 Ahoy hoy! Last Thursday, I think it was, I did a video about the rubber's channel. It was a reaction video, and it was a blind react. And I found some very troubling things about it, and I mentioned some of those troubling things, but I didn't go into a whole bunch of detail on it. I don't know if that was a mistake or not. I always intended to maybe expand upon it a little bit later as to what my objections were. So today, we're going to talk about two things. First of all, why that channel in particular is, or at least appears to be, focused on attracting child viewers, and two, why that's bad. So first of all, we're going to answer the biggest, I left comments on that video for about a half hour to an hour, and I noticed a strong trend of children leaving comments. Now you might be like, how do you know they were children? Well, when someone says something like, you dumb, or when I say you, not the word, why owe you, but the letter you. Those were the general kinds of comments that were being left early on. There were some reasonable arguments, but there were a lot of that. But once I noticed it was mostly kids responding, I decided to leave the comments off. There's a fair to middling chance I'm going to do the same thing for this video. Probably leave the ratings off too, just because I don't want any engagement from children. Not that there isn't a valid place on YouTube for children. Obviously YouTube kids exists and all that other stuff, but my channel is not for children. Period. So if they're coming here, then they need to not be engaging necessarily with the content. And there's only one real way to prevent that. So now we should probably talk about how I feel the rubber's content is specifically fun. Now I'm going to say this. I don't know for certain that it's intentional, right? There's a collection of things altogether. I'm going to play an intro here real quick. Let me grab my headphones. I'm going to play the intro real quick to the first video, or not the first video, but the latest video they've done. From the tallest of the piles of the dead came a monster. It burst forth from the dead like a great fish from the sea, and its bellow was so evil it could not possibly come from a godly creature. Hello, everybody. I'm the rubber. Today, we bring you SCP Foundation Keter Class Object SCP-4715. So, okay. Two things I want to say real quick. This is a brilliant intro to Fortract. I mean, this is very well crafted. However, first of all, I will say the animation style differs slightly. When we talk about this cutesy little mascot here, there's a big difference between that and some of the other artwork that you see. The cutesy mascot is the biggest issue I would see with this. When you create a character like that that looks like a child, children tend to want to be associated with it. They'll be like, oh, is this for me? When your mascot looks like a kid, kids will view your stuff. Secondly, the very, very simplistic language here. From the tallest piles of the dead came forth a monster. This is... I assume this is just something that this person came up with. And I understand from what I've been told that this person's first language is not English. So, what they're doing is they're using simplistic language because it's the language they understand best. But the problem is that it's also the language that children understand best. The simpler the language, the more easily digestible it is to children, period. And then we move on to the... there's a little bit more lines, all of it very simplistic language, followed by a child's mascot. The tone of the reading, the tone of the reading is very... I'm not going to say condescending because that has negative connotations, but very childlike, like you're speaking to a kid. Like, hello, how are you doing today? Versus just normal speech. I'm not entirely sure I can do the... because I constantly am condescending, but regardless. The real issue I have with this isn't necessarily what the intention is. I don't know if the intention is to market this to kids or not. Maybe this is just this person's art style combined with limited grasp of English, combined with a particular design that they didn't give too much consideration to for their mascot. Maybe these three things combined accidentally to form a perfect storm, and the only reason I know about it is because those three things together really attracted a lot of views. That's possible, right? But that doesn't change the fact that the content itself is much more focused on attracting those child viewers. Now I want to talk a little bit about why this is bad, and also ways that this could be fixed. Animation is not just for children. Anyone that tells you that is stupid. I'm not going to mince words on that. Anyone that tells you animation is only for children is dumb. However, there is a significant difference between animation that is focused on attracting child fans and viewers and animation for everyone. And that doesn't mean that the stuff that's meant to attract child viewers and fans isn't itself also valid as an adult piece of entertainment. This is the other half of it. When we talk about whether animation is or isn't for kids, that's a dumb distinction to make because animation is for everybody. People will make this thing where they think that kids shows is a derogatory thing, as if the quality of a show is dependent upon whether or not it's focused on adults or kids. There's plenty of kids shows out there that are amazingly well done and have plenty of adult fans for that reason. So I don't want to get bogged down in that or confused as to what's actually going on here. But this content needs to do either one of two things. First of all, if it's going to continue to act as though it's intended for children and then displayed adult content. By the way, I looked this up on the YouTube Kids app. It does not show up there. So at the very least, the YouTube algorithm is doing a decent-ish job of keeping it away from kids, but that doesn't mean that it's still not appealing to the kids. But this is where we're going to dovetail into the question of is SCP content for or not for kids? I'm going to take my headphones off. So SCP content runs the gamut. There's more than 5,000 SCP articles. There's probably at least that many tales, maybe less. I think it may be the 3,000 to 5,000 range. It's hard for me to know for sure. But regardless, there is plenty of content on the SCP Wiki right now that is appropriate for children. However, there's also a lot of content that isn't and it's not really differentiated. So the SCP Wiki itself is something that you should not be steering kids towards