To manage my child’s online viewing, I remove YouTube from all of his devices and instead use Pinchflat[1] to automatically download videos from a curated list of pre‑approved channels. We periodically explore YouTube together to discover new content aligned with his interests, which I then add to the list. Pinchflat retrieves new uploads within hours and automatically deletes them after a set period. The videos are stored locally and made available through Plex, Emby, or Jellyfin for remote access. This approach eliminates ads and algorithm‑driven recommendations while giving me full control over content, though it requires some setup, ongoing management, and storage capacity.

[1]https://github.com/kieraneglin/pinchflat

I don't have kids of my own, but I'm generally concerned about some of the advertising kids are exposed to these days (as seen through friends and family with kids). At the risk of viewing my own childhood with rose-tinted glasses, it seems much worse today. The main source of ads back then were TV and newspaper, and while neither were "perfect" at this, they both seemed to have much higher standards for what kinds of ads to allow than platforms do today.

Whenever I see my (9-year-old) nephew watching YouTube on their TV at home, I get a little horrified at some of the ads he's exposed to. But this has been normalized throughout his childhood, so it seems unremarkable to him, and his parents seem to be desensitized to it as well. I suppose some of this is bias on my part: I aggressively avoid exposing myself to advertising, using in-browser ad blocking, network-level ad-blocking, and OS-level DNS VPN-based ad-blocking on my phone. Whenever offered, I always pay for the service tier (like YouTube Premium) that removes ads. I get that this could get expensive real fast for a lot of people, and isn't feasible. (But I know a lot of people who don't even install browser ad-blockers, which is just baffling to me.)

But that's the big problem... people are being forced to choose between an uncomfortable level of financial expense, and paying for things with their attention, where that attention is being exploited with deeper and deeper psychological manipulation that has been fine-tuned over the span of decades. On the occasion I do see an ad (especially a video ad), my reaction to it is so viscerally negative that I mute audio and look away, even sometimes shutting it down entirely.

Feels like I'm in the twilight zone here. A few minutes of my pay per month for my kid to not be bombarded with bullshit ads seems like a good deal to me.

> There's a normal premium for $14 and a premium "lite" for $8. I'd have subscribed at $1/month, but those prices are absolutely insane

This just demonstrates how much money is in those ads and how much Youtube needs to charge to compensate for that. And advertisers wouldn't pay that much if it wasn't at least somewhat worth it, i.e., the psychological manupulation is worth at least that much w.r.t. their bottom line. The average person therefore "pays" with $14 worth of brainwashing.

You could obviously argue that $14 is just a ripoff and they don't make that much money off you. Sure you are not average and perhaps less influenced than others, but fun fact, a large majority of people believe that about themselves.

By the way, Youtube Premium still collects your data and uses it. Without that, it would need to be even more expensive.

For me I feel $5/month would be pretty reasonable. But $14 is out of control. Some of my friends however are subscribed at that price and consider it money well spent.

Google's finally cracking down on the adblocker scene, so enjoy Revanced while it lasts.