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I'd call the folder "don't open at night"

And then it'd be only a matter of time until I suspect it summons demons or something, and open it anyway

My apps are in an alphabetical list.

YouTube Kids is/was notorious for having awful content that's often the laziest, lowest effort product that kids will sit through (aka the most obnoxious combination of repetitive sound effects and visuals you can imagine), propaganda trying to get em while they're young, or some combination of both. Unfortunately a lot of people let their kids have unfettered access to it because it's the only way they can get them to be relatively quiet and preoccupied for 30 minutes... Partially because algorithm-driven tech is like crack to brains, especially developing ones.

There was a whole thing about YouTube kids being filled with content about Spider-Man impregnating Elsa, there being lots of unhealthy portrayals of relationships as normal such as abusive dynamics between Mickey and Minnie mouse, and generally weird/inappropriate content featuring poo, pee, farts, stinky feet, blood and needles, or whatever else content mills thought they could get kids to click on. Most of these channels popped up because YouTube showed ads to kids at the time and it was some of the most lucrative revenue streams to be found on the platform for the effort required—kids will watch almost anything after all.

There were so many bots making algorithmically generated sludge to put in front of kids that it was literally too much to go through and curate out... Everything was getting infinitely re-uploaded across hundreds of channels to the point where if you let a kid watch YouTube on auto play, they'd be all but guaranteed to run into that sort of content eventually and get kind of sucked into it like a vortex.

It was known as ElsaGate and, in classic fashion, a lot of the legitimate issues people took with the situation also got bundled up with weird New World Order/right wing conspiracy type shit. As is known to happen.

YouTube is still as described above with kids content to a degree, but the company has taken a bare minimum effort to make those videos more difficult to monetize (and also taking anything vaguely kid-approximating down with it... Lots of animation aimed at an adult audience also gets flagged as for kids all the time).

I have a very young brother who had an obsession with Siren Head at one point from watching YouTube kids for who knows how many hours. My mom even asked at one point if I could make a video of Siren Head using the toilet as a potty training aid for him. I did not end up making the video but that's a little beside the point.

Anyways there's also a non-zero number of kids out there named Elsa by their parents. Yay Disney parents!

prove that it’s wasting money.

advertisers have long understood the relationship between color and emotion. to me it seems downright reasonable that google have discovered (or are collecting) data that increases viewership, retention, and total ad revenue 🙂

because I was curious cuz I've always wanted to go to promp but nobody ever asked me.

That's pretty funny.

It's not just colour it's colour within what the algorithm already thinks is nice. If you only watch 4hour fish tank videos you'll only get 4 hour fish tank videos, just with purple fish. It's not like you have to just play this live either. Just generate the videos and add each non offensive one to a Playlist to run at the office. Sure it's not like a killer feature, I also doubt it took much effort at all to create.