8 ms·

Tell HN: YouTube has a spam problem, and it's getting worse

I've noticed a ton of crypto scams on YouTube recently, many of which are using the names of legitimate channels (like SpaceX), re-posting content from those channels and promoting scams – usually in the form of "send me [Elon Musk, Jeff Bezoz, etc] BTC, and I'll send you 2x back". It seems reasonable to expect one or two of these to slip through the cracks now and then, but over the past few months, I've had YouTube "recommend" these to me, again and again, multiple times per day. I've often reported them as spam, only to have YouTube recommend the exact same video to me a few minutes later. I don't know anyone who would fall for the scams in the videos, but they've become so common now that it's getting really annoying. You can't tell me that they're too difficult to distinguish from legitimate content. Any human being or half-decent algorithm would be able to catch these with no trouble at all (heck, I could write a couple of regular expressions that would do the trick and have 0 false positives), which leads me to wonder: why is YouTube promoting these videos? At this point, it feels like they must have some incentive not to shut them down, because it would require deliberate effort to have any form of spam control while also somehow letting these through. Am I the only one noticing this?

Fusion_Pizza 5y ago
I've noticed it happening right after any Elon related event
IronWolve 5y ago
I tried watching 18650 battery reviews on yt for 2021, and almost all the video are text to speech fake videos that just read amazon text or some other blurbs. Prob all automated to make videos. All mostly voted down, but a way to common problem.
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  I've seen a lot of them too... "top 10 X", then 10 affiliate links to some crap, and text-to-speech reading the first sentance from the description on aliexpress/banggood/...
- harshreality 5y ago
  TTS videos are everywhere. Some of them are good enough you might not notice the voice at first, but the content is always some generic crap. If it sounds like a topic report by a 6th grader, there's a good chance it's auto-generated. There are even channels with auto-generated pronunciation videos, because apparently TTS engines know how to pronounce things now. /s
  - hamiltonians 5y ago
    the dead giveaway is any url and mention of bitcoin I can see how ppl fall for these. look very realistic.
dmatech 5y ago
Unfortunately, YouTube seems to be trending away from letting people downvote stuff and having the vote mean anything. If I could see the upvotes and downvotes before viewing something, I'd know better than to view the spam.
- ziml77 5y ago
  Supposedly downvoting has the opposite effect of what you'd expect. My understanding is that now downvotes count as engagement, so bad videos with tons of downvotes will actually get boosted up. And of course comments will also have the same effect so you can't leave warnings there.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    Controversial or outrageous content is likely to generate way more "engagement" (as people fight over it and call each other names in the comments) than normal, unobjectionable content. Social networks thrive thanks to this.
  - not1ofU 5y ago
    Litrally just witnessed a perfect example of this a few minutes ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtIpjERmOM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtIpjERmOM This channels first video ^ titled (the video is 1 week old): "Jacob Collier: Music's Biggest Fraud" Likes: 102 / Dislikes: 469 I think it supposed to be satire, but doesnt come off too well. He makes a decent point about overbearing fans. I was surprised to see it in my recommended, as I dont really know of Jacob and only watched this video once, which is just 33 seconds long with the title of "when your phone rings in a jacob collier concert" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8PB0EzJ4oA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8PB0EzJ4oA So your point about engagement really rings true to me. Kinda sucks, especially when you can see the kind of... friction, it promotes (the comments section is pretty mad)
- cronix 5y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/walkaway/comments/me9u5s/official_white_house_youtube_channel_for_bidens/ https://www.reddit.com/r/walkaway/comments/me9u5s/official_w...
worldmerge 5y ago
There are also tons of spam comments pushing dot fyi or dot xyz domains. Why can they not just ban urls?
- darylteo 5y ago
