Tech Forum

This being an LDS tech forum, I'm sure most of you have had times where you're showing your family members a youtube video, and there's an inappropriate thumbnail image on the side of the youtube page, or one comes up at the end of the video. I got frustrated with that kind of thing, and created a website called Watchkin.com to help. Whenever you land on a youtube video page, it can automatically send you to a cleaned-up Watchkin page, where you can watch in peace, without related videos, comments and most ads.

There's also a search page which allows you to search for youtube videos, but with filtering more relevant to families. And users can help the filtering process by flagging a video as inappropriate, if something gets through that shouldn't. It's free and already being used by hundreds of people.

Here's a video sample, to get a feel for how it looks and works, and how you could share videos with friends and family:
watchkin.com/a4d0633064

For the best user experience on a desktop browser, you'll want to install the auto-redirect script, which also turns off suggested videos on any webpage you see a video on (such as videos embedded in blogs).

I'd love any feedback you have, as well as any suggestions on how to make filtering even better.

Thanks,
Alan Cheney

If we were to make a mobile app for this, would more people want an iOS or Android app? Obviously both would be useful at some point -- just trying to get a feel for priority.

Given the link between YouTube and Android, it might be interesting getting such a app approved for the Google Play Store.

Another one is K9 Web Protection by Blue Coat, the old Cerberian filter, that may be based on a bad experience last month in trying to get a music piracy site blocked by all the big filters, including Zscaler, Barracuda, Websense, FortiGuard, Net Nanny (has no category for media piracy) etc., before it could do its damage as the original version of the site, shut down by the labels and which had content by LDS artists on it, which means the outright pirate version may have had the same material, and as a result I now regard K9 and its corporate version as the 'last honest web content filter'. With over 15 years of filtering and some really hard work they are almost ironclad against much of what's bad out there now as far as websites go.

They are developing web filtering for Youtube, and that may also eventually lead to ways to filter out bad Youtube videos and even thumbnails as well on devices using other operating systems besides Windows or Mac. Youtube filtering has been in beta for more than a year, and given that it's been that long that tells you the difficulty of finding ways to filter videos online properly and avoid both false-positives and false-negatives.