YouTube Kids is/was notorious for having awful content that's often the laziest, lowest effort product that kids will sit through (aka the most obnoxious combination of repetitive sound effects and visuals you can imagine), propaganda trying to get em while they're young, or some combination of both. Unfortunately a lot of people let their kids have unfettered access to it because it's the only way they can get them to be relatively quiet and preoccupied for 30 minutes... Partially because algorithm-driven tech is like crack to brains, especially developing ones.
There was a whole thing about YouTube kids being filled with content about Spider-Man impregnating Elsa, there being lots of unhealthy portrayals of relationships as normal such as abusive dynamics between Mickey and Minnie mouse, and generally weird/inappropriate content featuring poo, pee, farts, stinky feet, blood and needles, or whatever else content mills thought they could get kids to click on. Most of these channels popped up because YouTube showed ads to kids at the time and it was some of the most lucrative revenue streams to be found on the platform for the effort required—kids will watch almost anything after all.
There were so many bots making algorithmically generated sludge to put in front of kids that it was literally too much to go through and curate out... Everything was getting infinitely re-uploaded across hundreds of channels to the point where if you let a kid watch YouTube on auto play, they'd be all but guaranteed to run into that sort of content eventually and get kind of sucked into it like a vortex.
It was known as ElsaGate and, in classic fashion, a lot of the legitimate issues people took with the situation also got bundled up with weird New World Order/right wing conspiracy type shit. As is known to happen.
YouTube is still as described above with kids content to a degree, but the company has taken a bare minimum effort to make those videos more difficult to monetize (and also taking anything vaguely kid-approximating down with it... Lots of animation aimed at an adult audience also gets flagged as for kids all the time).
I have a very young brother who had an obsession with Siren Head at one point from watching YouTube kids for who knows how many hours. My mom even asked at one point if I could make a video of Siren Head using the toilet as a potty training aid for him. I did not end up making the video but that's a little beside the point.
Anyways there's also a non-zero number of kids out there named Elsa by their parents. Yay Disney parents!
This is accurate to the joke I was making, yes. Thank you for your service writing all that out, because I really didn't want to!
I'll add that Elsa (and Daenerys) were briefly the most popular names for girls in the US, so there's more than a few out there.
That kids-content crackdown has been very annoying for me. Many kids songs (or kid adjacent, like a lot of TMBG) is flagged as child content, which puts stupid restrictions on it like not being able to listen in the background. This even affects YT Music which makes listening to those songs in playlists and such difficult or impossible.
I’m just… wondering what the internal corporate process that led to this. Like, they had to get people to code this feature, like imagine being the person who gets told “ oh yah, you and your team are implementing and integrating the new feature that sorts video feeds by color.”
I haven't seen this but it doesn't seem like a big deal, unless they're spamming you with it. people seem to have a pathological need to be mad about youtube updates tbh
I didn't used to sort mine by colour, but then I noticed when sorting by purpose, I'd usually end up with only one or two colours (often blue), and so now I sort by colour and purpose to I have a nice gradient
yeah that happened to me an hour ago. I chose the middle one because that was my favorite color scheme of the three choices. Result: the associated video selections were nothing special But I wonder if they took into account my algorithms I already had going, plus the blue purple color scheme 🤔
If the purpose is to provide alternative recommendation feeds, it's not useless. Ever had that feeling when you go to the yt homepage and you don't see anything you want to watch?
It just sends you to filters at the top for the color, there are tons of others already there that you can use to find new stuff, including a „new to me“ one that will only show things you actually haven’t seen before.
This feels more like an interesting solo hack together project on GitHub that one can take lessons from than an enterprise solution to any sort of issue or feature request.
Personally, I've never clicked on a video because I saw it on the homepage. When I open the site, I already know what kind of video I want to see and go immediately to search. Homepage recommendations have never been of use for me.
Why would it be? It could easily do things like- purple video of jacaranda flowers in bloom with peaceful music, then purple video of a guy wearing all purple giving the camera the finger while death metal plays.
Color says absolutely nothing about a video's contents.
It's not just colour it's colour within what the algorithm already thinks is nice. If you only watch 4hour fish tank videos you'll only get 4 hour fish tank videos, just with purple fish. It's not like you have to just play this live either. Just generate the videos and add each non offensive one to a Playlist to run at the office. Sure it's not like a killer feature, I also doubt it took much effort at all to create.
The algorithm is far from perfect. And how would it know you were planning for a reception and wanted those kind of videos if you normally watched death metal videos?
Bro this made me so mad, holy fuck. Just show me the channels I'm subscribed to and adjacent content, that's it. You haven't succeeded at that in years.
Cute or not, it's wasting money and time that could be spent on actually improving the app. YouTube constantly pushes more ads more aggressively saying they don't make profit, while wasting money in such absurd way
