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Use of special characters in usernames on YouTube has been limited

96 points by memorable 4y ago

CSMastermind 4y ago
This seems like a positive step in the right direction, YouTube comment spam was getting out of control. Nothing but respect for the engineers at Youtube working on fighting back against it. Seems like a very difficult classification problem.
- thamer 4y ago
  Is it very difficult? So many of these spam accounts follow the exact same format, with names following some variation of "Free stuff Telegram: +1234…" or "s3xY p1cs c0mE 2 mY chAnNeL", etc. Tons of them post these obviously made-up threads about how "Dr John Smith" has helped them triple their crypto investments. There's probably a dozen or so templates that many of these spammers and scammers use, and if you can spot them in a second, it's not hard to train a model to recognize them also. It is out of control because YouTube does not care to fix it, not because it's some insurmountably hard problem that one of the top AI companies in the world just can't figure out.
  - chx 4y ago
    > if you can spot them in a second, it's not hard to train a model to recognize them also. something Minsky vision something (I know it's an urban legend but still, it figures.)
  - meheleventyone 4y ago
    I can totally see that if you assume it’s simple and easy to fix that it must just be another case of people not caring. Yet here we are replying to a post about the not-ideal steps the company is taking. And further this is a problem for multiple large companies with user commenting and chat, from Google through Roblox, Twitch, Twitter and beyond. There are a few things that make naive solutions impractical: * Cost to build them. * Cost to keep them up to date in a highly adversarial environment. Note this might mean scraping the solution and starting again. * Cost of running them at huge scale. Particularly important is to understand the attack surface is so high and cost to the opposition is so low that people will defeat your approach recreationally just to spam obscenities.
    - zasdffaa 4y ago
      Guy makes concrete suggestions, you respond with abstract rebuttals that add up to "it's too hard". All he's saying is low-hanging fruit is pluckable; pluck it.
      - meheleventyone 4y ago
        Guy doesn’t understand why perceived low hanging fruit hasn’t been plucked and I explained why it’s not that simple or low hanging. That’s fine, naive filtering (now with added ML!) is the first idea everyone comes up with. Then they learn about the Scunthorpe problem and beyond.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        doublerabbit 4y ago
        > Guy doesn’t understand why perceived low hanging fruit hasn’t been plucked and I explained why it’s not that simple or low hanging. I'll explain too; Money. YouTube make money from the spam accounts, As twitter does, Reddit too. Spam is a very profitable market.
        smallnix 4y ago
        How does YouTube make money from spam comments?
        doublerabbit 4y ago
        Pay Google, Google turns a blind eye. Why else has Google not cracked down on spam accounts? It has the tech, it knows it has a problem and the best remedy they can come up with is shortened YouTube usernames? There's more to it behind the scenes. A real example is that I worked for a business where my job was to sell email addresses gathered from soft-core pornography websites. A batch of working emails could easily fetch £500. Reddit will sell you accounts for your "campaign" if it profits reddit and it's all the same for any big walled garden.
  - paulpauper 4y ago
    They don't even need to change the name. I recall seeing a giveaway livestream scam in which the hacker didn't change the name of the channel at all and it was still bringing in btc.
  - thrown_22 4y ago
    thаmеr is not thamer. The space of all unicode characters is too big for you to look for every single possible "looks like" pair. Unicode, as unpopular an opinion as this is, should only be used for presentation and not storage. Anything past ascii is a security vulnerability.
    - jfim 4y ago
      > Unicode, as unpopular an opinion as this is, should only be used for presentation and not storage. Anything past ascii is a security vulnerability. While at it, we should also ban the letters I and L as they can be confused. People who have those letters in their name can just request a name change. /s Leave Unicode alone for the vast majority of the world whose language isn't actually writable using ASCII.
      - thrown_22 4y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:QWERTY_1878.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:QWERTY_1878.png Notice some keys missing there? The difference is that we have a few good quality fonts, like liberation mono, which let you tell the difference between l and 1 and 0 and O. There can't be a font which does that for the whole of unicode space because a and а are by definition the same glyph.
        jfim 4y ago
        What's your proposal for differentiating between mais (but) and maïs (corn), or between café (French, Spanish) and cafè (Catalan) using ASCII? How would one write an ideographic language using ASCII?
        iforgotpassword 4y ago
