The youtube algorithm is powerfully optimizing for something, and I don’t trust that at all with my child. However, in a fit of hubris, for a minute I thought that I could outsmart it and get what I want (time to clean the kitchen) without it getting what it wanted (I make no strong claims about what the youtube algorithm wants, but it tries very hard to get it, and I don’t want it to get it from my three year old).
I searched for episodes of PBS’s Reading Rainbow, but let the algorithm freely choose the order of returned results, and then vetted that the first result was a genuine episode. I also put it in “Kids” mode, in the hopes that it would be kinder to a child than an adult.
This was way too much freedom. It immediately pulled out the episode of Reading Rainbow about the 9/11 terrorist attacks (this topic is not at all indicated by the title or thumbnail)
There is a harder second-order question of “what sorts of videos maximize watch time, and will those be bad for my child?” Hastings’s evidence points toward “yes”, but I don’t think the answer is obvious a priori. (The things YouTube thinks I want to watch are almost all good or neutral for me; YMMV.)
The youtube algorithm is powerfully optimizing for something, and I don’t trust that at all with my child. However, in a fit of hubris, for a minute I thought that I could outsmart it and get what I want (time to clean the kitchen) without it getting what it wanted (I make no strong claims about what the youtube algorithm wants, but it tries very hard to get it, and I don’t want it to get it from my three year old).
I searched for episodes of PBS’s Reading Rainbow, but let the algorithm freely choose the order of returned results, and then vetted that the first result was a genuine episode. I also put it in “Kids” mode, in the hopes that it would be kinder to a child than an adult.
This was way too much freedom. It immediately pulled out the episode of Reading Rainbow about the 9/11 terrorist attacks (this topic is not at all indicated by the title or thumbnail)
I think it’s well known that it’s optimizing for watch time.
There is a harder second-order question of “what sorts of videos maximize watch time, and will those be bad for my child?” Hastings’s evidence points toward “yes”, but I don’t think the answer is obvious a priori. (The things YouTube thinks I want to watch are almost all good or neutral for me; YMMV.)