7 ms·

Hmm, my nephew already saw pepa pig having her teeth extracted on YouTube kids so I'm gonna say this is too little too late.

by borne0 8y ago

borne0 8y ago
Downvotes right off the bat? Ok, parents are happy to give their kids a screen to give themselves a momentary reprieve but if that trust is broken good luck getting it back.
dkoubsky 8y ago
I've heard Joe Rogan talk about this on his podcast. It sounds like there is an epidemic of cartoon styled videos with dark endings that wind up autoplaying after kids' videos.
- Pulcinella 8y ago
  See the previous discussion on HN and it’s link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15637504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15637504 It’s very disturbing, especially once you have kids of your own and it hits home.
  - musage 8y ago
    https://imgur.com/a/Hpds1 https://imgur.com/a/Hpds1 What disturbs me is how no explanation other than "copy cats out for ad money" is allowed. The abusiveness of it might even get be allowed to be seen if only it could be tied to profit motive. But just targeting children at scale to fuck them up, maybe not even for ads, not even to groom them -- too nasty, can't be, Pizzagate tinfoil yadda yadda. Not that it would take more than a single multi-billionaire with a brain tumor or something; let's simply not even look into it, and make up revisionist narratives once the source material is all gone. But the material was/is there, not much about the nature of the content is mysterious. Nothing about the denial is mysterious either, except those in it. They prefer to talk about the people talking about the supposed intent of the people who made the videos, rather than the videos thoroughly. And even when it's well meant, "disturbing" is too much of an umbrella to be useful. It's pretty fucked up that the whole conversation ranges from "is this disturbing or can it be rationalized neatly". I guess that's called framing. To me it's "disturbing" because it seems to be reading from a script, and because some of it focuses on abuse, gleefully so. And that borders on stuff like toy videos (thousands and hundreds of thousands of them, it seems) which are just hands of an adult... shoving dolls around, making shrill voices. Or those endless wastelands of generated 3D animations playing with heads or tying identity to color, putting things in blenders and microwaves. And so on; there are two bottlenecks, the attention span of listeners/readers, and the energy it takes to look at and then recount all this stuff -- but the amount of fucked up shit is NOT a bottleneck. Even as a collective we don't muster the attention span required. It's an ocean, and we're the people skirting it saying it's a puddle anyway so there isn't even a need to measure its depth. And that itself, the overwhelming of the attention span, is another abusive aspect in all this. And we're not really discussing this or other aspects, using the "nutjobs" as a fig leaf for not doing so. But that's not nutty, and turning a blind eye to abuse is not documented behavior of a deeply sick society. Whatever helps them sleep. ElsaGate made also me less tolerant of stuff that isn't outright abusive, but simply very shit. That's not fair, but it did sensitize me to "just" sloppy and lazy children's entertainment, too. It's better kids entertain themselves and each other than be entertained by crap adults, I bet you they learn more from that. And frankly, when I look at what goes for adult entertainment, I see ElsaGate as the latest, ugliest achievement in a long line of normalization of abuse. It's no wonder the reaction is so limp and mostly focuses on sweeping it under the rug. We made this, ultimately; but we won't see it for what it is, nor the connection to what we accept.
mayniac 8y ago
/r/ElsaGate monitors this quite actively. The current prevailing non-tin-foil-hat theory is that some animators realised that they could game YouTube's suggestion algorithm, and that kids videos are an easy target. Kids also are very inquisitive when it comes to subjects you tell them are inappropriate. Over time the videos with darker themes got more clicks and it has spiralled out of control since. Throw in some bots to increase views and comment rapidly once videos are released to increase rankings and you've got a perfect ad-revenue scheme. Of course there's nutjobs who think it's a pedophile ring normalising sexual violence to kids, but there's an equal likelihood of pizzagate being real.
- borne0 8y ago
  I think that's over thinking it a bit, youtube algos are easy to manipulate and a single thread on 4chan can create a fair bit of weird media, for the explicit intent of creating weird media.
  - mayniac 8y ago
    I do prefer the 4chan theory, since it satisfies Occam's Razor. That said, the frequency of new videos from multiple channels dedicated to nothing but these videos, as well as the monetisation, makes it unlikely. Also considering the number of subscribers the subreddit has I'm sure that if there were any new 4chan threads suggesting people make those videos it would've been spotted. It's honestly the sheer number of videos that is the shocking part of the mystery. It's not just a few dozen videos from different animators, it's hundreds of videos from dozens of channels pumping this stuff out. Unfortunately I find it unlikely that we'll ever find out the cause.
    - andrepd 8y ago
      The cause is algorithms run amok. Find popular keywords: Elsa, Frozen, Fidget Spinner, Sexual. Have an AI mix these in whatever weird way and churn out nightmare fuel to kids, in exchange for big fat ad revenue. Kids, more easily manipulated, and with a whole life as consumers ahead of them, are valuable targets...
pfarnsworth 8y ago
The good thing for YouTube is that more kids are being born every day. They can sacrifice all existing kids and still have more new users going forward.
- pjc50 8y ago
  > sacrifice all existing kids Poor choice of language, Herod.