  Also a lot that are just "Yes <link to another youtube video> xyz" I don't get the point.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    Training the classifier that "xyz" is a sign of quality (by posting a benign, non-spam link) so that they can then use it for spam and have it go through?
    - worldmerge 5y ago
      That would be next level spam. But it sounds entirely possible.
- belimawr 5y ago
  Kinda not related but there was a thread about xyz domains: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28554400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28554400
shirro 5y ago
I reported crypto scams targeting a spacex audience many times over the last week. Reported as misleading/scam and do not recommend channel. Would refresh the front page and would get another scam in first position. Either Youtube is using me as unpaid labour to detect scams because its automated systems are rubbish or their systems are very broken. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they count reporting as user engagement and promote even more shit my way. Having paid for premium/red/whatever youtube since it was available to avoid advertising I am seriously considering if it is worth continuing as a lot of tech/edu youtubers are duplicating their content to other platforms.
- n4bz0r 5y ago
  > Would refresh the front page and would get another scam in first position I have a suspicion that their system simply doesn't reconstruct recommendation lists instantly. I've been marking a lot of videos (of certain channels) as "not interested" in the past, and remember having the same frustration. The videos wouldn't go away after a page refresh. But after about a day or two you'd stop getting videos from unwanted channels if you're persistent enough with your marking, and if you don't click very similar videos from other channels or videos from the same channel (even accidentally). They react much faster to what you do watch. The processing of data about what you do not want to watch is seemingly of much lower priority. Good thing, though, that it's of any priority at all. I suppose it must be somewhat similar with these reports. The buildup is rather slow, but in the end it should work.
- hamiltonians 5y ago
  Reporting is useless because it takes a very high threshold to get the video removed if at all. Think about how many reports Trump videos or fox news videos get. So YouTube probably does not assign such reports much weight.
  - shirro 5y ago
    Seemed like a reasonable comment but thanks to jschlatter posting a link to the youtube report history in a comment here I have been able to verify every single video I have reported in the last few days has been deleted. So it does make a difference but the volume of these things must be massive.
anonymouswacker 5y ago
Lower standards because they need more $. Buyer beware, no accountability, short term thinking. The marketing-advertising bubble is perhaps starting to pop.
thrill 5y ago
Whenever my recommendations get worthless I delete my history. It helps for a few months.
Nextgrid 5y ago
Until the law changes so YouTube and other social media is considered complicit of whatever scam they promote they have no incentive to fix this. The spammers and potential marks still "engage" with the site and its ads which is all they care about. Frankly this is not limited to YouTube even. Twitter has a spam problem for years where scammers would impersonate high-profile users and reply to the real account's tweets (as to be shown right underneath the real thing) with a scam disguised as a crypto giveaway. This is something that simple regular expressions can filter out, but why do this considering all of this malicious activity still counts as "engagement" and their bottom-line depends on this? Facebook has hosted (and I'm sure still does) cybercrime groups even after being notified about it: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/04/a-year-later-cybercrime-groups-still-rampant-on-facebook/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/04/a-year-later-cybercrime-...
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Forget Twitter and YouTube. Plenty of scams come by email, text, and snail mail.
  - hamiltonians 5y ago
    This scam is way more resiliant. ISPs seemd to come down hard on email scams.
patchtopic 5y ago
hunt for any youtube cryptocurrency content and instantly get your youtube feed filled with a torrent of garbage containing thumbnails of graphs and amazed facial expressions..
unknownOrigin 5y ago
Yes, it's not limited to Musk-related topics, but he does seem to be the nexus point of many of these. Everyday Astronaut was just complaing about a blatant (and kinda shocking as to how bad it can get, to be honest) instance here: https://mobile.twitter.com/Erdayastronaut/status/1438643886767869953 https://mobile.twitter.com/Erdayastronaut/status/14386438867...