        > What's your proposal for differentiating between mais (but) and maïs (corn), or between café (French, Spanish) and cafè (Catalan) using ASCII? Context, but... > How would one write an ideographic language using ASCII? ... We're talking about security sensitive context. Users can write stories with all the Unicode they want, just don't use it for identifiers like user and channel names. Reddit got it right.
  - ehnto 4y ago
    It is an adversarial space, the reason the names look ridiculous is because they have evolved to escape pattern matching as it also evolved. YouTube and Google are notoriously unhelpful when it comes to instances when they catch a human in their automation drag nets. They lack the capacity to support their platforms so they are probably being cautious not to create support and ill will they can't handle.
  - nikanj 4y ago
    It’s hard, if you’re insisting on doing it the Google way i.e. ML+AI with zero humans involved. Having a person keep an eye on the top 50 popular channels and spotting the patterns in commentor names would be very effective, but having a human is not Google
    - iforgotpassword 4y ago
      Exactly this is my guess too. Literally everyone is seeing these very obvious spam comments everywhere. Have a few people monitor comment sections manually and then maybe one guy who goes over the spam ones and come up with a regex-like matching rule to detect these and move them to the "potential spam" section of the creator's dashboard. It's gonna be whack-a-mole but it's rather responsive. I get it, they want to automate everything, but evidently that only gets you so far, your model will never be at 100%, and we didn't even get to false positives yet.
      - MauranKilom 4y ago
        That means you're now selecting for all the spammers that are somehow evading the eyes of that crew. It doesn't matter whether they are doing it intentionally initially, this un-natural selection will inevitably lead to spammers figuring out how to not be seen by those Google people.
        jfoster 4y ago
        It sounds like you're assuming that Google sticks to a single approach and doesn't waver from it, despite spam still being present. They wouldn't do it like that, though, would they?
        MauranKilom 4y ago
        The point is more that, unless Google keeps continuously expanding their approach along every dimension, whichever spammers happen to be evading them at any given point will stick around and multiply.
  - bryanrasmussen 4y ago
    >There's probably a dozen or so templates that many of these spammers and scammers use, and if you can spot them in a second, it's not hard to train a model to recognize them also. I'm betting it's probably not hard the spammers and scammers to switch templates if old ones get caught.
    - norman784 4y ago
      I think a company like Google have the resources to dedicate a team to work on that permanently, but as I suspect, working in something like this doesn't get you enough merits, so it's better to work on a new shinny useless feature than an actual useful but not shinny feature.
  - can16358p 4y ago
    Same for Instagram and Twitter. The formats of the obvious spam is super simple to detect on both platforms for years. Yet I haven't seen ANY progress on either platform. Assuming that they are much more competent than a random dude like me as a whole tech company, the only possible explanation is that they have incentive not to prevent spam. Perhaps: spam = more notifications delivered = more app opens = more potential feed engagement since they've opened the app even if from a spam notification = more ads shown = more revenue = happier shareholders short time... all at the expense of losing long-term trust to the platforms.
    - ElemenoPicuares 4y ago
      Have you been working on actually detecting them or are you assuming they’re easy to detect? Did you go digging for false negatives or false positives in other languages? Considering that not all special characters are printable, these platforms don’t limit their users to ASCII, random foreign words are common in other languages, the false positive rate has to be pretty much zero, etc etc etc I’ll bet it’s a whole lot more sophisticated than you imagine.
      - can16358p 4y ago
        I'm assuming they're easy to detect yet I'm super confident about the patterns I'm seeing that I'd bet money that it can be implemented. False positives should ideally be zero yet algorithms don't have to ban right away. If there's a relatively small team of people reviewing those spams manuallu after the algorithms flag, I don't see any problems with the approach. I of course get there are many different corner cases, Unicode characters that look like other letters etc. to bypass the filters yet they're also very easy to implement a filter that would probably detect many spams right away even with many of the corner cases. But again, a human team would still review these tweets anyway giving no room for false positives.
      - ratww 4y ago
