While @instagram and @mosseri just announced that they are pausing the work on Instagram Kids, @BytedanceTalk went already a step further: This week Youth Mode for Douyin, China's TikTok, launched.

Let's take a look in a quick overview 🧵 on the background and features...
1/ The decision comes after continued warnings and crackdown by regulators.

Already in 2018 China's regulators aimed to limit the time spend online by minors, citing rising levels of near-sightedness.
2/ This year the regulators defined hard rules: people under 18 got their game time restricted to 1 hour a day between 8 PM to 9 PM on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.

This is regulated on the supply side - meaning the developers can only offer their games to kids for these hours
3/ According to official broadcaster CGTN 95% of China's youth is already online - so around 183 million Chinese kids under 18.

Chinese people already spend a large amount of their day online, around 5 hours a day on average, 2 hours of which on social media.
4/ The average time a single user spent on Douyin apparently just hit 80min a day, according to @appannie.

Compare that with how Americans spend their phone time:
Average time on Facebook is 58 min
Average time on Instagram is 53 min
Average time on Snapchat is 50min
5/ Bytedance is now reacting according to the new playbook of China tech:
Proactivly self regulate before being overregulated.

Interestingly, here they are lagging behind Kuaishou (Tecent's 2nd largest Shortvideo app in China) which introduced a Youth Setting already in 2019.
6/ So let's look at the features announced for the Youth Mode, appropriatly called ‘Xiao Qu Xing’ (Little Fun Star):

⏱️ 40min Time Limit:
The most important feature is a time limit of 40min for users under the age of 14. After 40min the app locks itself - on the right screenshot
7/ 🌙 Night Block:
Under Youth Mode the app will also be unavailable to users between 10pm and 6am, preventing late night scrolling.

- Thinking about it, this might also a feature I would enjoy on @twitter. Or at least my sleep would benefit from it.
8/ 🛑 Feature Restriction:

Kids can't
- publish posts
- watch live-streams
- send messages
- make comments

In short, the app becomes consuming by scrolling only. Liking is still allowed, which is needed to train the algorithm.
But what can they consume?
9/ 🤖 New Algorithms:
Apparently additional filters are applied that should filter automatically and only show kid friendly content - what that is TBD but goes hand in hand with the next point:
10/ ✨ New content:
PBS did it, Youtube Kids did it, and now it arrived on Douyin: Corporate sponsored educational videos, from museums visits to science experiments to broadcasting the beautiful landscape.

I hope we get many educational gems like
11/ Which leads us to the UX issues of the mode:
- The youth mode is turned on by default... for users that ByteDance can recognize are under 14
- For that real names need to be used: without it ByteDance can't run an age check and thus autoenable Youth Mode
12/ - It can be manually enabled by parents - who will also be pinged regularly to enable it for their kids.

Based on my limited interaction with kids I am however sure they will quickly figure out how to disable Youth Mode.
13/ It will be interesting to see how this and Instagram Kids will play out over the next few years.
Kids are already online, what will be their online experience & who will define it?

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More from @skagarroum

27 Sep
The new gaming rules in China will probably doom the over 150,000 - 200,000 internet and gaming cafes that were at one point essential to Chinese youth.

Remembering them with a🧵and some memories...
Internet cafes were the traditional 3rd place for chinese youth: found everywhere, open 24/7, cheap and without proper adult supervision.

Mostly smoky rooms in darkness. Loud. At the entrance, you pay in cash and get assigned a modded, cobbled together PC for your stay.
In 2010 20% of all internet users in China used one, since then the number is falling.

But among the youth this was the place to meet, away from the prying eyes of society, and play cracked games and watch videos with friends till the early hours of the morning.
Read 9 tweets
27 Sep
1/ The EU proposal to make USB-C mandatory on all devices is making the rounds, so time for a quick overview 🧵 on the origin of the standard, the issues with it and what is coming next.

Let’s start: Who is behind it, what do they want and how do they make money?
2/ The USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) was founded in 95 as an NGO by a group of hardware companies working on a new connector together. The idea was to create one standard to unify and replace the variety of ports connecting all the PC peripherals: Mouse, Keyboards, Printers… Image
3/ The founding members were Compaq, Digital, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NEC and Nortel. Intel took the development lead back then.
Nowadays USB-IF has more than 1000 members, with the major ones being HP, NEC, Microsoft, Apple Inc., Intel, and Agere Systems. Image
Read 20 tweets

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