
Algorithm That Makes Preschoolers Obsessed with YouTube - pmcpinto
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/07/what-youtube-reveals-about-the-toddler-mind/534765/?single_page=true
======
corysama
In the past couple of years there has been a huge uptick in YT content
targeting very young children. The feedback loop is so tight that many of the
creators have converged on designing some of the most visceral (and
disturbing) material that appeals to kids at a reptilian level. Think about
how genuinely weird little kids are. Sometimes they do stuff that would be
scary if it wasn't just a minute of innocent pretend and a toy. Stuff like
kidnapping each other or performing surgery on each other. Well, now there are
hundreds of thousands of YT videos illustrating that kind of material in fine
detail. Many of them have millions of views.

This site [1] has a good collection of screenshots of what I'm referring to.
Unfortunately, it's such a heavyweight site that AdBlock is practically
required just to open the page.

[1] [https://vigilantcitizen.com/moviesandtv/something-is-
terribl...](https://vigilantcitizen.com/moviesandtv/something-is-terribly-
wrong-with-many-kids-videos-on-youtube/) "Warning: This article contains
disturbing images … although they’re all taken from children’s videos."

If your children are watching YouTube, make sure they are doing it only when
and where you are able to see what they are watching.

~~~
thatswrong0
I noticed this myself watching my friends young cousin browse Youtube.. his
feed was half clickbait 20-something white guys yelling at you to subscribe
Minecraft videos, half perverted (such as Spiderman kissing Elsa from Frozen)
or oddly gory children videos like the ones described in the article.

If I ever have kids, there's no way in hell I'm letting them run free with an
iPad or iPhone. I know it's the "easy way out" to distract your kids at the
dinner table, but I can't help but feel like it's bad for their mental
development. Then again, I was part of the first generation that grew up with
the modern internet and am decently well adjusted despite being exposed to
weird content at a young age. Hm.

~~~
bdamm
You may make a different choice after years of being unable to do anything but
give 100% of your attention to the child. Someone needs to cook & clean, or go
to work, after all. In the "old days" you'd just cut your kid loose into the
environment. Well, these days, TV and iPads are part of the environment, and
YouTube along with it.

I'm not saying you wouldn't make boundaries. Boundaries are important. But
that may also include a certain amount of time of letting the child "run free"
with the iPad.

~~~
SkyMarshal
Or you just do it the old fashioned way - teach them to read and give them
books. If they can use an iPad they can read.

~~~
bdamm
My child was competently operating an iPad _before he could talk or walk_

~~~
softawre
Mine too, and it is amazing. Would yours also try to touch the TV to swipe it?

My 4 year old is just now learning to use a mouse, but she's been at a
touchscreen for over 3 years.

~~~
jarrettch
My daughter is 3 and learned to use a phone/tablet before she was 2. Whenever
I'd pull up YouTube on my tv she'd walk to the tv and try to swipe it as well.
Often getting upset thinking the tv was broken, haha.

She was used to iPads, but one day I gave her my Android tablet. She was upset
at first because things are slightly different, but adjusted quickly. I was
shocked at how fast she picked it up.

------
utefan001
This is how my 11 year old daughter uses YouTube now... After 30 min, DNS no
longer works for entertainment sites. In order to fix that she has to do 5
Khan problems or read thoery.com, Duolingo, prodigy math, code monkey, splash
math, Xtra math, or typing club. It takes her 5 to 7 mins to earn points. My
server detects points and re enables DNS replies for YouTube, etc. Best result
so far is she now understands how fast 30 mins goes by and has no interest in
watching YouTube all afternoon. I have spent ton of time and resources on this
last 12 months. We are releasing new beta in 2 weeks. DNSLearning.org. Do Not
Stop Learning.

~~~
cjf101
This is brilliant. DNS + API is a really smart way to build this. If you
haven't done it already, it would be pretty straightforward to post a
notification to the child's device (via a companion app on selected platforms)
as an additional cue to let them know that they'd used up their time.

I'm halfway tempted to set this up for _myself_. You're absolutely right that
30 minutes is gone in instant when you start in on online entertainment.

~~~
utefan001
We plan to add GitHub progress tracking just for fun. Last year we had full
PITM, parent in the middle support, instant YouTube video notification, search
history, but 2 problems, I worried parent would login to bank on child's
device, exposing creds to server and also, kids use crazy amount of gigs per
day. Traffic volume to cloud http proxy was massive during tests.

~~~
j_s
Implement the proxy on-prem? (Raspberry Pi, etc.)

