislator is going to try to spin this story to do.

I don’t like MrBeast, I even mispronounced his channel name in my original comment. The authors implicit proposal to fix it though is a trap.

I believe the emotional language is a design choice to lead readers to be more favorable to such a proposal. It has nothing to do with MrBeast specifically.

>That’s the future people like the author would endorse

Surely not; author explicitly brought up the looming ban on kid-focused advertising during kid-waking hours.

I don’t know if you are trolling but you have been using pretty loaded and manipulative language yourself.

For the record, the new trend to shill MrBeast is to pretend to be neutral while you discredit the side against MrBeast more. Most of the time these people have a lot to say about MrBeast even though they say they don’t care or don’t like MrBeast. So…

To people responding to this comment, maybe you don’t realise that YouTube has an app for kids with parental controls that a lot of parents do use?

Try installing and do some search if you have never tried that before. It doesn’t take long before you find predatory content that leads to more predatory content.

I’m not sure if you have children.

Or watch children’s videos.

Too many childrens youtube videos themselves have many, many, addictive elements in them.

Sounds, colors, too many scene changes.

YouTube kids is not delivering on its promise. Youtube and YouTube kids is meant to keep eyeballs.

Not sure if you noticed the irony in what you said…

> Yes; however, the language used in the article is unapologetically wildly emotional to the point that the credibility falls apart.

Shilling shit with lead contamination to kids warrants jail time IMHO. An emotion filled rant text should be the least of his worries in any civilized society.

It's not clear the products are actually lead contaminated.

ERC does claim it.. but with no lab report, no mention of ppb, etc. ERC itself lists no staff or public owner, and does business out of Georgia but flags people in violation of prop65 which is California law.

Their website is mostly dead links and exclusively stock images.

I 'member YouTube back when it wasn't all dog shit. People uploaded their cats, dogs and other pets doing pet shenanigans. Some youth went viral uploading videos of harmless pranks. A ton of people made very good educational content. Some put up chunks of concerts, modern bootleggers.

But nowadays? Content theft runs utterly rampant - and I'm not talking about the oh-so-poor multi billion movie conglomerates being the victims here. I'm talking about the countless content farms that get by just 1:1 re-uploading other people's videos. I'm talking about "meme pages" that do just the same, not even bothering to tag the original creators of the stuff they steal. I'm talking about "reaction video" streamers that not just (again) steal other people's content, but often enough drive their rabid fanbase to dogpile upon whomever/whatever they "reacted" upon. All of that driven by the sweet sweet nectar of YouTube Ad revenue sharing.

And that's just the relatively harmless content thieves. Money also drives a lot of other very problematic kinds of YouTubers, especially ever since sponsoring became the norm rather than the exception for those creating high value/effort content: shilling literally dangerous and unsafe supplements, one-shoe-fits-all VPNs promising much but delivering not much to people who don't need them (other than, ironically, to bypass Youtube's geoblocking), even more supplements, cryptocurrencies, various forms of gambling, questionable "mental health" providers that deliver pages upon pages of warnings and horror stories when you just search once for them, scams like "Established Titles" [1]...

Then come all the "pranks" and "challenges" that often enough led to kids and youths injuring themselves in the process [2] (and sometimes unfortunately even killing them such as with the Tide pod challenge [3]), or outright anti-social behavior that got cheered upon by rowdy commenters. Some particularly braindead, ruthless (or however else you want to call them) arseholes exploit homeless people for clicks [6].

And finally, the politics. The alt-right/incel/conspiracy radicalisation funnel has been documented to insane depths [4], but nowadays it seems to have shifted mostly to TikTok [7] as YouTube (finally) took action after widespread media reports [5].

Oh and then the personalities. It sucks that so many streamers - particularly in the German scene [8] - ended up with allegations of all sorts of misconduct. Domestic violence, sexual abuse, grooming of minors in their fan base, the same shit that happens to a lot of stars that got popular as kids, the fame ruins their heads and makes them believe they can get away with anything.

I miss the old Internet, one that was not dominated by people willing to sell out everyone and their dog for clicks and ad revenue. Probably the only YouTuber I can actually still recommend who a) never shilled bullshit in his career and b) still does the same good content he started with is DaveHax. Even Simon's Cat has gone down the drain years ago when every new video turned out to be 75%+ recycled older material...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Established_Titles

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/01/17/youtube...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumption_of_Tide_Pods

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right_pipeline

[5] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/23/youtube-g...

