But, what's the alternative?
For example, I love 3brown1blue videos. But, it is too advanced even for my eleven year old.
Mark Rober videos are great, and my kids love them, but he's even inside MrBeast's orbit. And, he's not putting out as much content.
What are the good channels that create creative and stimulating videos that are a benefit to humanity.
Does YouTube kill those channels?
Nah, you didn't. You're the parent, if you don't like the content, don't let your kids watch it.
Good question. I'm also on the lookout for quality content for my kids. I recently learned that YouTube Kids can be put into whitelist-only mode, and that specific channels, videos, or collections of channels can be picked individually. Google aren't making it easy, but the option is there.
> Does YouTube kill those channels?
I don't think it's about YouTube. Mr Beast is good at what he does, and manages to produce very marketable content. It's fast-food entertainment. It's a newer take on what's been on our TV screens for decades in the form of reality TV and game shows.
And nothing wrong with some entertainment videos, some leisure is good. It doesn't need to be all educational.
Restoration and repair videos could be a good choice, although there's also plenty of fake clickbait content there too now. I usually actively avoid content with sensationalised titles and look for smaller non-profit creators.
The alternative is grabbing The Little Prince or My Neighbor Totoro and watching or reading it with the kids. I have a very simple rule, if something isn't good enough to be engaging for parents and kids just throw it the hell out. It reminds me of a discussion between a Japanese coworker and an American expat. The Japanese guy was disgusted by lunchables, and the expat went "oh yeah, they're just for kids", and he just said "you feed your kids something you wouldn't eat yourself"?
Stop normalizing feeding garbage to children, metaphorically or literally. There's enough stimulating media in the world outside of Youtube.
Ban YouTube. Have only 1 movie/TV night.
Mandate books as primary entertainment.
Stock the home library with classic tales of heroism and adventure. Own an encyclopedia set.
Reject the brainshinker system and look to works of more enduring worth.
Videos should be thoughtful. If that's not possible in the family dynamic, shut it down.
Avoiding one sided content altogether. Any and all video content must be rejected.
Learning to do things from books is the only way we can safeguard the next generation from becoming mind fucked zombies who have lost the cognitive ability to think for themselves.
Kurzgesagt doesn't have daily videos, but it fits that bill.
We have a 10 year old son and best approach we have found is VLC on his ipad and family TV, coupled to a NAS that we drop the content on to (downloaded/ripped shows that contain no ads).
[1]: Of course among other things, but you can't deny he did quite some philanthropy
We watched Youtube together as a family at first and when the kids got older I helped them find creators and setup their own subscriptions. The worst thing a parent can do is sit them in front of Youtube Kids brainrot. They started with lots of education,science,maker/craft,animation and PG gamers like Hermitcraft.
YouTube content, thanks to its short-lived nature, has become essentially useless as a shared 'cultural context' unless one is plugged in 24/7.
Personally, I find YouTube to be unusable if you think of it as channel-based. What I do is keep a list of topics and perform a search based on the topics.
That pulls in some set of videos, of which maybe about 20-50% are exactly what I want. If the search yields no great results, it's usually because I've gotten the search wrong or the topic isn't well covered on YouTube yet.
With the kids, I don't talk about watching "YouTube", I talk about watching "learning videos" and if they want to watch a learning video, I ask them to tell me what they want to learn before we turn the screens on.
Usually it's building something, like "I want to learn how to build a doll house" or "I want to learn how to make a shark sculpture
Channels are push content, this is more of a pull approach.
No you didn't. You chose to do so.
Mark Rober has turned into very content-driven since a few years ago. He used to spend more time on explaining how the science works. His “toys” are also copycat from existing competitors