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I follow a lot of YouTube creators who product genuinely excellent and valuable content. They typically limit their sponsorships to one short segment per long v

I follow a lot of YouTube creators who product genuinely excellent and valuable content. They typically limit their sponsorships to one short segment per long video. At the same time, their video descriptions often contain numerous affiliate links, preceded by a disclosure that the following links are to be used if you’re interested in purchasing one of the products and you want to support the creator. Those links honestly do not bother me at all. I barely even notice them since video descriptions are hidden on YouTube, apart from a few sentences at the top. So how do we make search engines that distinguish legitimate creators like that from spammers who create fake blogs with fake reviews and tons of affiliate links, all using a fancy blog template that makes the site seem trustworthy?

Nextgrid 4y ago
YouTube descriptions started being useless since they became a copy/pasted generic blurb of text (irrelevant to the video at hand) and a dumping ground for various social media or similar links, so no surprise that you aren't bothered by spam links in something that nobody looks at anymore because it's already been spammed to hell. But there was a time when descriptions were all manually written and were an actual summary/overview of what's in the video. > So how do we make search engines that distinguish legitimate creators like that from spammers who create fake blogs with fake reviews and tons of affiliate links, all using a fancy blog template that makes the site seem trustworthy? It's a whole other problem for videos so I'm going to approach this from a website search results point of view: we simply use presence of commercial content as a ranking factor - if the commercial content is all that matches your query then you get it, but if something non-commercial matches your query equally well then it comes first. This encourages non-commercial content without banning commercial content entirely. Ads/marketing/etc are noise, so it would be normal for a search engine designed to serve the user to rank low-noise content above noisy content, right?
deleted 4y ago
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Nextgrid 4y ago

YouTube descriptions started being useless since they became a copy/pasted generic blurb of text (irrelevant to the video at hand) and a dumping ground for various social media or similar links, so no surprise that you aren't bothered by spam links in something that nobody looks at anymore because it's already been spammed to hell. But there was a time when descriptions were all manually written and were an actual summary/overview of what's in the video. > So how do we make search engines that distinguish legitimate creators like that from spammers who create fake blogs with fake reviews and tons of affiliate links, all using a fancy blog template that makes the site seem trustworthy? It's a whole other problem for videos so I'm going to approach this from a website search results point of view: we simply use presence of commercial content as a ranking factor - if the commercial content is all that matches your query then you get it, but if something non-commercial matches your query equally well then it comes first. This encourages non-commercial content without banning commercial content entirely. Ads/marketing/etc are noise, so it would be normal for a search engine designed to serve the user to rank low-noise content above noisy content, right?

deleted 4y ago

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