~~~
utefan001
Yea, that is on our list.

------
option
Kids aged 2 and 3 should watch any content _together_ with their parent. Or at
the very least, the content that parent watched and approved before. No 2 or 3
year old should be mindlessly browsing Youtube

~~~
strictnein
I did, and now this is permanently burned into my brain:

    
    
       "Daddy finger, daddy finger, where are you? Here I am, here I am, how do you do?"

~~~
Danihan
Note to self, don't spend quality time with children until they hit imprinting
age, beyond dinner and reading at bedtime. ;p

~~~
watwut
Wanna cringe annoying and plain incredibly boring quotes from children books?
Pretty sure I could dig some dumb kiddy book around ...

------
cjf101
Have you seen the 2hour+ looping video phenomenon? My friends children
introduced me to this. Their favourite videos are extended looping videos of
the same 1-minute content. Songs, or funny moments, whatever. Their favourite
YouTube activity is to see the same thing over and over and over for hours.
They react nearly the same way to the same thing for the whole time. I'd never
seen anything like it, but their recommender feed was full of them. I guess
the algorithm works.

The article hints at this, but doesn't really point it out, when they talk
about children living to see the same kind of thing repeatedly, to try and
figure it out.

I'd be really curious to see if this actually helps the learning brain, or
hijacks it, preventing deeper understanding through varied examples.

~~~
wcummings
Jeez, that is kinda concerning, how old are your friends kids?

~~~
cjf101
5 - 8. I was concerned at first. But there's so many of these on YouTube that
have pretty high view counts, that my worry pretty quickly went from "my
friend's kids are weird" to "kids are weird".

~~~
danbolt
This kind of reminds me of having a few favourite VHS tapes and watching them
over and over as a little kid.

I used to think it was disconcerting, but I also had peers that did the same
and turned out alright, so I wonder if it's part of figuring out
stimulus/work/gratification/reward/effort as a child and eventually growing
into an adult.

------
alexc05
I absolutely loathe youtube's suggestion stream. It is clearly designed to be
exploitative of children's media-illiteracy.

Clickbait, misleading and outright deception in the headlines and thumbnails.
For lack of a better term "trend-whoring" (a couple weeks back, a number of
the video game streams suddenly had fidget spinners in all their thumnails)

I'm planning (hoping) on becoming a parent in a couple years, and it makes me
really appreciate the regulations imposed on television regulators. Or the
_trust_ I'd have subscribing to a paid content service.

Youtube's suggested content feed often feels like dredging through bottom
feeding sludge. And that's as an adult! I couldn't imagine subjecting children
to that.

I often feel that way about AMP suggestions on my phone, though it isn't quite
as bad, it sometimes goes really crazy.

I'm happy to read the rest of the parent-comments in this thread though, I'd
love to hear what the rest of you with a bit more experience do.

------
Theodores
I grew up with 3 channels and an analogue black and white TV that died after
an hour due to thermal runaway. Unsupervised daytime viewing did not happen.
Putting on the TV when the parents were out in the day was tantamount to
drinking spirits for breakfast, or that is how it felt, as if we had nothing
to do.

Back then the recommendation engine was your friends and you would talk about
'Life on Earth's or whatever else was the main presentation on TV the night
before. Everyone was on the same page so you could not ruin life for box set
types.

In that framework you had to pay attention and understand the nuances of the
story. If you didn't then you would not be in on convo and you would miss out.
So you learned stuff.

If you only had two hours of time in front of a screen you were focused on the
programming and it may have been what your parents want to watch, e.g. current
affairs or drama. There was definitely an aspect of education to it.

I did not get all the channels or the colours that my contemporaries from
other regions did so there is a 50% gap in my TV education, so I don't pick up
on references to a lot of stuff, yet that shared culture is a good thing,
humanising. The stuff I miss out on, it is like not being on Facebook.

The stuff YouTube are doing is wonderful but I wonder if we need to be trained
into this solitary rather than shared viewing. The sharing in conversation was
important to me.

------
ashark
Are there any good medium- to long-form recent works with valuable insight
into the modern phenomenon of hyper-availble multimedia? Psychological,
sociological, political effects, any of that? I'm reading DFW's part-
literature-review part-independent-thesis "E Unibus Pluram"[1] and read his
"Host" a little while back, and find myself wanting more recent
examinations/criticism of our media culture of similar quality.

