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Yes, and Youtube and Facebook both have similar problems. There is survivalship bias at play here, you do see the bots that manage to get past the spam protecti

Yes, and Youtube and Facebook both have similar problems. There is survivalship bias at play here, you do see the bots that manage to get past the spam protection, but never see the ones that don't. For all you know, Twitter could be blocking 99% of the spam. Of course, as long as there's money in it (and there is), spammers will constantly be coming up with new and unexpected ways to bypass your systems. It's a neverending battle, and if you think it's trivial, you are the one understating how hard the problem is. I never claimed Tesla self-driving wasn't an achievement, but clearly they underestimated how hard that would be themselves, so I wouldn't be surprised if they'd do the same for content moderation.

paisawalla 5y ago
There's a substantial qualitative difference between what gets through Youtube's and Facebook's filter, versus what gets past Twitter. They're not even practicing the current state of the art, as practiced by their peers.
LewisVerstappen 5y ago
> Youtube and Facebook both have similar problems. There is survivalship bias at play here, you do see the bots that manage to get past the spam protection, but never see the ones that don't. For all you know, Twitter could be blocking 99% of the spam. If you spend 5 seconds on YouTube and Facebook and compare that to Twitter, you'll see a massive difference. The spam bots on Twitter are incredibly unsophisticated. It's literally bots with the same profile picture and name as the person they're trying to spam. On the other hand, YouTube spam bots are actually incredibly sophisticated. They're using GPT-3 or some language model to generate text and reply to each other. Like, sometimes I'll read a comment and not be sure if it was a spam bot or not. Twitter is leagues behind w/ their spam filters.
- ehsankia 4y ago
  Obviously YMMV but in 2021, every tech video I commented on would get these replies, which all had 18+ profile pictures. Clicking their profile every account had the exact same "playlist" with a porn site ad inside, and the channel header had the exact same website link. I kept getting these for months.
- ehsankia 4y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Cw-vODp-8Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Cw-vODp-8Y

paisawalla 5y ago

There's a substantial qualitative difference between what gets through Youtube's and Facebook's filter, versus what gets past Twitter. They're not even practicing the current state of the art, as practiced by their peers.

LewisVerstappen 5y ago

> Youtube and Facebook both have similar problems. There is survivalship bias at play here, you do see the bots that manage to get past the spam protection, but never see the ones that don't. For all you know, Twitter could be blocking 99% of the spam. If you spend 5 seconds on YouTube and Facebook and compare that to Twitter, you'll see a massive difference. The spam bots on Twitter are incredibly unsophisticated. It's literally bots with the same profile picture and name as the person they're trying to spam. On the other hand, YouTube spam bots are actually incredibly sophisticated. They're using GPT-3 or some language model to generate text and reply to each other. Like, sometimes I'll read a comment and not be sure if it was a spam bot or not. Twitter is leagues behind w/ their spam filters.

ehsankia 4y ago
Obviously YMMV but in 2021, every tech video I commented on would get these replies, which all had 18+ profile pictures. Clicking their profile every account had the exact same "playlist" with a porn site ad inside, and the channel header had the exact same website link. I kept getting these for months.
ehsankia 4y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Cw-vODp-8Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Cw-vODp-8Y