        About 90% of the public Youtube spam I see on YT still follows this ultra-simple template: one person asks something on the "top comment", another one replies with a faux-legitimate message. The question is often "does anyone know how to pirate videos?", "...how to invest in crypto", "...how to get fake instagram followers", life coaches, etc. It's not really custom messages with special chars, it's something that I could detect by using Ctrl+F in the browser. It's not something they'd need special tools on their end to catch. The only thing that is changing is the name of the users. So yes, I'm gonna agree with GP that "the formats of the obvious spam" are super easy to detect.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- bavell 4y ago
  > Seems like a very difficult classification problem. I don't know, I've been seeing tons of low-effort comment spam on YT for months if not years. The kind where the comment says "read my username" and the username is "text me on telegram at xxxxx" where x is one of the Unicode numbers with a circle around it. If only YT or their parent company had access to some kind of spam filtering expertise, built up over decades of real-world use...
- paulpauper 4y ago
  why cant YouTube do anything about crypto giveaway livestream scams, fake livestream views, channels being hijacked to promote the scams?
- xdennis 4y ago
  If the change is to limit the character set to English then this is not a step in the right direction. What do they mean by special characters? The example they give is "¥ouⓉube(emoticon)". That doesn't include characters with diacritics. But if this means they ban channels that are actual human names like „Gică Raț“, then this is a terrible move. People in the comments are suggesting the same should be done to comments. So, for example, people won't be allowed to talk about prices in Japan ("this costs 100¥").
BobCat 4y ago
They should also figure out how to stop channel hijacking and the shillers playing that Elon Musk crypto interview which keeps showing up in my recommendations...
- dmix 4y ago
  I posted a SpaceX live feed launch on my work Slack channel, pretty close to the end, and when it ended it redirected to one of those crypto scams and someone complained I posted a crypto scam on the channel. To be fair to the person a lot of people open things in a tab and look at them later.
  - duskwuff 4y ago
    YouTube's default behavior when a stream ends is to redirect you to the first video (or stream) from the sidebar of suggested/related videos -- whatever that may be. This is a pretty serious misfeature, IMO. But it is what it is.
    - MiddleEndian 4y ago
      Youtube wants to be like broadcast TV. TV is endless rather than deliberate.
    - trafficante 4y ago
- tjpnz 4y ago
  Subscriber and view counts are a huge factor in whether a video gets recommended and scammers are able to easily exploit that using bots. Some simple commonsense would go far here. For one they could restrict streaming if a new account quickly gains tens of thousands of subscribers. That seems to be a common theme among the scammer accounts I've seen.
- paulpauper 4y ago
  yeah but engagement and ad dollars. the scam videos are as profitable for YouTube ad they are for scammers.
wyldfire 4y ago
Was this related to MKBHD's complaint about phishing in the comments section of his and other popular videos?
- ehnto 4y ago
  Almost every channel I watch has done a PSA warning viewers is the increase in spam and phishing, it must be a fairly high try profile issue by now.
- Ayesh 4y ago
  I think this was a concern for many channels. Jacksfilms, a channel that often quotes comments, even make fun of such phishing channel names in his videos.
meibo 4y ago
The actual title of the post is "Updates to reduce comment spam and impersonation on YouTube"
photochemsyn 4y ago
Youtube is a bad joke these days, and in particular the search algorithm is hilariously biased towards corporate/state propaganda, and if you're not searching, towards brain-dead Tik-Tok like content. China, amusingly enough, bans such content in its own country but is happy to promote it abroad. I see this as proof of my general conjecture that dumbing down the American population is something the global elites continue to pursue as a means of retaining their grasp on power. As far as myself, I was shadow banned on Youtube well over a year ago, most likely for making cynical comments about the ratio of ads to content on several popular channels, and perhaps for making a habit of reporting to content creators when their content had been age-restricted for no apparent reason, and as a result I will never buy or purchase anything I see recommended to me in a Youtube ad, which I mostly avoid via ublock origin and youtube_dl, and I have nothing but contempt for the Alphabet/Google brand and all who ride with it. We can do better than this, Europe's data privacy laws should be ported to the USA and all the creepy data merchants should be forced out of business post haste. P.S. stop calling them FAANG, they're nothing but MAMAA... as in the undue influence of Big MAMAA in the tech sector, which also ties into their ancestor, Ma Bell.
- infinitifall 4y ago
