I'm a grown adult and I think those thumbnails are gonna give me nightmares holy shit
this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2025
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What in tarnation?
Do people not curate their content? I never have any issues with YouTube. Even Twitter was fine. The only reason I deleted my Twitter account was because Musk bought the platform. I get recommendations for science stuff and that's it. Even the shorts.
And parents in my generation clutched their pearls at Looney Toons cartoons. What the actual fuck?
This reminds me of garbage pail kids cards.
gross, we are so doomed
I was working in a house this week that had a ~4 year kid in another room. They were on the mums phone watching YouTube shorts and I think I had an aneurysm listening to it. It was godawful and the attention span was so low they constantly flicked through so most didn't even play for more than a second or two of incomprehensible gibberish before they'd flicked onto the next one.
I feel really sorry for anyone who has to grow up surrounded by this bombardment of shite.
A 4yo has no business having unrestricted access to media, let alone YouTube. Current recommendations are 20 to 45 minutes a day at that age, depending on country / organization.
YouTube has so much questionable content, kids shouldn't be in a position to be able to click next and consume that crap.
YouTube kids exists since 2015, but Elsagate happened around 2017/18, so I don't exactly trust their content moderation.
Right, this is simple stuff - for a 4 year old, content of any kind must be curated, and I'd argue that stays true in different ways for quite a while.
Yeesh. Before ever turning over entire decision-making power on a very uncontrolled platform to a kid, ya gotta help walk them through stuff and spend time curating / selecting content together. And also wait for them to grow up some and demonstrate readiness.
And certainly never trust YouTube's curation, ever, agreed.
4 yo rawdogging modern AI slop YouTube shorts, solo, is wild.
Giving internet connected devices to a kid is like giving them blank plane tickets and sending them alone to the airport !
Seriously dangerous! I like your analogy, it's even a little worse though, it's like doing that but also the planes have an engineered preference to steer towards the worst places.
Caught my 7yo niece consuming disney princess cosplay ahegao content on youtube shorts yesterday. =\ she's not allowed on YouTube anymore, the platform is too unsafe for children.
the platform was never safe, parents are just ignorant
I have a 12 year old. I considered YouTube unsafe for her unsupervised, when she was growing up (and largely still do, we have a healthy teamwork approach to it). The place is just magnitudes worse now. And yep, parents are super ignorant (and have been), they have no idea what the kids are even watching, many don't really restrict the time they spend at all.
But Google forbid if someone says rape, murder, suicide or any number of no-no words. Then that video is demonetized.
This looks godawful
Most of YouTube does
I was on YouTube all the time until recently when I switched to peer tube, still to watch YouTube
I've never seen this shit before
I hope my child inherits my lack of reaction to this stuff. I find short form video content immensely boring. I cannot relate at all to people's ability to spend more than a couple of minutes with it.
Is that YouTube trying to compete with Tiktok for the no-attention-span brain rot market? I never saw the appeal.
Tbh YouTube is even worse.
I want my kid to watch YouTube in moderation, there are good content creators in there.
BUT there is no way for me to block their access to the brain rot shithole that is YouTube Shorts. None, zero, nada. No parental controls work.
With TikTok I can just block it completely with parental controls, no problems.
3rd party YouTube clients such as NewPipe, LibreTube and Freetube offer such options, if available on your device.
I want them to offer it on my kids devices, without giving them the ability to re-enable shorts.
I’m pretty sure they can’t do that, especially not on iOS and even less on desktop computers where they can just browse to the website
even less on desktop computers
Blocktube and Enhancer for Youtube are Firefox extensions that can hide all of that shit completely. Mine has all shorts disabled, and I've removed the recommended videos panels from the right hand side & ends of videos, plus disabled any non-playlist autoplay. There's still crap on the Home tab, but I don't use that so I've never needed to look into ways to improve it, I just use the subbed tab and playlists. My YT shows me exactly what I ask for and nothing else. The Blocktube extension settings can be password-locked.
Yattee is an app on iOS that might work, though I haven't tried it. Also on iOS, one of the Invidious website instances (3rd party YouTube front end) in Safari or installed as a PWA. On pc, using an Invidious site with the YouTube domain filtered out through your router or Pi-hole, could also work.
Disabling watch history and deleting all previous history stops the shorts from being recommended. You can still search for individual shorts but you can’t scroll infinitely. I’m not sure if you can lock that setting with parental controls or not, but may be helpful.
Use a software like newpipe with a subscription feed only. There are no ads, no recommended videos, and no shorts.
Nebula has mostly quality content and no "shorts", where as YT even without shorts has mountains of garbage.
There is a browser plugin "YouTube enhancer" that lets you disable shorts, comments, recommended videos and other crap.
I think..I...I..yep.. I do... I do smell what the rock is cooking.
it's crack.
It's the number of views they're getting that worries me the most.
I'm thinking how bullshit it is about how much money that video has made by getting AI art to rip off the rock with what I assume is a shitty song
I'm thinking about that too and why I haven't thought of it
This is terrifying looking, just activates every part of my hind brain.
Yup that’s why it’s so effective on children, they don’t have the foresight to think about the video being bad, and multiple parts of their brain light up and then they feed the addiction
my eyes are bleeding
I have a young child who will be using the web eventually and it terrifies me. I'm going to have to do something to lock it down to keep out the brain rot
Evolution was a mistake.
They seem to go well together tho.
I made a new youtube account recently. I use youtube shorts a decent amount. Fortunately, I never see shitty ai videos like these. I just get Invincible and GTA/Rdr2 edits. For some reason.
Is… this real?
r u ok dwayne
Or anybody's firehose of shitty videos for that matter.