jsnell 5y ago
> You can't tell me that they're too difficult to distinguish from legitimate content. Any human being or half-decent algorithm would be able to catch these with no trouble at all (heck, I could write a couple of regular expressions that would do the trick and have 0 false positives), Of course I can tell you that! :) Abuse is an adversarial and dynamic problem. A simple regex will never solve the problem for more than a very short time period. Sometimes such short term fixes are called for, since they'll buy you the time for something more principled. But they cannot be the solution forever, because the abusers will adapt. The more different variants you end up blocking, the more likely it is that they somehow interact and produce serious FPs. And then you've got a PR mess on your hands with people complaining about how "Jeff Bezos is being censored by YouTube". Abuse is pretty thankless that way: nobody ever sees your successes, only your failures, and it's all a job of balancing the two. What you actually want for fighting bulk spam (rather than other forms of abuse) is robust signals that are broadly useful rather than specific to one campaign. As for your actual question, I haven't actually been seeing this in my recommendations (but then again, I don't have anything related to cryptocurrency or Elon Musk in my recommendations). Maybe this isn't actually as widespread a problem as you're suggesting? To put it bluntly, perhaps cryptocurrency is an area where the legit content is basically indistinguishable from scams.
- SilverRed 5y ago
  We may as well think of the spammers as their own ML whos aim and weighting is to fool the spam prevention. So as good as you make the spam AI, the spammer AI evolves to be better than it since they keep iterating until they find whatever formula does not trip the spam protection. >Any human being or half-decent algorithm would be able to catch these with no trouble at all And this statement from OP is blatantly false because if it was true, no human would fall for the scams. But they do fall for them, in huge volumes. Especially if the scams appear to come from a known authority like Elon, the police, your boss, etc. And if you did find a half decent algorithm that worked, the spammers would just iterate again to make spam that doesn't trip it.
  - curiousgeorgio 5y ago
    > And if you did find a half decent algorithm that worked, the spammers would just iterate again to make spam that doesn't trip it. So, the solution is not to even try? How has that worked out for other platforms?
d883kd8 5y ago
Maybe they want to show problematic videos to security researchers
beorno 5y ago
The Space X impersonation "live event" is still ongoing, btw... It must have started 2h+ hours ago. That's some very slow reaction. (Btw, do report it as "mass advertising", and the channel as impersonating the SpaceX channel - I just did, and I presume lots of others before me.)
- hamiltonians 5y ago
  zero fucks given https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VOQXRrfibE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VOQXRrfibE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5dBA-01K88 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5dBA-01K88 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JImUxBO1IIQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JImUxBO1IIQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcvs9KJ_Wk4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcvs9KJ_Wk4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npNtPNHYGQQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npNtPNHYGQQ
hamiltonians 5y ago
These ppl making so much it's insane https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/13NKkx1epf5TcbisVSkDjMNWT1BTStv2yU?page=5 https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/13NKkx1epf5TcbisVSkDj... $100-200k/day everyday makes mafia, drug dealers jealous . no risk either. no tainted crypto larry lawton brags about having made 4million stealing diamonds, that is like a month's worth of anonymous scam videos except multiply by 10. Former mafia ppl brag about their exploits on youtube. These guys make them look like rookies.
- SilverRed 5y ago
  People are starting to realize that traceable and reversible bank transactions were actually a good thing..
jryan49 5y ago
Yes I've reported 4 fake crypto scam channels in the last few days.
samstave 5y ago
In the last weeks I have been getting a LOT of spam delivered to the primary inbox in gmail - and its really annoying.
root_axis 5y ago
