Okay so Youtube started recommending these videos in a genre called “HFY” or “Humanity Fuck Yeah” which, as far as I can tell, involves AI narrators reading AI-generated stories over slideshows of AI-generated images and the stories are all military sci-fi where humans are the bestest warriors the galaxy has ever seen and kill stupid evil caricature aliens 1000:1. Once in a while there’s a story where an alien race does a massacre to humans which gives the humans an excuse to gloriously commit righteous genocide
Why is this a thing
Who asked for it
Who’s watching it
The amount of AI slop is unreaaal. I have to manually curate a selection of videos of planes taking off or landing because my eldest is allowed to watch like half an hour a day of very boring videos. God forbid I forget to turn off autoplay however and I still have to discuss with him why we aren’t clicking that really cool looking thumbnail…
Thank god disabling cookies and everything makes youtube “withhold” recommendations and shows you a blank frontpage lol.
I’m not a parent but I think this is probably a good thing regardless. It’s the same lesson that can be used to dissuade buying junk food at the grocery store because it’s colorful and has a Disney character on it. I know it’s annoying because it will take years to actually get through to a kid on this but it’s worth it for encouraging critical thinking/suspicion.
Yeah that’s true. The whole idea of watching videos is introducing him to digital media with baby steps.
I only use YouTube either in a custom app or in a browser with no cookies. Everyone always asks me how I get a nice, empty homepage. Amazingly, people don’t actually want to be bombarded with tons of bullshit!
I highly recommend the Tubular app on Android. It lets you have a “subscription” list without an account, and you can mix YouTube subscriptions with PeerTube ones. It also has SponsorBlock built in.
I’m lucky because the majority of the creators I like now have a PeerTube mirror feed, so I don’t have to deal with YouTube’s terrible practices anymore.
Solid suggestions thanks, but I don’t want him to watch on a phone. We watch videos together on my laptop, or I learn my vocabs in parallel.
I manage the selection via bookmarks and we do search for stuff he likes on youtube occasionally but I get to select which video we then watch.
It’s more of a general recommendation for the readers :)