[1] [https://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf](https://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf) (I don't
know whether this is the same as the version collected in _A Supposedly Fun
Thing I 'll Never Do Again_)

~~~
defen
The eponymous _Infinite Jest_ in the DFW book of the same name is a piece of
content (film) so compelling that people watch it over and over until they
die.

------
RichardHeart
Guess who they sell this awesome traffic to......I lost $1000 to this garbage.
Every possible demographic option was enabled to prevent this from happening.
Even better, foreign language learn your ABC's!

~~~
ssharp
My kids were a little under 2 heading into election season. We watched very
little television at that age but there was one YouTube show that would really
help calm down one of them. Pretty much every time we watched that, we got a
Trump ad. Yay living in Ohio!

Thankfully they've taken to some PBS shows like Daniel Tiger and Thomas, so
they're usually content with that and we generally don't watch them on
YouTube, so there isn't an recommended content. One time, I did put up a
Thomas YouTube video on one screen with on of my sons in my lap, while I
finished up 10 minutes worth of work on the other screen. That's how we got
sucked into the "Bob the Train" vortex. Not good.

~~~
ashark
> Thankfully they've taken to some PBS shows like Daniel Tiger and Thomas

I recommend tracking down some old-school Mister Rogers' Neighborhood if you
can. Totally engages my 4-year-old, and she actually _talks_ to him when
prompted, which she does with no other children's show. The pace is sedate and
the shots long (like, really long, in a way I didn't appreciate as a kid—that
had to be difficult to film).

They make Thomas and Daniel Tiger and most of the rest of the PBS lineup seem
like Ren & Stimpy by comparison.

~~~
jackhack
All television from the 60s and 70s had extremely long shots by today's
standards.

Just for fun pick any show on any channel with modern content. Drama, comedy,
even news broadcasts -- the average shot duration is only 3.5 seconds.
SECONDS! Not only that, but the weird camera angles, and the infuriating
"shakey cam" (handled camera being purposely jiggled) is predominant in
children's programming, and used to keep our ever-decreasing focus. (It's a
wonder that children today can focus long enough to ever read a single
paragraph.)

Now, for comparison, watch an episode of Andy Griffith, or I Love Lucy, and
marvel that one camera shot might be 3 minutes long.

~~~
euroclydon
What's with the extremely short shot duration? I noticed that in some movies
too. It was incredibly frustrating. Is is some film technique to make me feel
what it's like to be OCD?

I just assumed the movie was so poorly directed that they were left with
stitching together a bunch of crap.

~~~
vkou
Let's say we have a sixty second shot, where two actors throw ten lines of
dialogue back and forth at eachother. Let's say that one out of ten takes on a
line is good.

It will take far more then ten minutes to film this. The actors may nail line
#1 and #2, but flub #3 or #4, or #7 or look at the wrong thing, or the
director won't like something about their emotions, or whatnot.

You have to do an entire re-take, whenever one little thing doesn't go as you
want.

Compare that to a short-shot film. Have each actor fire off twenty takes of
their four second line. If they got tongue-tied on the pronunciation of
supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, they didn't waste an entire take.

Hell, with short shots the two actors don't even need to be in the same
building for filming a scene, let alone on the same set at the same time. Do
takes for one on Monday, do takes for the other one on Tuesday. It works
better for everyone's schedules, and we can't afford to pay Scarlett Johansson
to hang out on set any longer then she has to. Three months later, the
director will decide that they really hate one of the shots, and it can be re-
filmed during post-production.

The reason that this happens is because filming is expensive, budgets are
bloated, celebrity actors command multi-million dollar salaries, editing is
easy, and audiences will happily lap up action schlock like Michael Bay's
Transformers (With its average of 3.2 seconds per shot.)

My SO works in musical theater. They don't have the privilege of stitching
together a show from perfect four second intervals. They have to perform it
right from start to finish - a two hour ordeal. This requires many, many weeks
of grueling rehearsals... And each performance has many, many mistakes.

~~~
danbolt
I just wanted to say that this is an awesome answer. I'm going to be paying
much more attention to shots in the shows I watch now.

------
fufonzo
Ya, on my iPad, I've hidden YouTube from my daughter (3.5 years old) because
of the garbage that's on there.

I find Netflix kids to be pretty good. I haven't really seen anything on there
that I really disapproved of (some of them I tell her that I prefer she
doesn't watch it - mostly because of the consumerism and materialist content,
like in Barbie - , and she's pretty good at listening to me). She also has a
couple of games on there that she can play.

But ya, the YouTube stuff is absolute trash.

