This thread is person after person saying “oh wow, person who sells terrible thing for humanity doesn’t let their kids have unlimited access to terrible thing! It’s so obvious. This isn’t news.”

The news is that the CEO of youtube is saying that Youtube is something that should be limited and he thinks harm will come to his children if he does not. This may be obvious to people on this site but a lot of normal people think it’s fine. It’s shocking as for a lot of people it’s more like “CEO of cucumber farm limits cucumbers for their child!” As that’s how Google markets youtube for kids.

Lots of normal people don't think it's fine.

Lots of parents limited their kids' TV (television, you know) time back in the day (mine sure did, thanks mum and dad, even though I didn't particularly approve of the restriction back then).

Now you have to limit smartphone (and tablet and PC and TV) time. Lots of parents do this already, CEOs are not alone.

To me it seems like basic parenting to limit access to tech.

It wasn’t healthy for kids to just play video games every day for 5hrs straight after school in the 90s either. But that also doesn’t mean they should never have had a PlayStation or all gaming is bad.

I personally think Youtube itself is just fine. It has parental controls and I can block channels etc.

What isn't fine is YOUTUBE FUCKING SHORTS. It's by far the worst of the infinite content producers in the world because automated uploads are so easy compared to the other platforms and there is no way to block it completely from kids without just banning all of Youtube. It _needs_ to have a separate setting.

Hacker News is not representative of the average person in often very bad ways.

So you kinda saying youtube for kids should limit itself to N hours per day per IP address / device?

Perhaps australia should’ve implemented such limitations. Burden of enforcement on big tech since the have billions to spend anyway.

It's also person after person telling people to parent harder.

I doubt “a lot of people” think spending all day watching YouTube is fine; this sounds hyperbolic.

Seems like a pathetic appeal to authority to me. Why should I care what weird idiosyncrasies billionaires have? I'm sure they have tons of things they don't want their children learning that a lot of people would consider to be trivial. In my mind this goes back to whether you model children as property that you own or individual humans you're hoping to introduce to the world in the best way you understand how. It sucks that other people's children are going to youtube to turn off their brains. But my kids are excelling because of it and similar services. My girls are constantly trying new things because of what they see on social media and youtube. My 12 year old daughter already plays flute, violin and cello but wants to pick up the saxophone because of content she has consumed. We get everything from weird science experiments to a desire to try sewing or knitting. When people talk about the "dangers" of the internet and social media I struggle to understand what they mean because it's always been an enabler to me to excel. Somewhere along the way so called "hackers" wanted to create safe spaces to completely isolate their children from any variables the world can throw at them and I just cannot understand the mentality.