  I've noticed that unless you spell out channel names, you will only be shown videos from verified/checkmark accounts, no matter how far down you scroll. The only way to see videos made by "the people" is restricting search to last week or shorter time periods. Controversy-adjacent search terms are sanitized and rendered useless. Channels and videos are shadow banned so that even if you remember exact video titles you will never be able to find them. If despite these measures you somehow end up on an interesting video, the recommendations sidebar is scrubbed clean and shows global popular videos instead of the usual similar videos watched by other people. Clearly optimizing for total watchtime and avoiding controversy is not aligned with creating a great search and recommendation algorithm.
  - Thorrez 4y ago
    >I've noticed that unless you spell out channel names, you will only be shown videos from verified/checkmark accounts, no matter how far down you scroll. Searching "lego stop motion" I get a non-checkmark channel in the 4th result: https://i.imgur.com/Dvds7ib.png https://i.imgur.com/Dvds7ib.png >If despite these measures you somehow end up on an interesting video, the recommendations sidebar is scrubbed clean and shows global popular videos instead of the usual similar videos watched by other people. Are you talking about all videos, or just controversy-adjacent videos? I know I've seen people online complaining in the past that YouTube sometimes leads to people going down a rabbit hole of crazy videos with the recommendations. If you're just referring to controversial videos, what you say sounds like YouTube fixed the rabbit hole problem. If you're referring to all videos, I haven't experienced that. I get mostly good recommendations. Disclosure, I work at Google but not YouTube.
system2 4y ago
Now, bring back the ratings back to the videos. I am super tired of watching fake videos until the end.
- waterpowder 4y ago
  This extension is working well so far to display the likes and dislikes, but I don't know for how long... https://returnyoutubedislike.com/ https://returnyoutubedislike.com/
  - gpgn 4y ago
    > A combination of archived data from before the offical YouTube dislike API shut down, and extrapolated extension user behavior. How reliable is this?
    - djxfade 4y ago
      Works fine for older videos where the like/dislike count was archived. On new videos, not that much, since it's dependent on data from other users also using the plugin.
- skunkworker 4y ago
  This becomes dangerous with how-to videos which used to be easy to spot if they weren't very good or fake.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
Normille 4y ago
- minitech 4y ago
  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/top_of_mind https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/top_of_mind
  - Normille 4y ago
    Just because something's in Wiktionary, doesn't mean it's legitimate usage. Mind you, I think I should give up being astounded by what passes for English amongst Americans these days. Only t'other day I got pulled up for dropping my monocle at the word "Eventuated" Talk about "two peoples separated by a common language"!
- raverbashing 4y ago
  They will probably outsource this to GPT-3 as soon as they are able to
Dwedit 4y ago
Hello U+202E
- teddyh 4y ago
  !taht potS
lloydatkinson 4y ago
Wow finally. Many well regarded youtubers that have been creating videos for years have been complaining about many of the problems youtube or its staff cause, this impersonation being a pretty big complaint. Took them long enough to fix it.
hgazx 4y ago
I wish all websites would only allow ascii characters as usernames. Having the full spectrum of Unicode available has brought nothing good.
- Biganon 4y ago
  Same with domain names. I'm a French speaker and I don't care if I have to renounce using accents in domain names. Nobody uses them for good reasons anyway. But it makes attacks so easy, see binance. Terrible, terrible idea.
  - teddyh 4y ago
    “People whose names break my system are weird outliers. They should have had solid, acceptable names, like 田中太郎.” — https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
  - xdennis 4y ago
    Computer systems should conform to people, not the other way around. If you're terrible at detecting malicious sites, the answer isn't to force English on everyone, it's to write better systems.
    - Biganon 4y ago
      > If you're terrible at detecting malicious sites, the answer isn't to force English on everyone, it's to write better systems Yeah good idea, I'll tell my grandmother it's her fault if "bank.tld" with "CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER A" instead of latin "a", and with a valid HTTPS cert, stole her banking credentials. What an idiot!
- xdennis 4y ago
  That is such a narrow minded idea. There are 7 billion people who don't speak English. People should be able to write in their own language and use their own names.
gok 4y ago
Damn how is Elon Mušk going to send me that $69420 of bitcoin he promised me in a video comment now?
- xdennis 4y ago
  Mušk is a real place in Slovenia and a real word in Lithuanian. If anything you should ban "Musk".
JamesSwift 4y ago
I just don't see how there isn't a manual solution that could solve this. I get it, its way easier in the future if the computer can do the work for you, but it seems highly unlikely that the number of channels/users being created daily with "problematic" characters in their names is not within the realm of "manually reviewable".
rep_movsd 4y ago
Elons son gonna have trouble

