realitista

Steps forward are few and far between these days, I'll take what I can get.

That's not an experience I'm willing to pay for in its current form. But I could definitely see a path for it to become one, thanks for putting it on my radar.

I'm okay except for the walled garden part. I get referred to articles in many ways, none of them in Apple News. If I can ever log into the actual publications sites with my Apple ID and get the article, then I'm on.

Yeah that's what I used for the first 6 months to try it out.

I used Kagi for a few months when other engines failed. It did come through a few times. But paying $5 a month to get one extra good search result per month was a hard sell for me. If they offered a much much smaller package of lime 20-50 searches per month or just pay as you go, I'd definitely be in.

I'd say their decision making was mostly forced by their drop in ad revenue and subscriptions forced by the internet.

Though I do wish that someone would make a Spotify for news so that I could pay once and get access to all of them and at least give them 10 cents per article or something, because I will never pay the subscription cost any are asking.

As much as I'd like to support them, the price to utility ratio is way the fuck off at the prices they ask now.

Exactly. The only way is to block it and then choose something on your device whenever you want to show them something, and never let them use it without you choosing the content. The algorithm will always lead them to the darkest bowels of garbage content in my experience.

The stuff he was watching was more "am I gonna catch Mikey? Mikey is a chicken" kind of stuff. If he was really learning about the mechanics and how to program stuff in Minecraft with redstone or something, I could get behind it. I know Minecraft well enough to know the junk from the good stuff. And he watched probably 10 videos like this every day for more than a year, so I think from those thousands of videos he's learned whatever he would have learned already.

Now instead he is mostly watching chess videos and playing on an app called ChessKid which I'm much more happy with.

Yeah I mean if a parent was always curing the content, it could be useful. But to me that's the same as not letting them have it, you just put on some YouTube videos every so often for them that you choose on your device (we do this now, I just don't allow it on their devices).

Yeah, I mean we do sometimes watch YouTube videos together when they ask about a certain topic. I can see how if you only allowed them to use it supervised it could be a valuable thing. But it's tough to keep it only supervised. When my son had it, it ended up being just blippy and Minecraft videos. Not terrible stuff but not stuff I want him spending an hour a day on either.

In the time I allowed my kids to have YT kids, I did not encounter the content you speak of. I know there's good content on YouTube, I watch it all the time. But I never saw anything good come up in the YouTube kids app. And we had it for a while.

That's why I've blocked YouTube on all my kids devices. It's just a pipeline of pure garbage content for kids.