Hmm, my nephew already saw pepa pig having her teeth extracted on YouTube kids so I'm gonna say this is too little too late.

by borne0 8y ago

Hmm, my nephew already saw pepa pig having her teeth extracted on YouTube kids so I'm gonna say this is too little too late.

borne0 8y ago

Downvotes right off the bat? Ok, parents are happy to give their kids a screen to give themselves a momentary reprieve but if that trust is broken good luck getting it back.

dkoubsky 8y ago

I've heard Joe Rogan talk about this on his podcast. It sounds like there is an epidemic of cartoon styled videos with dark endings that wind up autoplaying after kids' videos.

Pulcinella 8y ago
See the previous discussion on HN and it’s link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15637504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15637504 It’s very disturbing, especially once you have kids of your own and it hits home.
- musage 8y ago
  https://imgur.com/a/Hpds1 https://imgur.com/a/Hpds1 What disturbs me is how no explanation other than "copy cats out for ad money" is allowed. The abusiveness of it might even get be allowed to be seen if only it could be tied to profit motive. But just targeting children at scale to fuck them up, maybe not even for ads, not even to groom them -- too nasty, can't be, Pizzagate tinfoil yadda yadda. Not that it would take more than a single multi-billionaire with a brain tumor or something; let's simply not even look into it, and make up revisionist narratives once the source material is all gone. But the material was/is there, not much about the nature of the content is mysterious. Nothing about the denial is mysterious either, except those in it. They prefer to talk about the people talking about the supposed intent of the people who made the videos, rather than the videos thoroughly. And even when it's well meant, "disturbing" is too much of an umbrella to be useful. It's pretty fucked up that the whole conversation ranges from "is this disturbing or can it be rationalized neatly". I guess that's called framing. To me it's "disturbing" because it seems to be reading from a script, and because some of it focuses on abuse, gleefully so. And that borders on stuff like toy videos (thousands and hundreds of thousands of them, it seems) which are just hands of an adult... shoving dolls around, making shrill voices. Or those endless wastelands of generated 3D animations playing with heads or tying identity to color, putting things in blenders and microwaves. And so on; there are two bottlenecks, the attention span of listeners/readers, and the energy it takes to look at and then recount all this stuff -- but the amount of fucked up shit is NOT a bottleneck. Even as a collective we don't muster the attention span required. It's an ocean, and we're the people skirting it saying it's a puddle anyway so there isn't even a need to measure its depth. And that itself, the overwhelming of the attention span, is another abusive aspect in all this. And we're not really discussing this or other aspects, using the "nutjobs" as a fig leaf for not doing so. But that's not nutty, and turning a blind eye to abuse is not documented behavior of a deeply sick society. Whatever helps them sleep. ElsaGate made also me less tolerant of stuff that isn't outright abusive, but simply very shit. That's not fair, but it did sensitize me to "just" sloppy and lazy children's entertainment, too. It's better kids entertain themselves and each other than be entertained by crap adults, I bet you they learn more from that. And frankly, when I look at what goes for adult entertainment, I see ElsaGate as the latest, ugliest achievement in a long line of normalization of abuse. It's no wonder the reaction is so limp and mostly focuses on sweeping it under the rug. We made this, ultimately; but we won't see it for what it is, nor the connection to what we accept.

mayniac 8y ago

/r/ElsaGate monitors this quite actively. The current prevailing non-tin-foil-hat theory is that some animators realised that they could game YouTube's suggestion algorithm, and that kids videos are an easy target. Kids also are very inquisitive when it comes to subjects you tell them are inappropriate. Over time the videos with darker themes got more clicks and it has spiralled out of control since. Throw in some bots to increase views and comment rapidly once videos are released to increase rankings and you've got a perfect ad-revenue scheme. Of course there's nutjobs who think it's a pedophile ring normalising sexual violence to kids, but there's an equal likelihood of pizzagate being real.

borne0 8y ago
I think that's over thinking it a bit, youtube algos are easy to manipulate and a single thread on 4chan can create a fair bit of weird media, for the explicit intent of creating weird media.
- mayniac 8y ago
  I do prefer the 4chan theory, since it satisfies Occam's Razor. That said, the frequency of new videos from multiple channels dedicated to nothing but these videos, as well as the monetisation, makes it unlikely. Also considering the number of subscribers the subreddit has I'm sure that if there were any new 4chan threads suggesting people make those videos it would've been spotted. It's honestly the sheer number of videos that is the shocking part of the mystery. It's not just a few dozen videos from different animators, it's hundreds of videos from dozens of channels pumping this stuff out. Unfortunately I find it unlikely that we'll ever find out the cause.
  - andrepd 8y ago
    The cause is algorithms run amok. Find popular keywords: Elsa, Frozen, Fidget Spinner, Sexual. Have an AI mix these in whatever weird way and churn out nightmare fuel to kids, in exchange for big fat ad revenue. Kids, more easily manipulated, and with a whole life as consumers ahead of them, are valuable targets...

pfarnsworth 8y ago

The good thing for YouTube is that more kids are being born every day. They can sacrifice all existing kids and still have more new users going forward.

pjc50 8y ago
> sacrifice all existing kids Poor choice of language, Herod.