3 ms·

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.
    - Nextgrid 4y ago
      Spammers contribute to user & engagement numbers and might even drive real engagement behind themselves as (angry) real users respond to them.
- franga2000 4y ago
  Gmail, Twitter, Facebook and Reddit have all but eliminated spam comments, yet they are everywhere on YouTube. Regarding scale: this is the company that scan every second of every video uploaded for copyrighted material, I'm sure their servers could handle a couple of (channel-configurable?) regular expressions per comment. Regarding Scunthorpe: they clearly don't care about false positive flagging when it comes to ContentID and video reporting, so it's definitely not what's stopping them here. And if they suddenly do, they have the resources for human review and appeals like everyone else is doing. Regarding low-hanging fruit: a handful of individuals have done this themselves already and it works great [0]. I think Linus Media Group started using this this on all their channels and the difference has been night and day. [0] https://github.com/ThioJoe/YT-Spammer-Purge https://github.com/ThioJoe/YT-Spammer-Purge
- unionpivo 4y ago
  Sure, it's hard to get around sophisticated operator., but most of the spam on YT that I see is not sophisticated. You wouldn't even need ML, for the majority of them. There is actually OS tool[1] that can do this for individual creators. That tool, finds a lot of spam, that YT itself does not, and it's developed by a single guy. So there definitively is plenty of opportunity to pluck the low hanging fruit. But Goolge has probably 100 of PHD's developing some kind of ML, that ends up performing worse than some simple regexes, because you don't get promoted for simple solutions. [1]: https://github.com/ThioJoe/YT-Spammer-Purge https://github.com/ThioJoe/YT-Spammer-Purge
- Izkata 4y ago
  > Then they learn about the Scunthorpe problem and beyond. I comment pretty regularly on youtube to get random thoughts out of my head about the video I'm watching (I'm under no delusion that someone relevant will see my comment), and all the spam replies I get use unicode numbers in the username to share phone/telegram numbers. Circled numbers [0] are a favorite, though not the only ones they use. The Scunthorpe problem doesn't seem very relevant here. [0] http://xahlee.info/comp/unicode_circled_numbers.html http://xahlee.info/comp/unicode_circled_numbers.html
striking 4y ago
How do you know the low-hanging fruit hasn't already been picked, and that you're not just seeing the tip of the iceberg when you see spam?

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.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    Spammers contribute to user & engagement numbers and might even drive real engagement behind themselves as (angry) real users respond to them.
franga2000 4y ago
Gmail, Twitter, Facebook and Reddit have all but eliminated spam comments, yet they are everywhere on YouTube. Regarding scale: this is the company that scan every second of every video uploaded for copyrighted material, I'm sure their servers could handle a couple of (channel-configurable?) regular expressions per comment. Regarding Scunthorpe: they clearly don't care about false positive flagging when it comes to ContentID and video reporting, so it's definitely not what's stopping them here. And if they suddenly do, they have the resources for human review and appeals like everyone else is doing. Regarding low-hanging fruit: a handful of individuals have done this themselves already and it works great [0]. I think Linus Media Group started using this this on all their channels and the difference has been night and day. [0] https://github.com/ThioJoe/YT-Spammer-Purge https://github.com/ThioJoe/YT-Spammer-Purge
unionpivo 4y ago
Sure, it's hard to get around sophisticated operator., but most of the spam on YT that I see is not sophisticated. You wouldn't even need ML, for the majority of them. There is actually OS tool[1] that can do this for individual creators. That tool, finds a lot of spam, that YT itself does not, and it's developed by a single guy. So there definitively is plenty of opportunity to pluck the low hanging fruit. But Goolge has probably 100 of PHD's developing some kind of ML, that ends up performing worse than some simple regexes, because you don't get promoted for simple solutions. [1]: https://github.com/ThioJoe/YT-Spammer-Purge https://github.com/ThioJoe/YT-Spammer-Purge
Izkata 4y ago
> Then they learn about the Scunthorpe problem and beyond. I comment pretty regularly on youtube to get random thoughts out of my head about the video I'm watching (I'm under no delusion that someone relevant will see my comment), and all the spam replies I get use unicode numbers in the username to share phone/telegram numbers. Circled numbers [0] are a favorite, though not the only ones they use. The Scunthorpe problem doesn't seem very relevant here. [0] http://xahlee.info/comp/unicode_circled_numbers.html http://xahlee.info/comp/unicode_circled_numbers.html

striking 4y ago

How do you know the low-hanging fruit hasn't already been picked, and that you're not just seeing the tip of the iceberg when you see spam?