I have kids and I'm really bothered by MrBeast. I had to buy goddamn chocolate bars at Walmart because of him. I acknowledge he is creative and driven but the content is such crap, with a few exceptions that my kids point out.
But, what's the alternative?
For example, I love 3brown1blue videos. But, it is too advanced even for my eleven year old.
Mark Rober videos are great, and my kids love them, but he's even inside MrBeast's orbit. And, he's not putting out as much content.
What are the good channels that create creative and stimulating videos that are a benefit to humanity.
People might downvote this but it’s what our family is doing. We barely watch any TV and do t spend a lot of time on screens. We have a lot of books and entertainment for my kids is primarily through reading physical books, sports, hanging out with friends in their backyard etc.
Many people, when they say 'culture' in the context of kids, mean something that kids can discuss around a lunch table. If OP's kids don't watch youtube, they won't have this particular aspect of culture as an inroad to make friends.
Like other humans, kids don't have universally aligned interest in media. Also, "missing out" can be good in many cases, depending on the content of said media.
Sure, but if YouTube makes up say 20% of culture, that's 20% of conversations they cannot participate in. I'd love to read any source that says that "missing out" on making friends is actually a good thing.
Absolute nonsense. Even a few months difference in when children get sucked into the YouTube vortex means they have totally different understandings of creators, their content and the contemporary dramatics.
YouTube content, thanks to its short-lived nature, has become essentially useless as a shared 'cultural context' unless one is plugged in 24/7.
My kids have a lot (probably too much) screen time. None of them watch Mr Beast. I think he is recommended to people who don't have well developed Youtube histories. He is sort of the Taylor Swift of Youtube. She might be a fine musician for all I know but no music service is going to recommend her to a listener it knows wants metal. Beast is a safe recommendation for people who only have a casual interest in what the platform has to offer. He never appears in my recommendations. The algorithm knows better.
We watched Youtube together as a family at first and when the kids got older I helped them find creators and setup their own subscriptions. The worst thing a parent can do is sit them in front of Youtube Kids brainrot. They started with lots of education,science,maker/craft,animation and PG gamers like Hermitcraft.
good channels that create creative and stimulating videos that are a benefit to humanity
Restoration and repair videos could be a good choice, although there's also plenty of fake clickbait content there too now. I usually actively avoid content with sensationalised titles and look for smaller non-profit creators.
We successfully moved to restoration videos. They’re great. Agreed with everything said about both Mr Beast and Mark Rober. Not what I want my kids watching a lot of.
Personally, I find YouTube to be unusable if you think of it as channel-based. What I do is keep a list of topics and perform a search based on the topics.
That pulls in some set of videos, of which maybe about 20-50% are exactly what I want. If the search yields no great results, it's usually because I've gotten the search wrong or the topic isn't well covered on YouTube yet.
With the kids, I don't talk about watching "YouTube", I talk about watching "learning videos" and if they want to watch a learning video, I ask them to tell me what they want to learn before we turn the screens on.
Usually it's building something, like "I want to learn how to build a doll house" or "I want to learn how to make a shark sculpture
Channels are push content, this is more of a pull approach.
Idk much about him but stacking school busses on top of each other with a crane or driving a train into a sinkhole seem like pretty interesting things to do. Better than geeking out over the bloodiest Mortal Kombat fatality or whatever I was doing at that age. What's an example of the more "crap" content?
Avoiding one sided content altogether. Any and all video content must be rejected.
Learning to do things from books is the only way we can safeguard the next generation from becoming mind fucked zombies who have lost the cognitive ability to think for themselves.
Good question. I'm also on the lookout for quality content for my kids. I recently learned that YouTube Kids can be put into whitelist-only mode, and that specific channels, videos, or collections of channels can be picked individually. Google aren't making it easy, but the option is there.
> Does YouTube kill those channels?
I don't think it's about YouTube. Mr Beast is good at what he does, and manages to produce very marketable content. It's fast-food entertainment. It's a newer take on what's been on our TV screens for decades in the form of reality TV and game shows.
i don't know of many, but I've got kids in a similar range and I endorse Kurzgesagt. CGP Grey hits nice sometimes too (they loved the flags, hexagons, and dragon videos)
The alternative is grabbing The Little Prince or My Neighbor Totoro and watching or reading it with the kids. I have a very simple rule, if something isn't good enough to be engaging for parents and kids just throw it the hell out. It reminds me of a discussion between a Japanese coworker and an American expat. The Japanese guy was disgusted by lunchables, and the expat went "oh yeah, they're just for kids", and he just said "you feed your kids something you wouldn't eat yourself"?
Stop normalizing feeding garbage to children, metaphorically or literally. There's enough stimulating media in the world outside of Youtube.
It doesn't kill them per se, but it doesn't seem to promote them either. The good content takes a lot more digging to find. Not an easy task, considering how bad the search on YouTube is.
I like Practical Engineering. I also watch a lot of quality family vblog. You can tell genuine content vs influencer contents I am sure
Mark Rober has turned into very content-driven since a few years ago. He used to spend more time on explaining how the science works. His “toys” are also copycat from existing competitors
I know this is beside the point but I remember the first time I bought a Mr Beast bar, I bit into it, and realized their standard bar was actually a pretty dark chocolate. I think they changed the labeling but I imagine there must have been a lot of kids who bought the candy bar and hated it lol
I know what you mean, but MrBeast cured 1000 people of (a form of) blindness, which is quite a benefit to humanity [1]. I would not be surprised if kids learn a bit of "kindness is good" from him.
[1]: Of course among other things, but you can't deny he did quite some philanthropy
Thinking that kindness content is good is naive. It is exploitative and usually what people get from it is "it could happen to me" rather than "I could help others".
It is a fine argument, but I mean it is youtube and it is kids we are talking about. It's really hard to show kids kindness through free content if you want to be nuanced.
The whole youtube/streaming/advertiser/influencer/product pusher ecosystem is complete shit for kids and, to a degree, adults.
We have a 10 year old son and best approach we have found is VLC on his ipad and family TV, coupled to a NAS that we drop the content on to (downloaded/ripped shows that contain no ads).
But, what's the alternative?
For example, I love 3brown1blue videos. But, it is too advanced even for my eleven year old.
Mark Rober videos are great, and my kids love them, but he's even inside MrBeast's orbit. And, he's not putting out as much content.
What are the good channels that create creative and stimulating videos that are a benefit to humanity.
Does YouTube kill those channels?