• Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      2 hours ago

      H’okay, so. Several years ago, some weird shit happened on Youtube.

      Youtube is not designed for children under 13, nevertheless it became pretty popular for parents to just hand their children an iPad. There were creators that made a genuine effort to make healthy and wholesome children’s programming, but they were quickly outpaced by lazy jackasses who were just trying to make a buck.

      The Youtube algorithm is designed to push content to achieve maximum engagement. It’s designed with adults in mind. The viewers are toddlers, who cannot read and who respond strongly to repetitive sounds and motions, faces and bright colors. So these lazy jackasses started churning out videos with as many popular keywords in the titles as possible, so you’d get “finger family pregnant frozen elsa kills hitler spiderman” Finger family being the name of a severely ear wormy nursery rhyme thing. The videos were designed to be baby crack, there were stories of kids screaming when their iPads were taken away.

      This happened before the AI boom, but they’ve got a similar broken surreal uncanny idea cancer feel to them despite all of the videos being intentionally made by people.

    • TheOneCurly@lemm.eeEnglish
      19·
      19 hours ago

      The search term you need is elsagate. A whole bunch of cheaply made youtube videos featuring popular characters in bizarre situations. They were made to game the youtube kids algorithm and tons of tablet kids watched them.

  • pivot_root@lemmy.world
    7·
    17 hours ago

    Skibidibackrooms?

    I think. I’m probably too old to understand what gen alpha will consider childhood nostalgia.

    • LunarVoyager@lemmy.world
      618·
      16 hours ago

      They’re basically braindead. They can’t even remember 5 minutes ago, much less last week. They’ll be 23 years old like “durrrr nustalga? what’s that? help me out chat”. Stupid little pricks.

      • Noel_Skum@sh.itjust.works
        61·
        10 hours ago

        Saying an entire generation across the whole of planet Earth is “basically braindead” is a bold claim… and factually incorrect. I’m not here to argue this point - your assumption is flawed.

        • LunarVoyager@lemmy.world
          11·
          7 hours ago

          I was having a bad day yesterday and needed to vent. Sorry not sorry. My brother has a stepdaughter who is gen alpha and while she can be annoying as fuck, she’s a good kid and I know that most of them are not ipad zombies. But it’s fun to punch down, you understand that right?