It annoys the shit out of me that they never made the "kids" section of youtube an entirely separate thing.

Like TV, they could curate the hell out of it and not just allow anyone to upload, but no, they instead made way too much money from elsagate videos and videos of kids swimming. Now that that's gone, it's now making money off of kids from AI slop.

Yeah, at one point Youtube in their wisdom decided that toys are for kids, so anything to do with them got forcefully marked as "for kids". I remember many LEGO and RC channels have issues with it. And having your video or channel marked as "for kids" disables 90% of Youtube features - comments, likes, notifications, saving videos to playlists or watch later, end cards etc.

Even then, Youtube basically has only two age ratings - either the content is suitable for everyone (but you do have to mark if it is specifically aimed at kids under 13), or it's age-restricted to adults only. Imagine if movies only had the options of "G" or "NC-17". But eh, in the end it is FTC and COPPA telling them what they have to do. The alternative is that you'd have to create an account and somehow age-verify that you are over the age of 13 before Youtube was allowed to show any videos.

I remember when they first rolled out the “made for kids” video designation, “Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared” (a horror video) was labeled as children’s content by the AI until enough actual users had pointed out the error on Twitter.