> We don’t need a “safer” alternative for damaging their cognitive development.

By Safer, I meant like some educational content or shows which are genuinely good fwiw. So I grew up watching Adventure Time on Cartoon Network. So curating shows like those and channels say veritasium or some Vsauce videos.

My question was that, can there not be a human volunteer curated group effort to find some decent channels from Youtube which are nice/safe for kids.

Calling the whole of youtube channels as bad might be unwise as well and mix some of it with cartoons and just having an archive/tag designed for it so that either an app or even you yourself could look at the archive tags and see which channels the videos are from and cartoons and just a more collective human effort into making a small library of things that are safe for kids?

Because kids will watch Youtube someday and they will hear about it from their friends and feel left out. You then trust that something like YT kids might work only to realize that it doesn't. Even something like rss list of those channels with something like freetube could be good as well fwiw.

What do you even recommend that people watch? I used to watch cartoon network for many hours growing up watching shows like beyblade and pokemon and Adventure Time etc. but it seems that cartoon network itself is nowadays struggling compared to Youtube kids :/

there definitely should be more to why/how Youtube kids is so prevalent. one can say bad parenting but I have seen good parents slip up in this case. They think its harmless. There's defintiely more to it (imho)