Is the problem as bad as you say and really getting worse? I don't know, I personally have never been recommended anything like this. I also think it's absurd for you to suggest that you could "write a couple of regular expressions" to successfully remove spam from YouTube with 0 false positives. The reason stuff like this will always exist is precisely because false positives are inevitable and they piss people off way more than spam. There are dozens of threads about random YouTube videos getting hit by the algorithm going back a decade on this site, the reality is that this problem will always exist. With all that said, there's nothing wrong with asking YouTube to do better, but I'd temper my expectations if I were you.
- hamiltonians 5y ago
  People's expectations are already very low. But there dozens of these videos playing at any time . It's not like this is a one-time occurrence or under the radar. It's everywhere when you search for certain keywords or just browse certain topics like crypto or elon musk or any major event. You would think these highly paid engineers and such a hugely profitable company could do more to fix it.
- sen 5y ago
  On my front page right near the top, right now, is a video that looks EXACTLY like a SpaceX live stream, it's "Live Now", the channel name is "Space X", the thumbnail is the exact same one they use for their livestreams, and the title is "SpaceX's all-civilian Inspration4 mission!" and it has thousands of viewers right now. The only way to tell it's fake is by hovering over the channel name and the URL isn't /c/SpaceX it's /channel/<randomcharacters> I've seen these on the front page every single day for weeks now, always with different URLs. I tried to report a few but quickly found out from other comments here that it does nothing so I gave up and just ignore them now.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
A family member lost $3k to one of these YouTube promotions that ended up a scam. YouTube and the scammer make money here, so why would it change?
jschlatter 5y ago
You're not the only one. I've been getting annoyed by these, too. I was encouraged today to discover that youtube has a report history page that lets you know the outcome of your reports. Most of the videos I've reported have been removed, including most of the ones I've reported in the last 12 hours. So at least _something_ is being done about them, even though the current effort is not sufficient against the unending inflow of new scam videos. Here's the report history page: https://www.youtube.com/reporthistory https://www.youtube.com/reporthistory
- shirro 5y ago
  Excellent. Good to see all the ones I reported have been removed. That gives me a lot more confidence in the reporting mechanism. Youtube is obviously dealing with a considerable volume of these. I still wonder if I am being used as a mechanical turk to help identify these. Hopefully the inputs are training a machine learning system.
adishy 5y ago
I think a few of the other comments poke at this general idea, but I've come to be very intrigued by the meta-game of training these media recommendation engines (YouTube, Spotify, Netflix, TikTok?) by picking the right things to get a good feed. This sort of training is becoming more important than ever for a good experience in these platforms. In my experience, YouTube seems to be one of the more reactive recommenders - especially if you go down rabbit-holes / dig deeper into certain types of topics. I have turned off both web history and Youtube watch history in my Google account and I find that the Youtube homepage very quickly devolves to lists of videos by channels I've subscribed to - a randomized subscription feed. I would really be interested in seeing recommendation behavior be quantified and documented in some systematic/objective way (if this is even possible).
xvmt 5y ago
I'd say that it is the internet in general that has a spam/scam problem. Due to bandwidth costs, which apparently only Google is able and willing to subsidize, YouTube is basically the internet for videos. Many opinions I read about YouTube do not consider this point and treat it as just another website. But for me, making Google responsible for whatever is posted on YouTube is akin to making ISPs responsible for whatever is going through their switches. YouTube has a lot of problems, but I personally have no doubt that its existence is a net benefit to humanity. Calls for tighter regulation (or breaking Google down), which appear to be more and more common these days, make me wonder if would even have an alternative if YouTube went down. It is easy to take it for granted.
JanDietch 5y ago
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Fusion_Pizza 5y ago