~~~
bdamm
Netflix is great.

Even better is "PBS Kids" series of apps, including "PBS Video" and "PBS
Games". 3 and 4-yr old approved. Also work checking out is "PBS Parents".

------
OmarIsmail
This is why I don't let my kid watch YouTube unattended. Hulu, Netflix and
Amazon Prime offer more than enough content for them. If there's only
something available on YouTube then I'll find a playlist with only that
content and let them watch that.

YouTube's random suggestions is a killer for kids. The first time I happened
upon a "Lego unboxing" video I knew exactly what was going on and realized the
danger of it.

------
mncharity
I wonder if some of these formats might be leveraged for informal science
education content?

For instance, there was a play-doh egg surprise with a lego doctor figure with
a stethoscope. Imagine instead an egg surprise with a real stethoscope (and
maybe the figure and/or say a real egg with an inked on scope). Then show
kindergarten kids using stethoscopes (it's a thing). Build associations
between heartbeat sounds, wrist and apex palpation, the flashing heart icon of
blood pressure machines and fitness apps, ECG, hr, hr vs time graphs, and so
on. Include a clip of an N-yard dash and cool down, with with heart sounds,
flashing icon, and hr graph. Hr sounds for sleeping person, walking, running
or climbing stairs. For resting infant, kid, adult. And for mouse, cat, small
dog, big dog, human, horse, whale. It's fun to see dogs and horses anyway, but
why not take the opportunity to add heart stuff and hint at scaling laws too?

The videos linked to from the article didn't seem odd choices. They seemed to
have rich and fun "learning about the world" content.

~~~
luca_ing
Good idea.

But judging by my son's behaviour he would just select the next video once the
"boring" educational content starts :-(

~~~
mncharity
> once the "boring" educational content starts

Imagine a cartoon about a kid playing with a doll. Cartoon creators know a lot
about related topics, like life skills, social dynamics, fashion, etc. And so
they can seamlessly integrate bits of those rich domains of expertise into the
cartoon. The OP cartoon bear video covers a lot of ground.

But now imagine a cartoon about a kid playing with a puddle. Cartoon creators
know very little about puddles. Almost nothing of their physics, biology,
chemistry, geology, engineering, and so on. No clue - stomp, laugh, mess. So
science doesn't get the integrated and engaging storytelling which those other
topics do. But there seems no fundamental reason it can't.

Except... searching for videos is painful. Even when you know a video exists,
it's often implausible to find. Using google and bing video search to find
bits of educational content, feels like searching the web circa early
AltaVista - one stop among several, all of very limited effectiveness.

FWIW, here's a big stinky whale heart
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJnKuw7Wvz4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJnKuw7Wvz4)
hoisted for display
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4JIwlkUdEs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4JIwlkUdEs)
. A kid demoing a heart rate app
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOjWmA_7yUc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOjWmA_7yUc)
, and taking a stress test
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCS_6ixfq8U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCS_6ixfq8U)
. A fetal hr app
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XaYl6RJVsc&start=13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XaYl6RJVsc&start=13)
. A rabbit hr
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADLFLDszTYA&start=50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADLFLDszTYA&start=50)
. A boring video of an interactive heart anatomy app
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLyXWjWcQtc&start=65](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLyXWjWcQtc&start=65)
, to illustrate that VR/AR has the potential to massively disrupt education. A
boring exhibit with some hearts
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QthT9bs8Tws&start=15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QthT9bs8Tws&start=15)
. There are _very_ many videos on stethoscope use, variously flawed. Which is
great for assembling piles of Fair Use clips, but not so good for linking
here. And... out of time.

So to reframe my original question: I wonder if youtube kids viral video
formats might be used for outreach... but the cost of creation could be
prohibitively large. Though there might be low hanging fruit, like a play-do
egg surprise, filled with water, or bubble foam, or jello, or liquid nitrogen,
or hydrogen, or...

Thanks for your comment. I was(am?) considering an education project, but was
clearly doing selective memory on just how massively time consuming it would
be.

~~~
luca_ing
The thing is, kids are incredibly primed to recognise and cherish brands. I
find it shocking, to be honest.

They _want_ a Paw Patrol figurine to emerge from the play-doh, for the
millionth time. Not some stupid liquid hydrogen (I view it the other way
around, but I'm not the target audience).

And the pull of those silly videos is incredibly strong. We also have an
excellent app with literally hundreds of educational clips from "Die Sendung
mit der Maus" [1] [2]. My son likes them, and will watch them for hours on end
if he gets the chance -- and so will I, because they are genuinely interesting
and amusing.

Yet if given the choice, he will pick Youtube and the silly videos every time.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Sendung_mit_der_Maus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Sendung_mit_der_Maus)
[2]
[http://www.wdrmaus.de/extras/maus_international/englisch.php...](http://www.wdrmaus.de/extras/maus_international/englisch.php5)

> I was(am?) considering an education project

Wonderful. We can't have enough decent, genuinely amusing education,
especially against this flood of trash.