96 points by memorable 4y ago

This seems like a positive step in the right direction, YouTube comment spam was getting out of control. Nothing but respect for the engineers at Youtube working on fighting back against it. Seems like a very difficult classification problem.

thamer 4y ago
Is it very difficult? So many of these spam accounts follow the exact same format, with names following some variation of "Free stuff Telegram: +1234…" or "s3xY p1cs c0mE 2 mY chAnNeL", etc. Tons of them post these obviously made-up threads about how "Dr John Smith" has helped them triple their crypto investments. There's probably a dozen or so templates that many of these spammers and scammers use, and if you can spot them in a second, it's not hard to train a model to recognize them also. It is out of control because YouTube does not care to fix it, not because it's some insurmountably hard problem that one of the top AI companies in the world just can't figure out.
- chx 4y ago
  > if you can spot them in a second, it's not hard to train a model to recognize them also. something Minsky vision something (I know it's an urban legend but still, it figures.)
- meheleventyone 4y ago
  I can totally see that if you assume it’s simple and easy to fix that it must just be another case of people not caring. Yet here we are replying to a post about the not-ideal steps the company is taking. And further this is a problem for multiple large companies with user commenting and chat, from Google through Roblox, Twitch, Twitter and beyond. There are a few things that make naive solutions impractical: * Cost to build them. * Cost to keep them up to date in a highly adversarial environment. Note this might mean scraping the solution and starting again. * Cost of running them at huge scale. Particularly important is to understand the attack surface is so high and cost to the opposition is so low that people will defeat your approach recreationally just to spam obscenities.
  - zasdffaa 4y ago
    Guy makes concrete suggestions, you respond with abstract rebuttals that add up to "it's too hard". All he's saying is low-hanging fruit is pluckable; pluck it.
    - meheleventyone 4y ago
      Guy doesn’t understand why perceived low hanging fruit hasn’t been plucked and I explained why it’s not that simple or low hanging. That’s fine, naive filtering (now with added ML!) is the first idea everyone comes up with. Then they learn about the Scunthorpe problem and beyond.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - doublerabbit 4y ago
        > Guy doesn’t understand why perceived low hanging fruit hasn’t been plucked and I explained why it’s not that simple or low hanging. I'll explain too; Money. YouTube make money from the spam accounts, As twitter does, Reddit too. Spam is a very profitable market.
        smallnix 4y ago
        How does YouTube make money from spam comments?
        doublerabbit 4y ago
        Pay Google, Google turns a blind eye. Why else has Google not cracked down on spam accounts? It has the tech, it knows it has a problem and the best remedy they can come up with is shortened YouTube usernames? There's more to it behind the scenes. A real example is that I worked for a business where my job was to sell email addresses gathered from soft-core pornography websites. A batch of working emails could easily fetch £500. Reddit will sell you accounts for your "campaign" if it profits reddit and it's all the same for any big walled garden.
- paulpauper 4y ago
  They don't even need to change the name. I recall seeing a giveaway livestream scam in which the hacker didn't change the name of the channel at all and it was still bringing in btc.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  thаmеr is not thamer. The space of all unicode characters is too big for you to look for every single possible "looks like" pair. Unicode, as unpopular an opinion as this is, should only be used for presentation and not storage. Anything past ascii is a security vulnerability.
  - jfim 4y ago
    > Unicode, as unpopular an opinion as this is, should only be used for presentation and not storage. Anything past ascii is a security vulnerability. While at it, we should also ban the letters I and L as they can be confused. People who have those letters in their name can just request a name change. /s Leave Unicode alone for the vast majority of the world whose language isn't actually writable using ASCII.
    - thrown_22 4y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:QWERTY_1878.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:QWERTY_1878.png Notice some keys missing there? The difference is that we have a few good quality fonts, like liberation mono, which let you tell the difference between l and 1 and 0 and O. There can't be a font which does that for the whole of unicode space because a and а are by definition the same glyph.
      - jfim 4y ago
        What's your proposal for differentiating between mais (but) and maïs (corn), or between café (French, Spanish) and cafè (Catalan) using ASCII? How would one write an ideographic language using ASCII?
        iforgotpassword 4y ago
        > What's your proposal for differentiating between mais (but) and maïs (corn), or between café (French, Spanish) and cafè (Catalan) using ASCII? Context, but... > How would one write an ideographic language using ASCII? ... We're talking about security sensitive context. Users can write stories with all the Unicode they want, just don't use it for identifiers like user and channel names. Reddit got it right.
- ehnto 4y ago
  It is an adversarial space, the reason the names look ridiculous is because they have evolved to escape pattern matching as it also evolved. YouTube and Google are notoriously unhelpful when it comes to instances when they catch a human in their automation drag nets. They lack the capacity to support their platforms so they are probably being cautious not to create support and ill will they can't handle.
- nikanj 4y ago