I've noticed it happening right after any Elon related event

IronWolve 5y ago

I tried watching 18650 battery reviews on yt for 2021, and almost all the video are text to speech fake videos that just read amazon text or some other blurbs. Prob all automated to make videos. All mostly voted down, but a way to common problem.

ajsnigrutin 5y ago
I've seen a lot of them too... "top 10 X", then 10 affiliate links to some crap, and text-to-speech reading the first sentance from the description on aliexpress/banggood/...
harshreality 5y ago
TTS videos are everywhere. Some of them are good enough you might not notice the voice at first, but the content is always some generic crap. If it sounds like a topic report by a 6th grader, there's a good chance it's auto-generated. There are even channels with auto-generated pronunciation videos, because apparently TTS engines know how to pronounce things now. /s
- hamiltonians 5y ago
  the dead giveaway is any url and mention of bitcoin I can see how ppl fall for these. look very realistic.

dmatech 5y ago

Unfortunately, YouTube seems to be trending away from letting people downvote stuff and having the vote mean anything. If I could see the upvotes and downvotes before viewing something, I'd know better than to view the spam.

ziml77 5y ago
Supposedly downvoting has the opposite effect of what you'd expect. My understanding is that now downvotes count as engagement, so bad videos with tons of downvotes will actually get boosted up. And of course comments will also have the same effect so you can't leave warnings there.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  Controversial or outrageous content is likely to generate way more "engagement" (as people fight over it and call each other names in the comments) than normal, unobjectionable content. Social networks thrive thanks to this.
- not1ofU 5y ago
  Litrally just witnessed a perfect example of this a few minutes ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtIpjERmOM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtIpjERmOM This channels first video ^ titled (the video is 1 week old): "Jacob Collier: Music's Biggest Fraud" Likes: 102 / Dislikes: 469 I think it supposed to be satire, but doesnt come off too well. He makes a decent point about overbearing fans. I was surprised to see it in my recommended, as I dont really know of Jacob and only watched this video once, which is just 33 seconds long with the title of "when your phone rings in a jacob collier concert" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8PB0EzJ4oA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8PB0EzJ4oA So your point about engagement really rings true to me. Kinda sucks, especially when you can see the kind of... friction, it promotes (the comments section is pretty mad)
cronix 5y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/walkaway/comments/me9u5s/official_white_house_youtube_channel_for_bidens/ https://www.reddit.com/r/walkaway/comments/me9u5s/official_w...

worldmerge 5y ago

There are also tons of spam comments pushing dot fyi or dot xyz domains. Why can they not just ban urls?

darylteo 5y ago
Also a lot that are just "Yes <link to another youtube video> xyz" I don't get the point.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  Training the classifier that "xyz" is a sign of quality (by posting a benign, non-spam link) so that they can then use it for spam and have it go through?
  - worldmerge 5y ago
    That would be next level spam. But it sounds entirely possible.
belimawr 5y ago
Kinda not related but there was a thread about xyz domains: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28554400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28554400

shirro 5y ago

I reported crypto scams targeting a spacex audience many times over the last week. Reported as misleading/scam and do not recommend channel. Would refresh the front page and would get another scam in first position. Either Youtube is using me as unpaid labour to detect scams because its automated systems are rubbish or their systems are very broken. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they count reporting as user engagement and promote even more shit my way. Having paid for premium/red/whatever youtube since it was available to avoid advertising I am seriously considering if it is worth continuing as a lot of tech/edu youtubers are duplicating their content to other platforms.

n4bz0r 5y ago
> Would refresh the front page and would get another scam in first position I have a suspicion that their system simply doesn't reconstruct recommendation lists instantly. I've been marking a lot of videos (of certain channels) as "not interested" in the past, and remember having the same frustration. The videos wouldn't go away after a page refresh. But after about a day or two you'd stop getting videos from unwanted channels if you're persistent enough with your marking, and if you don't click very similar videos from other channels or videos from the same channel (even accidentally). They react much faster to what you do watch. The processing of data about what you do not want to watch is seemingly of much lower priority. Good thing, though, that it's of any priority at all. I suppose it must be somewhat similar with these reports. The buildup is rather slow, but in the end it should work.
hamiltonians 5y ago
Reporting is useless because it takes a very high threshold to get the video removed if at all. Think about how many reports Trump videos or fox news videos get. So YouTube probably does not assign such reports much weight.
- shirro 5y ago
  Seemed like a reasonable comment but thanks to jschlatter posting a link to the youtube report history in a comment here I have been able to verify every single video I have reported in the last few days has been deleted. So it does make a difference but the volume of these things must be massive.

anonymouswacker 5y ago

Lower standards because they need more $. Buyer beware, no accountability, short term thinking. The marketing-advertising bubble is perhaps starting to pop.

thrill 5y ago

Whenever my recommendations get worthless I delete my history. It helps for a few months.

Nextgrid 5y ago

Until the law changes so YouTube and other social media is considered complicit of whatever scam they promote they have no incentive to fix this. The spammers and potential marks still "engage" with the site and its ads which is all they care about. Frankly this is not limited to YouTube even. Twitter has a spam problem for years where scammers would impersonate high-profile users and reply to the real account's tweets (as to be shown right underneath the real thing) with a scam disguised as a crypto giveaway. This is something that simple regular expressions can filter out, but why do this considering all of this malicious activity still counts as "engagement" and their bottom-line depends on this? Facebook has hosted (and I'm sure still does) cybercrime groups even after being notified about it: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/04/a-year-later-cybercrime-groups-still-rampant-on-facebook/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/04/a-year-later-cybercrime-...