~~~
mncharity
The MIT K-12 video "How Do Braces Work?" has 4.7M views. It's an outlier, but
FWIW.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zzA4BU2e58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zzA4BU2e58)

>> or liquid nitrogen, or hydrogen,

> Not some stupid liquid hydrogen

Eeep! I'd intended the "liquid" to be scoped by the comma. :) Though I'd
expect liquid hydrogen to be even more popular than the pop of hydrogen gas.
The play doh freezes, and breaks like glass, and then... people like big
explosions.

Neat Maus show - thanks.

But... consider the difference in testing culture between app development, and
education video development. I tried creating some education video, using
software style iterative development, and street guerilla usability testing.
Which turned up all sorts of unexpected failure modes (say "millimeters", and
some have traumatic flashbacks to learning metric in school; say "fun story
about viruses!", and for some, that has the emotional loading of "fun story
about genocide!"). Later, I was chatting about it with someone from WGBH,
Boston's PBS station. Which makes a lot of education videos. Their comment was
something like, yes, we'd love to try iterative development and testing, and
we will... just as soon as we find anyone willing to fund it. So an
underperformance of science education videos seems no more surprising than an
underperformance of large-scale waterfall software projects.

> kids are incredibly primed to recognise and cherish brands

So I'd rephrase this as: the toy industry devotes lots of effort and money and
testing, to creating things kids will recognize and cherish... and the science
education video industry simply doesn't.

As for the "silly" videos, imagine you were playing with kids. You might do
something much like in those "silly" videos - hands on, rich in phenomena
(play doh tearing, describing objects, making choices, and on and on)... fun
and interesting. You wouldn't do "Now I will show you a still photograph of
part of a bottle of sun screen. Note the number 10..." blah blah blah (example
from the Mouse TV 1 video). I myself found the silly videos more engaging,
despite an ignorance of, and distaste for, the branding and characters. So I
suggest at least some of the appeal is elsewhere.

I greatly enjoy going to research talks. I generally don't bother watching
science education videos. There's a richness in one that's missing from the
other. And consider molecular biology thesis defenses (went to one yesterday),
which at least around MIT and Harvard, end with a long thank you section.
Something I've not seen in other fields. It extends to family, and significant
others, and pets, and friends. It is illustrated with funny photos, and is
leavened with inside jokes, and hints of their challenges and character. A
moment of standing at this major milestone in their life, and looking back. It
is just a _richly textured_ few minutes. Not all defense acknowledgements are
that notable. And yes, there are some science education videos which try to
capture a bit of that in interviews. But you don't have people crying, or
slips like "thank you to my husband <name of their professor instead>" as the
room cracks up. It could be valuable educationally, to show those segments to
kids. Especially with students from underrepresented groups, or no-college
families. So they could see, that person is like me - that could be _me_ in a
few years, and it looks like they had _fun_ getting there. But like so much
else in science research, which might be of value in science education, the
incentives along the pipeline to get them from one to the other, are absent or
dysfunctional.

> this flood of trash

So perhaps a more upbeat perspective, might be that society is investing lots
of creativity and resources, to discovering how to create compelling media and
storytelling. Yay! And it's now up to people who care about science education,
to create content which leverages those insights.

Hmm, I wonder how VR/AR will impact this silly video niche... hands-on direct
manipulation play-doh egg surprises?

------
jpalomaki
We wonder why kids watch the same content over and over again, but are we any
different? I can admit to listening few musical pieces quite many times and
still enjoy them. Same applies to well done (standup) comedy clips, somehow
they don't loose their value in my eyes even though I know exactly what will
happen.

------
scandox
I have a 5 year old and a two year old and I've absolutely banned unwrapping
videos. They are like heroin.

With cartoons they'd watch and be disappointed if we ended them. With this
more addictive content my older kid would become aggressive and highly
agitated if we stopped them.