[6] https://www.vice.com/en/article/homeless-people-are-not-prop...

[7] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1472586X.2023.2...

[8] https://www.ingame.de/news/streaming/streamer-skandale-2022-...

> I 'member YouTube back when it wasn't all dog shit.

And that was...?

The first video I ever watched on Youtube, in 2005, was a teenager acting goofy in front of the camera.

The second video I ever watched on YouTube, in 2005, was teenagers goofing around a toilet, and I turned it off because I thought they were going to show actual shit in the toilet.

Oh, wait, you said dog shit. That was human shit. My bad.

But, jokes aside, the whole point of YouTube is that anyone can upload anything. There are no gatekeepers. What do you expect? The content was always shit from the beginning; the only thing that's changed is that it turns out that, if you remove the gatekeepers, people will exploit it. (And if you have gatekeepers, the gatekeepers exploit their power.)

> And that was...?

Probably around the same time as yours.

> But, jokes aside, the whole point of YouTube is that anyone can upload anything. There are no gatekeepers. What do you expect? The content was always shit from the beginning; the only thing that's changed is that it turns out that, if you remove the gatekeepers, people will exploit it. (And if you have gatekeepers, the gatekeepers exploit their power.)

Well there are gatekeepers: moderation! It's one thing during the beginning of YouTube... but honestly, YouTube could and should go and detect viral trends (they do it anyway to present to users) and moderate stuff that's dangerous.

> Well there are gatekeepers: moderation! It's one thing during the beginning of YouTube... but honestly, YouTube could and should go and detect viral trends (they do it anyway to present to users) and moderate stuff that's dangerous.

I agree, but that's easier said than done. At a certain point it costs money to pay someone to watch all the popular videos. (It's very clear that this isn't something that can be 100% AI, although I'm sure AI could help to some degree.)

YouTube makes 31 billion dollars a year in advertising revenue.

I am sure they could afford paying a couple hundred people with fluency in popular languages to do actual content moderation instead of abusing the general public to notice stuff going bad and press/courts as support system.

> a couple hundred people

That will only scratch the surface. There are way more videos to watch than that; and way more dangerous videos.

To put it in perspective: I pay $22 / month for a family plan. That pays for 0.5 / 4 hours of labor, depending on who/where you hire. We probably watch 40+ hours of Youtube a month.

In contrast, "in the olden days" when TV only had a few channels, you betcha someone was carefully choosing what went out over the airwaves.

So think more critically about numbers here: There's no way "a couple hundred people" can police Youtube. The economics don't make sense.

Where are all these poisoned children getting the cash to buy these things?

The children in the article wanted to spend their pocket money.

This is a short sighted and unaware comment.

It starts with desire.

And carrying it regardless of whether there is money or not.

And what the feeling of lack in an impressionable child can do.

The fundamental issue is unmanaged exposure to devices and content does harm to children.

Who manages the exposure to the devices a children has? Where did they get these devices from in the first place?

By relentlessly bugging their parents to buy them these things

So gasp, parents have to use the hardest word in the English language and do their job? Heaven forbid.

This take shows up a lot and it's a bad one.

"I can surround your child with dangerous unhealthy things and do my best to corrupt and poison them, there should be no limit to this behavior whatsoever because if I succeed it's your fault for being bad parents! All you have to do is say no, it's not like it's my full time job to make end-runs around you with the aid of behavioral science and psychology and a budget, no no no guiding your children morally is as simple as saying no once, are you too stupid and lazy to do that?".

Your comment is one extreme.

"Parents should just say no" is another extreme.

I would put money on the best solution being somewhere between those two extremes.

… what’s the second extreme expressed here? I see the same one stated two ways.

gjsman-1000 says that all responsibility falls to the parent for failing to say no.

splwjs says that corporations have the responsibility because they spend billions on psychological manipulation campaigns.

There are a lot of parents that don't/can't say no. Those are the whales these advertisers are hunting for. The ones who's parents do say no and are "left out" or bullied are just collateral damage.

Also, it's not just saying "no" once. It's a hundred times a day, every day, for years.

My teenager has a mom who abandoned him to me when he was two, but is more than happy to send him money on any of several apps.

Your view of the world lacks much nuance.

Oh true, I didn't consider that. I guess parents have no agency over their children.

Traditionally advertising time slots on kids television shows were dramatically cheaper, because as you notice, kids don't have any money.

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