MattGaiser 5y ago
Forget Twitter and YouTube. Plenty of scams come by email, text, and snail mail.
- hamiltonians 5y ago
  This scam is way more resiliant. ISPs seemd to come down hard on email scams.

patchtopic 5y ago

hunt for any youtube cryptocurrency content and instantly get your youtube feed filled with a torrent of garbage containing thumbnails of graphs and amazed facial expressions..

unknownOrigin 5y ago

Yes, it's not limited to Musk-related topics, but he does seem to be the nexus point of many of these. Everyday Astronaut was just complaing about a blatant (and kinda shocking as to how bad it can get, to be honest) instance here: https://mobile.twitter.com/Erdayastronaut/status/1438643886767869953 https://mobile.twitter.com/Erdayastronaut/status/14386438867...

jsnell 5y ago

> You can't tell me that they're too difficult to distinguish from legitimate content. Any human being or half-decent algorithm would be able to catch these with no trouble at all (heck, I could write a couple of regular expressions that would do the trick and have 0 false positives), Of course I can tell you that! :) Abuse is an adversarial and dynamic problem. A simple regex will never solve the problem for more than a very short time period. Sometimes such short term fixes are called for, since they'll buy you the time for something more principled. But they cannot be the solution forever, because the abusers will adapt. The more different variants you end up blocking, the more likely it is that they somehow interact and produce serious FPs. And then you've got a PR mess on your hands with people complaining about how "Jeff Bezos is being censored by YouTube". Abuse is pretty thankless that way: nobody ever sees your successes, only your failures, and it's all a job of balancing the two. What you actually want for fighting bulk spam (rather than other forms of abuse) is robust signals that are broadly useful rather than specific to one campaign. As for your actual question, I haven't actually been seeing this in my recommendations (but then again, I don't have anything related to cryptocurrency or Elon Musk in my recommendations). Maybe this isn't actually as widespread a problem as you're suggesting? To put it bluntly, perhaps cryptocurrency is an area where the legit content is basically indistinguishable from scams.

SilverRed 5y ago
We may as well think of the spammers as their own ML whos aim and weighting is to fool the spam prevention. So as good as you make the spam AI, the spammer AI evolves to be better than it since they keep iterating until they find whatever formula does not trip the spam protection. >Any human being or half-decent algorithm would be able to catch these with no trouble at all And this statement from OP is blatantly false because if it was true, no human would fall for the scams. But they do fall for them, in huge volumes. Especially if the scams appear to come from a known authority like Elon, the police, your boss, etc. And if you did find a half decent algorithm that worked, the spammers would just iterate again to make spam that doesn't trip it.
- curiousgeorgio 5y ago
  > And if you did find a half decent algorithm that worked, the spammers would just iterate again to make spam that doesn't trip it. So, the solution is not to even try? How has that worked out for other platforms?

d883kd8 5y ago

Maybe they want to show problematic videos to security researchers

beorno 5y ago

The Space X impersonation "live event" is still ongoing, btw... It must have started 2h+ hours ago. That's some very slow reaction. (Btw, do report it as "mass advertising", and the channel as impersonating the SpaceX channel - I just did, and I presume lots of others before me.)

hamiltonians 5y ago
zero fucks given https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VOQXRrfibE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VOQXRrfibE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5dBA-01K88 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5dBA-01K88 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JImUxBO1IIQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JImUxBO1IIQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcvs9KJ_Wk4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcvs9KJ_Wk4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npNtPNHYGQQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npNtPNHYGQQ

hamiltonians 5y ago

These ppl making so much it's insane https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/13NKkx1epf5TcbisVSkDjMNWT1BTStv2yU?page=5 https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/13NKkx1epf5TcbisVSkDj... $100-200k/day everyday makes mafia, drug dealers jealous . no risk either. no tainted crypto larry lawton brags about having made 4million stealing diamonds, that is like a month's worth of anonymous scam videos except multiply by 10. Former mafia ppl brag about their exploits on youtube. These guys make them look like rookies.