  It’s hard, if you’re insisting on doing it the Google way i.e. ML+AI with zero humans involved. Having a person keep an eye on the top 50 popular channels and spotting the patterns in commentor names would be very effective, but having a human is not Google
  - iforgotpassword 4y ago
    Exactly this is my guess too. Literally everyone is seeing these very obvious spam comments everywhere. Have a few people monitor comment sections manually and then maybe one guy who goes over the spam ones and come up with a regex-like matching rule to detect these and move them to the "potential spam" section of the creator's dashboard. It's gonna be whack-a-mole but it's rather responsive. I get it, they want to automate everything, but evidently that only gets you so far, your model will never be at 100%, and we didn't even get to false positives yet.
    - MauranKilom 4y ago
      That means you're now selecting for all the spammers that are somehow evading the eyes of that crew. It doesn't matter whether they are doing it intentionally initially, this un-natural selection will inevitably lead to spammers figuring out how to not be seen by those Google people.
      - jfoster 4y ago
        It sounds like you're assuming that Google sticks to a single approach and doesn't waver from it, despite spam still being present. They wouldn't do it like that, though, would they?
        MauranKilom 4y ago
        The point is more that, unless Google keeps continuously expanding their approach along every dimension, whichever spammers happen to be evading them at any given point will stick around and multiply.
- bryanrasmussen 4y ago
  >There's probably a dozen or so templates that many of these spammers and scammers use, and if you can spot them in a second, it's not hard to train a model to recognize them also. I'm betting it's probably not hard the spammers and scammers to switch templates if old ones get caught.
  - norman784 4y ago
    I think a company like Google have the resources to dedicate a team to work on that permanently, but as I suspect, working in something like this doesn't get you enough merits, so it's better to work on a new shinny useless feature than an actual useful but not shinny feature.
- can16358p 4y ago
  Same for Instagram and Twitter. The formats of the obvious spam is super simple to detect on both platforms for years. Yet I haven't seen ANY progress on either platform. Assuming that they are much more competent than a random dude like me as a whole tech company, the only possible explanation is that they have incentive not to prevent spam. Perhaps: spam = more notifications delivered = more app opens = more potential feed engagement since they've opened the app even if from a spam notification = more ads shown = more revenue = happier shareholders short time... all at the expense of losing long-term trust to the platforms.
  - ElemenoPicuares 4y ago
    Have you been working on actually detecting them or are you assuming they’re easy to detect? Did you go digging for false negatives or false positives in other languages? Considering that not all special characters are printable, these platforms don’t limit their users to ASCII, random foreign words are common in other languages, the false positive rate has to be pretty much zero, etc etc etc I’ll bet it’s a whole lot more sophisticated than you imagine.
    - can16358p 4y ago
      I'm assuming they're easy to detect yet I'm super confident about the patterns I'm seeing that I'd bet money that it can be implemented. False positives should ideally be zero yet algorithms don't have to ban right away. If there's a relatively small team of people reviewing those spams manuallu after the algorithms flag, I don't see any problems with the approach. I of course get there are many different corner cases, Unicode characters that look like other letters etc. to bypass the filters yet they're also very easy to implement a filter that would probably detect many spams right away even with many of the corner cases. But again, a human team would still review these tweets anyway giving no room for false positives.
    - ratww 4y ago
      About 90% of the public Youtube spam I see on YT still follows this ultra-simple template: one person asks something on the "top comment", another one replies with a faux-legitimate message. The question is often "does anyone know how to pirate videos?", "...how to invest in crypto", "...how to get fake instagram followers", life coaches, etc. It's not really custom messages with special chars, it's something that I could detect by using Ctrl+F in the browser. It's not something they'd need special tools on their end to catch. The only thing that is changing is the name of the users. So yes, I'm gonna agree with GP that "the formats of the obvious spam" are super easy to detect.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
bavell 4y ago
> Seems like a very difficult classification problem. I don't know, I've been seeing tons of low-effort comment spam on YT for months if not years. The kind where the comment says "read my username" and the username is "text me on telegram at xxxxx" where x is one of the Unicode numbers with a circle around it. If only YT or their parent company had access to some kind of spam filtering expertise, built up over decades of real-world use...
paulpauper 4y ago
why cant YouTube do anything about crypto giveaway livestream scams, fake livestream views, channels being hijacked to promote the scams?
xdennis 4y ago
If the change is to limit the character set to English then this is not a step in the right direction. What do they mean by special characters? The example they give is "¥ouⓉube(emoticon)". That doesn't include characters with diacritics. But if this means they ban channels that are actual human names like „Gică Raț“, then this is a terrible move. People in the comments are suggesting the same should be done to comments. So, for example, people won't be allowed to talk about prices in Japan ("this costs 100¥").