------
martinaparicio
I was reading this article and viewing the videos while at work. I'm a 25
years old looking at a video of three little girls playing, while in a
meeting. I'm sure now I'm the perv of the office now.

~~~
jethro_tell
I mean, people in offices often feed their kids by turning up in offices. Some
of those people even like kids, and sometimes, they even see instagrams, and
/r/daddit photos/videos of other peoples kids. And even more then that,
sometimes seeing someone who is happy with their kids, or kids that are happy
also makes them happy.

kids + adults =/= perv

------
throwaway919191
This is something that has bothered me lately with YouTube. As the article
explains, tends to be inappropriate, sexual or mischievous. However not only
that they tend to be cheaply made or make egregious copyright violations, most
of which barely pass as "educational content" because they a child shouts the
name of the color every minute or so.

What really bothers me however, is this type of content tends to be some of
the most watched content on YouTube outside of music videos. For example, to
give some context on YouTube performance, in the last 2 weeks, the most
watched video on YT (according to our systems) was 'Luis Fonsi - Despacito ft.
Daddy Yankee' with 300M views, #10 was 'DJ Khaled - Wild Thoughts ft. Rihanna,
Bryson Tiller' with ~70M views. I think everyone would agree this type of
content is well recognized in pop culture.

Kids "content" starts up at #29 with 'Сrying Babies Accident! Bad Baby Playing
Doctor and Learn Colors with Bandage / Nursery Rhymes Songs'
([http://youtu.be/b6B0pt_dhe0](http://youtu.be/b6B0pt_dhe0)) with ~40M views.
This isn't "niche content" nor is the spread of it limited. "Сrying Babies
Accident" is more well produced than the other videos I've come across but
still has same traits - the same stock sounds, the same stock music, intercut
with 10 second "educational" content where the a child yells out the name of a
color (see 2:40).

This video 'Learn Colors With Soccer Balls for Children'
([http://youtu.be/OY7ILLGvAJk](http://youtu.be/OY7ILLGvAJk)), exhibit more of
the common 'yt kids content genre'. Again the same focus on learning 'colors'
(I've yet to see content that teaches something other than colors), but now
you can see the recurring characters of this genre, name Spiderman, the Hulk,
and Elsa. I doubt any of this content is licensed by Disney, but the guys
behind this are likely making millions.

My absolute favorite has to be 'THE BOSS BABY Learning Color Funny Videos -
Learn Colors For Kids Best Moments Tim And The Boss' (youtu.be/gZVFKXt5WeQ),
which is just a clip from the movie Boss Baby. It starts off normal until the
final scene where it pauses and a child yells the name of the color. What
happens next is strange - the entire scene tint shifts (for example the main
characters body is blue), the clip plays again and a child yells a different
color (~10M views in the past week).

For fun, the most interesting I've seen is 'Superhero Gamezone'
([http://youtu.be/amrkiS1Bjao](http://youtu.be/amrkiS1Bjao)) - while many of
these videos have "older" characters that act out Spiderman and Elsa, this is
the only popular one where a full grown man acts like a toddler with his son.
No colors in this one, but the same Spiderman/Hulk characters along with the
exaggerated facial expressions.

 _A lot_ of children watch this content. I can't pass any judgement on whether
its good or not, but to me, the obsession with this content is strange.

------
sleazybae
I read one of the first sentences of one of the paragraphs as "Kids’ videos
are among the most wretched content in YouTube history," and went "well, yeah,
Spiderman and Elsa and all that weird shit." Then I reread it properly and
realized it said "watched content," and went, "yeah, that makes more sense,
but it's definitely some of the worst stuff on the internet.

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fil_a_del_fee_a
A majority of these videos have the same recurring Disney / Marvel characters.
I have a VERY STRONG suspicion these videos ARE sponsored by these very
companies. There is no way they would allow these videos to get 100+ MILLION
views if they weren't behind it. Regular people get fined and/or arrested for
copyright infringement and/or pirating content all the time.

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dogruck
I think Starfall.com's content is a superior, safe alternative to YouTube for
kids.

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j_s
I'm late to the party, but any advice on shutting down YouTube in the home at
the router. I need an on/off button on my phone!

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laxk
One solution is to use a chromecast device (or similar devices), you can
control everything(content, amount of time) from your phone.

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throwawaymanbot
You see such things as the following. You'll find a video that teaches
colors.. harmless you say? No, because the different colors are really an
Advert for Lays Brand Potato chips. Teaching a child colors, using different
colors of different flavors of Lays potato chips should not be allowed on any
kids platform and should be regulated. I think this sort of advertising is
disgusting.

