Stop begging for censorship. That never ends up good. Accurate tagging of media is what we need and a way to filter that ourselves.
this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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It's not really begging for censorship, it's begging for healthier consumption.
The issue is entirely one of parenting IMO. I've seen what's on YouTube kids and my kids aren't allowed to watch anything on YouTube without my supervision.
Gross sexual stuff, violence, and cruelty is being pushed to your children as fun with flashy colors and silly sounds. Go watch YouTube kids for a while, click on the random kids channels not the corporate ones.
We're not talking about sex education and more mature topics, these shoes are promoting sexual violence, violence, bullying, and it's all being pushed in a fun way.
It's a parenting problem, and the parents need to be educated on it. They don't see the problem, kids have their own phones, and Google doesn't give a fuck they will push the must engaging most addicting most disturbing content to your kids to keep them watching.
Hmm. I never watch Youtube Kids, but regular Youtube is one of my primary entertainment sources. All I get if I keep scrolling are people making food, game play throughs, science channels, animation, AMVs. The worst thing I see are music videos no worse than MTV had... Maybe you should just ban them from YouTube Kids... My biggest complaint is that I have to manually click on subscriptions to see the things I subscribed to. I pay for premium, so maybe that makes a difference?
Seeing TADC in the thumbnail and the "stock footage with scaryvoice" shockumentary intro immediately put me off this video (plus a link to another video from the same person with the same thumbnail but with Minecraft characters; seems like a good racket). So, my two cents:
🪙: The Amazing Digital Circus is a pretty-brilliant psychological horror adult animation. It shouldn't be recommended to little kids, for sure, but it's not "disgusting content."
🪙🪙: There is definitely a problem with the stuff being recommended to kids on YouTube. Google has no real incentive to fix it, of course, but leaving a kid to watch YouTube at random long enough to wander into the really weird shit is kind of on the parents. It's a video service that cares only about serving ads, not a babysitter; either adjust your expectations or stop complaining.
There are plenty of services for only a few dollars a month that are actively safe for kids. Quick DDG found this (and I'm a little dubious about them including the big players like Netflix and Prime, but they also list stuff that looks better): https://thestreamable.com/video-streaming/best-streaming-service-for-kids
Anyway, here's a much better video courtesy of Dan Olson about the weird stuff on YouTube aimed at kids: https://youtu.be/LKp2gikIkD8 (and its only 15 minutes long)
Totally agree about the shockumentary style, however OP's video goes into stuff so much worse.
It's pretty clear that you didn't actually watch the video... The video has nothing against TADC...
The Amazing Digital Circus is disgusting content...?
Is this video pearl clutching? It's pearl clutching, isn't it?
I haven't watched the video yet, but I think TADC has unwillingly joined the "kids" content mill, which is probably what might be referenced.
Even Gooseworx dislikes how those content mill channels have abused TADC's popularity for their own profit while neither she nor Glitch can do much about it.
I remember watching this channel hit 1K subscribers, it has definitely changed.
reply test
yea i also were there at a few thousand I think and the content has changed a lot since then.
YouTube’s Deliberate Indifference Exposes Anyone to disgusting Content
FTFY
That's why I've blocked YouTube on all my kids devices. It's just a pipeline of pure garbage content for kids.
There can absolutely be educational content for kids on YT, but compared to the egregious amount of mind-numbing/fetishy content, it's totally not worth it. It's a shame how there feels like a lack/decline of quality kids/tween TV shows being broadcasted, I was talking to my mom about how kids really don't have a lot to watch once they hit age 9+.
In the time I allowed my kids to have YT kids, I did not encounter the content you speak of. I know there's good content on YouTube, I watch it all the time. But I never saw anything good come up in the YouTube kids app. And we had it for a while.
Well I'm mostly thinking about how my teachers would make us watch a YT vid with a classwork/homework assignment. CrashCourse does like every subject, I watched several of their Civics & Government/History videos. Amoeba Sisters was a frequent channel in my Biology class.
But the whole point is you have to look for those, cause YT knows they can get way more kids to scroll and watch ads for 5 hrs+ if you show them "ElSa pOoPiNg oN SpIDeRmAn!1!1?!?1?" videos compared to “Learn about how carbon affects the pH of seawater!". The algorithm is designed to trap unfortunately, and YT kids is a fucking sham.
Yeah I mean if a parent was always curing the content, it could be useful. But to me that's the same as not letting them have it, you just put on some YouTube videos every so often for them that you choose on your device (we do this now, I just don't allow it on their devices).
How do I has a parent curate content? I have not found anything that lets me allows the good. Either I block youtube completely, or I get what google decides is good for my kids (which blocks things I find good while allowing the bad)
Exactly. The only way is to block it and then choose something on your device whenever you want to show them something, and never let them use it without you choosing the content. The algorithm will always lead them to the darkest bowels of garbage content in my experience.
i let my kids use YouTube kids right now, and what I've found is that the kids algo is way more targeted and sensitive to changes than the normal one. if you go find 2 educational videos via search and watch them all the way through it will serve you nothing but those for days, but if you watch 2 slop videos the same thing applies. so, as with most things, parental supervision is the only way it works, but with that oversight it works great.
When we first let the kids watch YouTube it was on the main TV with it's own account. We have consistently monitored it and actively prune recommendations while slowly introducing them to the concept of "the algorithm". From secondary school they pretty much need YouTube on their own PC's for homework reasons and it's harder to totally lock down - we use the family link controls to limit it a little but if they tried to get around them they could. The hope is we've at least prepared them a little before they have totally unfettered access to the internet.
