For anyone wanting interesting YT videos for their kids (and not wanting to take anything away from OP's project), I highly highly recommend thekidshouldseethis.com. It's basically a curated stream of cool videos, and I would feel totally safe letting my daughter browse it alone (she never does because we usually watch them together, but the curation is that good). Videos on all sorts of topics, and good enough to be really entertaining for both kids and adults - I can spend an evening there easily. They also have a really fantastic gift guide.
Absolutely amazing. Bookmarked, gonna be very useful in 5 or 10 years ahahah
On the other hand, it's so soul-crushingly depressing to contemplate how most youtube content targeted at kids is such brain-addling garbage fucking up their psyche in all sorts of ways, all for the sake of ad impressions... If there's a place for the expression "late capitalism" this has to be it
Oh, if you think that is bad, wait until you're looking for educational apps for them. What a total hot mess in a sector which should by rights be amazing.
This is a great idea! Recommendation algos are weaponized against kids and would be great to have some way of managing it.
There is a similar problem with movies as well. It is hard to know whether a movie is appropriate for a child e.g. some kind of violence may be acceptable but not adult themes. So marking a movie PG-13 for example doesn't help much. There are some crowd-sourced solutions to this right now such as https://www.commonsensemedia.org/movie-reviews But LLMs could really help automate this
Is there a version for adults? Something that keeps you from getting pulled down engagement bait rabbit holes would be great. I don’t want it to be overly focused on children’s education though.
I disabled all suggested content on my YouTube account. My “home” page shows as totally blank. Only the subscription tab works, or explicitly searching. You still get recommended “related videos” but it helps stay focused on the things you’ve chosen to see.
I exlusively watch youtube videos from my homepage and from the related videos section. You can train the YouTube algorithm to not feed you garbage, most of the videos on my homepage are 30+ minutes long educational content. I just wish you could permanently hide the Shorts section (I guess ublock can do this), so that I could see more than 6 at a time.
I also never subscribe to any channels, watching a few videos pretty much guarantees they will pop up on the homepage every once in a while.
sent you mail,
I would love to be associated with this project. I was looking for a solution for some time, at least one which allows to restrict the content from the main youtube. Youtube kids app they have is a joke.
YouTube recommendations for kids shouldn't be driven by engagement (e.g. "oh, you watched 20 hours of MrBeast videos. You probably need another hour.")
If my kid watches an hour of unboxing toy videos, I shouldn't have to try and disable 3,000 channels of toy unboxings in an effort for that topic to never surface again.
The thumbs down button essentially has zero effect.
I’d go further and say nobody should be subjected to this stuff. Engagement is a euphemism for addiction. Self improving addiction machines are a horrible idea. They’re actively bad for people and society for a laundry list of reasons.
Anyone who works on this stuff should be ashamed of yourselves. You’re modern day cigarette companies.
One thing I would like to see is an algorithm based on expressed rather than revealed preferences.
De-jargoned, that means clicking the like button means I want to see more things like that, and the dislike button means I don't want to see things like that. If I watched something all the way through, but clicked the dislike button, that means I don't want to see things that produced a similar response from people who tend to react the way I do.
This kind of algorithm is not going to increase watch time over the short term, and might not over the long term either, which makes it unlikely to be adopted by any for-profit service.
"The algorithm" was different in the early 2000's and all of our lives were richer for it. Before Facebook publicly embedded psychologists into the development teams and before the goal was more and more attention. The internet used to be great.
> How would you go about writing the recommendation algorithm?
I probably wouldn’t. Twitter, YouTube and Facebook were all invented before recommendation algorithms existed, and they worked great. Reddit still doesn’t use a recommendation algorithm.
Would they make less money without this stuff? Yeah, probably. But I think that’s a good deal for humanity.
I was really struck in The Social Dilemma how at the end they asked devs if they’d let their children use the platforms they’ve made. People interviewed overwhelmingly said no. If that’s the case, you know it’s bad. Just stop.
It allows us to control the algorithm. It’s all LLM translating to YouTube search queries under the hood.
Visually it looks the same.
The suggested videos come from predefined buckets on topics they love.
E.g. 33% fun math, 33% DIY engineering, 33% creative activities.
Video recommendations that have a banned word in the title/desc don't get displayed e.g. MrBeast, anything with Minecraft in it, never gets surfaced.
For anyone interested in using it, send me an email.
jim.jones1@gmail.com