BobCat 4y ago

They should also figure out how to stop channel hijacking and the shillers playing that Elon Musk crypto interview which keeps showing up in my recommendations...

dmix 4y ago
I posted a SpaceX live feed launch on my work Slack channel, pretty close to the end, and when it ended it redirected to one of those crypto scams and someone complained I posted a crypto scam on the channel. To be fair to the person a lot of people open things in a tab and look at them later.
- duskwuff 4y ago
  YouTube's default behavior when a stream ends is to redirect you to the first video (or stream) from the sidebar of suggested/related videos -- whatever that may be. This is a pretty serious misfeature, IMO. But it is what it is.
  - MiddleEndian 4y ago
    Youtube wants to be like broadcast TV. TV is endless rather than deliberate.
  - trafficante 4y ago
tjpnz 4y ago
Subscriber and view counts are a huge factor in whether a video gets recommended and scammers are able to easily exploit that using bots. Some simple commonsense would go far here. For one they could restrict streaming if a new account quickly gains tens of thousands of subscribers. That seems to be a common theme among the scammer accounts I've seen.
paulpauper 4y ago
yeah but engagement and ad dollars. the scam videos are as profitable for YouTube ad they are for scammers.

wyldfire 4y ago

Was this related to MKBHD's complaint about phishing in the comments section of his and other popular videos?

ehnto 4y ago
Almost every channel I watch has done a PSA warning viewers is the increase in spam and phishing, it must be a fairly high try profile issue by now.
Ayesh 4y ago
I think this was a concern for many channels. Jacksfilms, a channel that often quotes comments, even make fun of such phishing channel names in his videos.

meibo 4y ago

The actual title of the post is "Updates to reduce comment spam and impersonation on YouTube"

photochemsyn 4y ago

Youtube is a bad joke these days, and in particular the search algorithm is hilariously biased towards corporate/state propaganda, and if you're not searching, towards brain-dead Tik-Tok like content. China, amusingly enough, bans such content in its own country but is happy to promote it abroad. I see this as proof of my general conjecture that dumbing down the American population is something the global elites continue to pursue as a means of retaining their grasp on power. As far as myself, I was shadow banned on Youtube well over a year ago, most likely for making cynical comments about the ratio of ads to content on several popular channels, and perhaps for making a habit of reporting to content creators when their content had been age-restricted for no apparent reason, and as a result I will never buy or purchase anything I see recommended to me in a Youtube ad, which I mostly avoid via ublock origin and youtube_dl, and I have nothing but contempt for the Alphabet/Google brand and all who ride with it. We can do better than this, Europe's data privacy laws should be ported to the USA and all the creepy data merchants should be forced out of business post haste. P.S. stop calling them FAANG, they're nothing but MAMAA... as in the undue influence of Big MAMAA in the tech sector, which also ties into their ancestor, Ma Bell.