since there's no way to know if they're going to encounter some fun piece of entertainment or something that's vicious and gory. But YouTube content's different. You as a YouTube creator get to decide what you're putting up on the screen. And if you know that even if you didn't mean to, for example, and your content can change over time, mine's content's changed over time, even if you didn't mean to market to children, if you look at your demographics data and you look at your pop, you know, whatever, and you see that it is a thing that is actually happening, you can shift your content. Or if you think this is happening and you'd like to continue doing what you're doing, you can put a warning in front of it. Adult animation often has warnings put in front of it because parents and children both just assume incorrectly that animation is for kids. That's fine as long as it's corrected. If you put a little disclaimer at the beginning, SCP Illustrated does that and his stuff is clearly adult-oriented entertainment, but he still puts a little disclaimer on top of it because YouTube can be a little weird about animation. Just as an example, on like adult swim, when adult swim starts, when cartoon network transitions from cartoon network to adult swim, there's a disclaimer on the screen, and when certain shows go on, even during adult swim, if they're particularly adult, and I think even if not, like all of their stuff gets a disclaimer at the beginning. By the way, this is adult content just in case you somehow tuned in after the last warning. That's important. And as YouTubers, we get to, as I said, we get to decide what we put on our channels. So if we want to, we could choose to pick the cutesy Wondertainment, cutesy, you know, RoboDoo, that kind of stuff. There's literally at least a thousand, probably multiple thousands worth of SCPs that are appropriate for any age. Well, maybe not any age, but most ages. The thing is, the SCP Wiki itself is another thing that we definitely don't want to be steering kids towards. One, the content. The content is very adult, and it's mixed in with stuff that's perfectly child-appropriate, and you can get your kids very confused, and your adults very confused when they think that it's safe for work, and it's not. You know, we use the word safer work to mean like appropriate, but we talk about kid-friendly and not kid-friendly, and it'd probably be more accurate here. So you think that the content's kid-friendly, and it maybe isn't. And secondly, and I hate to have to put it this way, the SCP Wiki is home to predators, for lack of a better way to put it. And it's not our job to necessarily protect everybody all the time from everything, but I think we can agree that protecting children from predators is a pretty good goal. And the SCP harassment team does a job in trying to prevent this, but they don't have a great track record, and the secrecy surrounding the way they handle things can be very, make it very difficult to truly evaluate how good or bad of a job they're doing. So I have to assume from, you have to make certain assumptions on how that works. I'm not saying that the SCP Wiki has a child predator problem. I don't think it does. Well, it depends on how you define problem. Is it systemic? I don't think so. Is there a problem because people who are in that community are child predators? Yes. But that's true of any large community. It's how the community deals with it and responds to it that's important. And I just don't see the SCP harassment team doing a solid enough job. And they have made a lot of improvements over time. But that's important to keep in mind. So I very strongly would believe that steering children towards SCP content is somewhat irresponsible. Once people reach their mid to late teens, you have to assume that there's some level of personal responsibility on their parts. But when we're talking about kids below the age of 13, we have to do a better job of identifying what is and isn't kids content and in making it clear to our own viewers what is and isn't kids content. I mean, look at this here. This, and I put this picture in with my thumbnails from time to time. This is an animation while it's not animation technically, but this is a cartoon character. This is a drawing, right? But if you look at it, it's always been one of those things is like, you know it when you see it. You look at something and the issue is also that what one culture or nation even or country, I should say, thinks of as adult or kids focused content differs. There are probably places even in the Western world that would look at this and be like, I don't see any difference between this and anything else. And then there would be other places that would be like, this is clearly kids content and this is clearly adult content. We have to work from our own assumptions of like our own cultural biases. There's really no other options to do. We can recognize that there are other other opinions and other views, but we also have to operate on our own assumptions and deal with this kind of content on those assumptions. And I've talked to a lot of people about this and I've shown them some of this stuff and they mostly, not all, but mostly agree with me that it is clearly if not deliberately kids focused then accidentally kids focused and probably deserves at least a disclaimer to make sure that kids are warned that this is not kids content. Because if you come across that intro just now and you're a kid, you very well may think that this is kids content. It's pretty reasonable, but it isn't. That's it. That's the long version of my reaction now that I've had about a week to think about it and actually put together a video about it. And like I said, there's probably not going to be comments enabled on this video because as I said, the people who are attracted to the last video based on the content that was in it tended to be children. And YouTube does automatically, if you choose that something is intended to be focused on kids will automatically disable comments and ratings. I did it preemptively because I could see that it was kids. That was on me and I'm probably going to do it again. That's it. Thank you very much for watching. If you enjoyed the video, please hit the subscribe button and then hit the notification bell next to that so you're notified when I upload new videos. Then head on over to patreon.com forward slash the Sumerian and pledge at any level like everybody here on the screen already has, including Dr. J redacted and VV will both pledge at $100 and Morgan was pledged at $40. It's nice to know that I'm not alone out here and I'll see you all again on Tuesday.