I'd love some way to expose an allow-list-restricted subset of YouTube to my 7 y.o. nephew. A couple of days ago, he noticed that his twisty balloons get cold when they deflate, which opened up a huge learning opportunity for adiabatic compression/expansion, Sterling cryocoolers, etc. YouTube search is broken on Grandpa's smart TV and as soon as Grandpa handed him the tablet to do a YouTube search, he was off watching a group of Australians competing to see how many weather balloons they could pop by throwing various items at them.
An allow-list feature would get me to let my kids on Youtube (despite the ads—it'd be really convenient to be able to just use the site/apps) rather than YouTube-dl-ing the videos. Even just a channel allow-list would be huge, but also being able to allow individual videos would be nice, too.
Of course, parents have been asking for this instead of the shitty "YouTube kids" garbage for... ever? Basically? So clearly Google just doesn't want to do it, for whatever reason. Probably doesn't let them extract as much money from advertising to kids, somehow.
Unfortunately the only metric that youtube cares about is watch time, so they're never going to introduce a feature that could reduce that. They _want_ to suck people into meaningless trivial nonsense since thats what keeps them watching more.
Not sure its that obvious it'd reduce watch time. If you could let your kid watch YouTube with less supervision, presumably some people would allow their kids to watch more YouTube, and more YouTube would be watched.
FWIW, I've tried to do that for my almost-5-yo by starting with an account for him only: unfortunately, even with family-controlled account (whatever their terminology is), I wasn't able to do that (at least not with a non-gmail address). Google kept throwing weird errors after attempting to validate the account with 2FA through SMS on my phone number. Yes, I even tried "family link" or whatever using an Android phone (I originally tried using only a computer).
It seems it might be related to legislation surrounding account ownership by minors, but I have no idea how to confirm it, esp since it's supposed to work when a parent controls the account.