We did try YouTube kids a little but it was such a garbage experience we just blocked the app everywhere.
Try using a free online YouTube ripper. You rip the video you need while still denying the kiddos junk tube.
Sure if they needed to bypass ads I can introduce them to Free tube or whatever but for all it's sins they need moderated exposure to the YouTube experience so they're equipped enough not to go totally wild when they finally have unfettered access.
You assume Google genuinely cares. They don’t.
Yeah, I mean we do sometimes watch YouTube videos together when they ask about a certain topic. I can see how if you only allowed them to use it supervised it could be a valuable thing. But it's tough to keep it only supervised. When my son had it, it ended up being just blippy and Minecraft videos. Not terrible stuff but not stuff I want him spending an hour a day on either.
I thought my youngest was all about watching hour long Minecraft playthroughs but really they are quite interested in game mechanics and speed running. They are just a lot more tolerant of watching hours of videos around a particular game.
I don't overly police their content consumption (although we do talk about limiting shorts). The main thing is at the weekend to kick them off the TV after the morning to go and do something more interactive.
The stuff he was watching was more "am I gonna catch Mikey? Mikey is a chicken" kind of stuff. If he was really learning about the mechanics and how to program stuff in Minecraft with redstone or something, I could get behind it. I know Minecraft well enough to know the junk from the good stuff. And he watched probably 10 videos like this every day for more than a year, so I think from those thousands of videos he's learned whatever he would have learned already.
Now instead he is mostly watching chess videos and playing on an app called ChessKid which I'm much more happy with.
Make a new account and see what the suggestions turn into.
Edit: Missed that you were talking about educational content, so this is more about entertainment, though quite a few of the shows in the linked post touch on social lessons that are, in my opinion at least, also important for kids to learn. Acceptance, open-mindedness, self-expression, that sort of thing.
There's a post I ran across a while back that might be what you're looking for: https://lemmy.world/post/30235633
There are a lot of good shows for kids that age (and the adults watching along with them), they just tend to not be all that well known. There are also a decent number of older cartoons not in that list that are kid-friendly while being just genuinely good art; off the top of my head:
- Samurai Jack
- Invader Zim (if you're ok with its particular style of weirdness, parent discretion advised)
- Courage The Cowardly Dog (also weird, but not as weird as Zim)
Because I'm slightly an animation dork, I'd also personally include Batman The Animated Series and Batman Beyond. Mostly just standard-but-high-quality action cartoons, but both occasionally did some really impressive artistic stuff, especially TAS.
I totally agree with the lists mentioned in that post, as my sister and I watched a good amount of them. But like my post said, there's a decline in good TV shows for kids. All of those shows mentioned are finished, none of them are currently ongoing shows right? Do they still broadcast them? Now parents have to pay for Disney+ to have something that isn't slop for their kids to watch.
Honestly, I haven't followed the state of Western animation much the last few years, so I can believe that there are fewer good shows than there used to be.
That said, animation is extremely expensive to produce for the amount of media it creates. Combine that with creative writing (well, art in general) being very under-appreciated, and therefore poorly-paid-for, there are a lot of societal/business pressures working against shows like this being produced. I only bring that up because people being unwilling to pay for non-slop is a big contributor to the problem.
(Not to defend Disney or the other mega-corps nickel-and-diming us for shareholder profits, of course. If only these companies would use their billions to fund shows from enthusiastic new creators rather than dumping everything into forgettable live-action remakes and CEO bonuses >_>)
I was talking to my mom about how kids really don’t have a lot to watch once they hit age 9+.
This is completely true, and it's because all the major cable networks stopped funding good shows.
They only pay for lazy, easy to produce shit that nobody cares about.
Gone are the days of Adventure Time and Avatar.
Parents: don’t let your babies on the Interwebs.
That's easy. What about when they get older?
Then you have to set up parenting filters. Firewalls, content filters, read logs, etc.
I wish there was a way to filter youtube. I can block it completely on my firewall, but how do I let my kids watch their piano lesson without getting sucked into something they shouldn't see?
You either watch it with them, download it for them to play offline (try ClipGrab, its free) or they don't watch it.
That is the easy part. my kids piano lessons track which is next and their practice, then the video is embedded. it also doesn't work on the roae unless I get a vpn.
Could create a playlist of the lessons in jellyfin, iduno if its secure enough to use without a vpn though. Could just save them to a usb drive or laptop instead 🤷
Talk to them honestly without pandering about how to be discerning about what they watch?
Find things to watch with them that are genuinely enjoyable for you both?
Make sure you always interact with them in an open, accepting, genuinely-involved way so that they tell you what they've been watching and respect your opinions on those things?
Sure, then they go watch the garbage anyway. Often until very late at night if I don't take away their school device that I can't lockdown...
When they are older I guess you can beg big brother and nanny state to hold their hand.
YouTube "algorithms" are nonsense. I watch one deep dive into the fallout games and despite the fact that I have, and continue to watch British TV shows it's relentless in showing me deep dives into "fallout lore". What I've chosen is like 3% of what I usually watch. It's not a very popular genre in comparison to, oh, the fucking BBC. Still, it's all of the sudden its the only thing that gets suggested.
they censor quite a bit for the sake of a children audience.
Honestly their algorithm seems to mostly push low quality, South Asian, and/or AI generated content lately, when randomly playing off of something like Ms Rachel or Sesame Street. Nothing disgusting, although maybe a little trippy (in AI case). My daughter really digs the Bollywood inspired kids stuff though.