SilverRed 5y ago
People are starting to realize that traceable and reversible bank transactions were actually a good thing..

jryan49 5y ago

Yes I've reported 4 fake crypto scam channels in the last few days.

samstave 5y ago

In the last weeks I have been getting a LOT of spam delivered to the primary inbox in gmail - and its really annoying.

root_axis 5y ago

Is the problem as bad as you say and really getting worse? I don't know, I personally have never been recommended anything like this. I also think it's absurd for you to suggest that you could "write a couple of regular expressions" to successfully remove spam from YouTube with 0 false positives. The reason stuff like this will always exist is precisely because false positives are inevitable and they piss people off way more than spam. There are dozens of threads about random YouTube videos getting hit by the algorithm going back a decade on this site, the reality is that this problem will always exist. With all that said, there's nothing wrong with asking YouTube to do better, but I'd temper my expectations if I were you.

hamiltonians 5y ago
People's expectations are already very low. But there dozens of these videos playing at any time . It's not like this is a one-time occurrence or under the radar. It's everywhere when you search for certain keywords or just browse certain topics like crypto or elon musk or any major event. You would think these highly paid engineers and such a hugely profitable company could do more to fix it.
sen 5y ago
On my front page right near the top, right now, is a video that looks EXACTLY like a SpaceX live stream, it's "Live Now", the channel name is "Space X", the thumbnail is the exact same one they use for their livestreams, and the title is "SpaceX's all-civilian Inspration4 mission!" and it has thousands of viewers right now. The only way to tell it's fake is by hovering over the channel name and the URL isn't /c/SpaceX it's /channel/<randomcharacters> I've seen these on the front page every single day for weeks now, always with different URLs. I tried to report a few but quickly found out from other comments here that it does nothing so I gave up and just ignore them now.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

A family member lost $3k to one of these YouTube promotions that ended up a scam. YouTube and the scammer make money here, so why would it change?

jschlatter 5y ago

You're not the only one. I've been getting annoyed by these, too. I was encouraged today to discover that youtube has a report history page that lets you know the outcome of your reports. Most of the videos I've reported have been removed, including most of the ones I've reported in the last 12 hours. So at least _something_ is being done about them, even though the current effort is not sufficient against the unending inflow of new scam videos. Here's the report history page: https://www.youtube.com/reporthistory https://www.youtube.com/reporthistory

shirro 5y ago
Excellent. Good to see all the ones I reported have been removed. That gives me a lot more confidence in the reporting mechanism. Youtube is obviously dealing with a considerable volume of these. I still wonder if I am being used as a mechanical turk to help identify these. Hopefully the inputs are training a machine learning system.

adishy 5y ago

I think a few of the other comments poke at this general idea, but I've come to be very intrigued by the meta-game of training these media recommendation engines (YouTube, Spotify, Netflix, TikTok?) by picking the right things to get a good feed. This sort of training is becoming more important than ever for a good experience in these platforms. In my experience, YouTube seems to be one of the more reactive recommenders - especially if you go down rabbit-holes / dig deeper into certain types of topics. I have turned off both web history and Youtube watch history in my Google account and I find that the Youtube homepage very quickly devolves to lists of videos by channels I've subscribed to - a randomized subscription feed. I would really be interested in seeing recommendation behavior be quantified and documented in some systematic/objective way (if this is even possible).

xvmt 5y ago

I'd say that it is the internet in general that has a spam/scam problem. Due to bandwidth costs, which apparently only Google is able and willing to subsidize, YouTube is basically the internet for videos. Many opinions I read about YouTube do not consider this point and treat it as just another website. But for me, making Google responsible for whatever is posted on YouTube is akin to making ISPs responsible for whatever is going through their switches. YouTube has a lot of problems, but I personally have no doubt that its existence is a net benefit to humanity. Calls for tighter regulation (or breaking Google down), which appear to be more and more common these days, make me wonder if would even have an alternative if YouTube went down. It is easy to take it for granted.

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