Honey, YouTubers are poisoning the kids

I don't feel like this problem is limited to kids. Youtube is a cesspool of people trying to find anything that will make them money and increase their subscribers. 80-90% of the stuff youtube recommends to me is just random people posting whatever they think will get them clicks. I'm into tech and 4 of 5 tech recommendations are just some random no one repeating the latest tech news with some sensational spin and click-bait title.

And, that's not even going into the non-tech world where it's 10x worse. Years ago that guy got in trouble for posting a dead body from a forest in Japan but just looking at what's recommended it's clear 90% for the content is just people trying to find some random non-topic and hyping it up.

Checking top recommendations right now

"Should I Buy This Chinook Helicopter? Craziest Barn Find Ever!"

"I Played Fortnite on World’s SMALLEST Keyboards"

"10 NEW Costco Deals You NEED To Buy in September 2024"

"I Bought VINTAGE vs NEW Beauty Products"

"My Daughter Survives WORLD'S TINIEST HOUSE"

I supposed the world was always this way given that there was a market for "World Weekly News" but "at scale" with millions more schlock producers it's horrifiying.

What aggravates me about YouTube is there's some great content that would be amazing for kids, but it's mixed with lots of garbage. Since YouTube doesn't provide any reasonable way for people to curate and share these allow lists with others, I end up completely blocking it on various devices, resulting in less hours of viewership for YouTube.

In the "How to work for Mr Beast" leak, the "no doesn't mean no" section absolutely boggles my mind.

For decades (probably centuries!), the phrase "don't take no for an answer" has always been a common sales technique. If the customer says they aren't interested, you don't necessarily just walk away from the sale. You can continue to try. Why wouldn't they have used that extraordinarily common phrase? The paragraph under the header only ever describes the same concept.

Who thought it was appropriate to negate the "no means no" phrasing that has almost exclusively referred to sexual consent for all recent memory?

Only way to watch YT by kids is FreeTube.io with blocked ads, skipping sponsored content, disabled autoplay and disabled recommendations.

Or browser with uBlock Origin and plugin Unhook, that lets you block recommendations, shorts, trends, autoplay, etc.

Was PRIME juice the inspiration for the South Park CRED drink? Or is it just the latest brand to exploit this marketing channel?

Social media is poisoning kids? No. You don't say. It's poisoning society.

While true, I don't think it's something new and unique, and by no means it's "consequence of technology entering their lives far too early". If anything, it's author's inability to see a plank in his own eye. In the hindsight, it was 100% the same thing with us (me specifically) watching TV cartoons with sketchy ads in between. That was before MrBeast was even born, and while I may dislike him more than others because of his creepy face, he is literally an amateur compared to Coca-Cola and Paramount.

I have never watched a 'Mr. Beast' video in full but I've caught clips here and there. From the very first time I saw his style of content I knew that it was something I would never let my kids watch willingly. His fake authenticity is sickening, and to be blunt I don't know how he's conned so many people into believing he is a genuinely good person that makes good content.

My kids are still far too young for unsupervised YouTube/TV time and are still firmly in the "Bluey or Ms. Rachel" age, but there's already a hardline Mr. Beast ban in my house. Hopefully by the time they're old enough to want that kind of content Mr. Beast is but a memory and YouTube will have much better content controls in place.

Sadly that seems unlikely - and AI-generated content is not going to help.

Beast and so many other YouTubers that target the very malleable 10-13 years are causing brain rot like we've never seen before.

I don't know how to explain it but my teenage kids see right through Mr. Beast and are very skeptical about all other online content. Basically they won't believe anything on the Internet, and they decline to watch anything that has markers of popularity. If it has a lot of views or likes they close the tab. I don't really think that is my influence, it's their generation.

Do enough young people even watch TV for banning adverting junk food before 9pm will help anything? clearly advertisers will go to these less regulated platforms which are probably substantially more effective and cheaper.

Advertising is a virus that will infect all ecosystems.

How are these children hearing about these products in the first place?

YouTube is not a place for children.

We need to be teaching young people the skills for critical thinking when it comes to advertisements. These companies pay teams to work full time to outsmart our monkey-brains, and it's not fair to expect the average person to have the time to educate themselves about this. By making it part of the curriculum in social studies, we can empower the next generations to make informed decisions instead of being hoodwinked by the endless psychological strategies employed by advertising firms and influencers.

I found myself empathizing more with MrBeast and his kid audience than the grump who wrote this article.

Ironically, by complaining about MisterBeast being a grifter and using so much loaded language, the author comes off as a grifter to me. Or at a minimum (especially looking at his other output), “old man yells at clouds.”

I 'member YouTube back when it wasn't all dog shit. People uploaded their cats, dogs and other pets doing pet shenanigans. Some youth went viral uploading videos of harmless pranks. A ton of people made very good educational content. Some put up chunks of concerts, modern bootleggers.

But nowadays? Content theft runs utterly rampant - and I'm not talking about the oh-so-poor multi billion movie conglomerates being the victims here. I'm talking about the countless content farms that get by just 1:1 re-uploading other people's videos. I'm talking about "meme pages" that do just the same, not even bothering to tag the original creators of the stuff they steal. I'm talking about "reaction video" streamers that not just (again) steal other people's content, but often enough drive their rabid fanbase to dogpile upon whomever/whatever they "reacted" upon. All of that driven by the sweet sweet nectar of YouTube Ad revenue sharing.

And that's just the relatively harmless content thieves. Money also drives a lot of other very problematic kinds of YouTubers, especially ever since sponsoring became the norm rather than the exception for those creating high value/effort content: shilling literally dangerous and unsafe supplements, one-shoe-fits-all VPNs promising much but delivering not much to people who don't need them (other than, ironically, to bypass Youtube's geoblocking), even more supplements, cryptocurrencies, various forms of gambling, questionable "mental health" providers that deliver pages upon pages of warnings and horror stories when you just search once for them, scams like "Established Titles" [1]...

Then come all the "pranks" and "challenges" that often enough led to kids and youths injuring themselves in the process [2] (and sometimes unfortunately even killing them such as with the Tide pod challenge [3]), or outright anti-social behavior that got cheered upon by rowdy commenters. Some particularly braindead, ruthless (or however else you want to call them) arseholes exploit homeless people for clicks [6].

And finally, the politics. The alt-right/incel/conspiracy radicalisation funnel has been documented to insane depths [4], but nowadays it seems to have shifted mostly to TikTok [7] as YouTube (finally) took action after widespread media reports [5].

Oh and then the personalities. It sucks that so many streamers - particularly in the German scene [8] - ended up with allegations of all sorts of misconduct. Domestic violence, sexual abuse, grooming of minors in their fan base, the same shit that happens to a lot of stars that got popular as kids, the fame ruins their heads and makes them believe they can get away with anything.

I miss the old Internet, one that was not dominated by people willing to sell out everyone and their dog for clicks and ad revenue. Probably the only YouTuber I can actually still recommend who a) never shilled bullshit in his career and b) still does the same good content he started with is DaveHax. Even Simon's Cat has gone down the drain years ago when every new video turned out to be 75%+ recycled older material...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Established_Titles

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/01/17/youtube...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumption_of_Tide_Pods

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right_pipeline

[5] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/23/youtube-g...

[6] https://www.vice.com/en/article/homeless-people-are-not-prop...

[7] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1472586X.2023.2...

[8] https://www.ingame.de/news/streaming/streamer-skandale-2022-...

Where are all these poisoned children getting the cash to buy these things?