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YouTube Will Disable Comments on Nearly All Videos With Kids (variety.com)
YouTube said today it will disable the ability for viewers to leave comments on most videos featuring minors, as it tries to contain the damage from a scandal involving child predators leaving coded sexual comments on the site. From a report: YouTube said in a blog post Thursday that over the past week it had already disabled comments from "tens of millions of videos" that could be subject to predatory behavior. Now, it will expand that to suspend comments on virtually all videos featuring young minors, as well as videos featuring older kids that "could be at risk of attracting predatory behavior." In a tweet, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki linked to the update and explained the change: "Recently, there have been some deeply concerning incidents regarding child safety on YouTube. Nothing is more important to us than ensuring the safety of young people on the platform."
In other news YouTube nuked its head office from orbit in order to deal with a mouse found in their cafeteria kitchen.
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
"useless" very much depends on the video. Yes, comments on most entertainment-style videos are probably useless, they can be helpful on how-to videos and the like, especially if the channel is small enough that the creator actually sees and responds to the comments.
Or go one step further by removing ads from all videos featuring children. That would remove the incentives for adults to exploit children for financial gain on YouTube.
I thought I had seen some incredible feats of hysteria before, but this has to be a new high water mark. Because some comments *might* be left by perverts, we are just getting rid of them altogether? "Featuring minors" also is incredibly vague, would this include anything with child actors? What about reviews of something that featured child actors?
I feel like this is just going to push yet another chunk of the creator base to other platforms, if they exist. It might be time for Youtube to decide on the content it really wants on its platform and then build outward from there, as they have obviously moved (or been forced) away from just a general video sharing service.
YouTube comments on most "how-to" videos can be pretty useful, they're another source of information.
#DeleteFacebook
[comments are] so incredibly useless that I definitely wouldn't miss them.
I disagree. When I see a video making an incorrect statement, I often see the highest voted comment is one making a correction. I think this is great.
You identified problem that kids are unable to cope with adversity and your proposed solution is to further insulate them? How is that going to result in them growing up to become well-adjusted adults capable of coping with life? Kids eventually grow up and have to face adult life that is at best indifferent to your problems, and at worst cruel, mean, and full of unnecessary suffering.
YouTube comments are some of the worst on the internet.
This comment is worse than most YouTube comments.
You identified problem that kids are unable to cope with adversity and your proposed solution is to further insulate them? How is that going to result in them growing up to become well-adjusted adults capable of coping with life? Kids eventually grow up and have to face adult life that is at best indifferent to your problems, and at worst cruel, mean, and full of unnecessary suffering.
Good parenting is the key. It's not our job to raise peoples kids, but it IS our job to find ways to project the masses from obvious abuse, it might not be ideal, but this is not a perfect world, and youtube is NOT your or my property. As it is now, it's basically just an entertainment platform made by their content creators, either for profit or for fun.
I'd like to live in a sensorship free world, that is my dream, yet as I get older, I realize we need some basic rules for things, for example - if we didn't have any kind of police, we'd basically be a society of survival-of-the-fittest and it'd be total anarchy. No, I don't always agree with the lawmakers, and I hate new rules as much as the next person in here.
But the bullying I've seen of kids, mostly BY other kids - tells me that there's certain media that we're not ready to handle properly yet, and we need some way of regulating it. If YouTube was open source, owned by the public, controlled by the public - it would be a different story, and maybe we'd have better ways of controlling the outcome of this kind of "overwhelming" success.
YouTube is truly victims of their own success, on one hand - they have massive server fees to pay for, on the other hand - they've got millions of entitled people who thinks that their services should remain free and uncensored. You really can't please them all.
I miss the "old" uncensored YouTube - but it ain't worth the life of a single kid, or adult for that matter.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
You are choosing to be willfully ignorant that children today are exposed to orders of magnitude more cruelty, meanness, and unnecessary suffering in social settings than we had to face.
This is hysterical overreaction and symptomatic helicopter parenting response. Crime is down, every school is on anti-bullying initiative, every teacher and parent is hypervigilant about all kinds of nonsense issues (i.e. stranger danger).
Children today are insulated to the point that basic coping skills fail to develop due to atrophy. Hence we have trigger warnings and victimhood culture. Just add the numbers, helicopter parenting hysteria started sometime during 80s. Now look at what is going on in Universities and places where most workers are young (startups and tech).