YouTube Kids is massively popular and also the actual worst content the world has to offer. The most successful content, racking up hundreds of millions of views, is extremely vapid and just consists of sounds and colours punctuated by disguised adverts for expensive toys. No narrative, no speech, nothing educational. Kids are so malleable and early development is so important, yet a sizeable chunk are watching people in knock-off Spider-Man costumes unwrap toys and chase around knock-off Elsas all day. I won’t even get into the unsettling uncanny valley side of things and the creepy procedurally generated animation on there.

I’m genuinely concerned about kids being brought up on what is essentially mental junk food through their most formative years. I’m not saying they all need to be listening to violin concertos all day, but I feel that when I was a kid straight up garbage like this didn’t even exist and every kids show had at least something you could learn from it, like Sesame Street, or was decently produced entertainment, like Pokemon. This has a quarter of a billion views and it’s just... nothing.

    • KasDapital [any]
      ·
      3 years ago

      No, but that's not the point. It's the aspirations and hopes of the kids that let's them have different plans and options as they get older. Not all of the US kids will always want to be you tubers, but the time spent there is time they could learn about another field that's more interesting to them, which is more viable. This would be true even under socialism, as not everyone can be entertainers.

      With China the students aspirations are more directly involved in math and the sciences, and specifically sciences which currently don't have major military implications, it's just doing experiments in space. (arguably changing, not the point). That can be more readily applied to other career paths and interests which can serve others.