infinitifall 4y ago
I've noticed that unless you spell out channel names, you will only be shown videos from verified/checkmark accounts, no matter how far down you scroll. The only way to see videos made by "the people" is restricting search to last week or shorter time periods. Controversy-adjacent search terms are sanitized and rendered useless. Channels and videos are shadow banned so that even if you remember exact video titles you will never be able to find them. If despite these measures you somehow end up on an interesting video, the recommendations sidebar is scrubbed clean and shows global popular videos instead of the usual similar videos watched by other people. Clearly optimizing for total watchtime and avoiding controversy is not aligned with creating a great search and recommendation algorithm.
- Thorrez 4y ago
  >I've noticed that unless you spell out channel names, you will only be shown videos from verified/checkmark accounts, no matter how far down you scroll. Searching "lego stop motion" I get a non-checkmark channel in the 4th result: https://i.imgur.com/Dvds7ib.png https://i.imgur.com/Dvds7ib.png >If despite these measures you somehow end up on an interesting video, the recommendations sidebar is scrubbed clean and shows global popular videos instead of the usual similar videos watched by other people. Are you talking about all videos, or just controversy-adjacent videos? I know I've seen people online complaining in the past that YouTube sometimes leads to people going down a rabbit hole of crazy videos with the recommendations. If you're just referring to controversial videos, what you say sounds like YouTube fixed the rabbit hole problem. If you're referring to all videos, I haven't experienced that. I get mostly good recommendations. Disclosure, I work at Google but not YouTube.

system2 4y ago

Now, bring back the ratings back to the videos. I am super tired of watching fake videos until the end.

waterpowder 4y ago
This extension is working well so far to display the likes and dislikes, but I don't know for how long... https://returnyoutubedislike.com/ https://returnyoutubedislike.com/
- gpgn 4y ago
  > A combination of archived data from before the offical YouTube dislike API shut down, and extrapolated extension user behavior. How reliable is this?
  - djxfade 4y ago
    Works fine for older videos where the like/dislike count was archived. On new videos, not that much, since it's dependent on data from other users also using the plugin.
skunkworker 4y ago
This becomes dangerous with how-to videos which used to be easy to spot if they weren't very good or fake.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

Normille 4y ago

minitech 4y ago
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/top_of_mind https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/top_of_mind
- Normille 4y ago
  Just because something's in Wiktionary, doesn't mean it's legitimate usage. Mind you, I think I should give up being astounded by what passes for English amongst Americans these days. Only t'other day I got pulled up for dropping my monocle at the word "Eventuated" Talk about "two peoples separated by a common language"!
raverbashing 4y ago
They will probably outsource this to GPT-3 as soon as they are able to

Dwedit 4y ago

Hello U+202E

teddyh 4y ago
!taht potS

lloydatkinson 4y ago

Wow finally. Many well regarded youtubers that have been creating videos for years have been complaining about many of the problems youtube or its staff cause, this impersonation being a pretty big complaint. Took them long enough to fix it.

hgazx 4y ago

I wish all websites would only allow ascii characters as usernames. Having the full spectrum of Unicode available has brought nothing good.

Biganon 4y ago
Same with domain names. I'm a French speaker and I don't care if I have to renounce using accents in domain names. Nobody uses them for good reasons anyway. But it makes attacks so easy, see binance. Terrible, terrible idea.
- teddyh 4y ago
  “People whose names break my system are weird outliers. They should have had solid, acceptable names, like 田中太郎.” — https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
- xdennis 4y ago
  Computer systems should conform to people, not the other way around. If you're terrible at detecting malicious sites, the answer isn't to force English on everyone, it's to write better systems.
  - Biganon 4y ago
    > If you're terrible at detecting malicious sites, the answer isn't to force English on everyone, it's to write better systems Yeah good idea, I'll tell my grandmother it's her fault if "bank.tld" with "CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER A" instead of latin "a", and with a valid HTTPS cert, stole her banking credentials. What an idiot!
xdennis 4y ago
That is such a narrow minded idea. There are 7 billion people who don't speak English. People should be able to write in their own language and use their own names.

gok 4y ago

Damn how is Elon Mušk going to send me that $69420 of bitcoin he promised me in a video comment now?

xdennis 4y ago
Mušk is a real place in Slovenia and a real word in Lithuanian. If anything you should ban "Musk".

JamesSwift 4y ago

I just don't see how there isn't a manual solution that could solve this. I get it, its way easier in the future if the computer can do the work for you, but it seems highly unlikely that the number of channels/users being created daily with "problematic" characters in their names is not within the realm of "manually reviewable".

rep_movsd 4y ago

Elons son gonna have trouble