Is it just me, or do Parental Control systems in popular apps basically not work at all for common use-cases?
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YouTube is overrun by armies of bots creating disturbing and creepy kids content that manage to trick the algorithm (and the human brain), but there is (no joke) literally no way to block a channel on YouTube.
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YouTube itself refuses to even attempt to be kids-friendly, so they have created a special version for kids that ostensibly handles these use-cases better. However, the kids-friendly version ALSO doesn't allow you to whitelist or blacklist content.
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It has a "allow YouTube to curate all of my content" mode, but if you don't switch into this mode, the bizarre and disturbing content shows up in the Kids apps too.
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The thing about the bizarre content is that it's designed to trick kids into clicking on it (they use well-known kids characters in the videos and thumbnails), so even if you're directly watching with your child, you have to work hard to stop the child from clicking.
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Here's an article explaining this messed up subculture:https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2 …
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If you Google it, you'll find a huge amounts of articles about it, and YouTube *always* responds by promising to tweak its algorithms. But the algorithms are persistently behind, and *I just want to freaking curate the content myself*
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The "trick" is to literally download all of the curated content onto the device and switch into "offline" mode, but that mode renders most of the UI inoperative (including search) and forces you to scan through lists of content.
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It also only works for people with devices with very large hard drives.
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This pattern repeats over and over again. It's like the people building "parental controls" features for popular media sites don't really understand the use-cases, and just think that they're being asked to build "censorship" tools for parents.
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To be clear,
@wykittens is 18 months old. At this point, parental controls are mostly about keeping the main areas full of content designed for kids, and keeping him from inadvertently navigating to other kinds of content. It's a usability issue, and a very big one.Show this thread -
The relevant use-cases are easy to google for ("whitelist content youtube" "lock netflix device to one profile", etc) but the response from the app is always "sorry, we don't support that, have you tried <ineffective thing everyone already knows about>"
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It seems like "toddler mode" is simply not a use-case these companies are thinking about, despite the fact that huge numbers of parents are watching content with their toddlers (and many toddlers without their parents) on these sites.
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And in case you're tempted to say "the solution is to carefully control the videos your child is watching" that's like saying that diet and exercise is the solution to obesity.
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It's a good way for content providers to avoid even engaging with the use-case, but it's not particularly related to the reality of many parents.
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To give it a more positive spin, media companies that did a good job with the toddler use-case would be beloved by parents of toddlers ;)
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End of conversation
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There is a YouTube kids app, but I'd rather have them read a book anyway, instead of watching too many videos.
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So we stick with apps from the German TV stations, that we know to have quality content, and no worries.
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Wenn have a dedicated kids-account in the family tablet. Protected with applock. Some apps whitelisted that are dedicated to kids.
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What I wish for Netflix is "zap-mode" like YouTube has for kids. Where you can watch something while flicking for the next interesting thing.
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