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Comment by meheleventyone | Hacker News Reader

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.

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There is a community project out there to filter and delete most of the spam and many creators use it. It was developed primarily by one person in their spare time. Google has no excuse.

To be fair, Google has tens of thousands of developers, and so would have a hard time being anywhere near as productive as one person.

^ this might sound like a joke to many, but is hauntingly accurate.

The common view on HN seems to be that google products optimize for promotions, and not even executive or entry level promotions, primarily middle management promotions.

I don’t think it’s entirely true as hopefully the finance department has folks smart enough to realize if headcount is adding negative value or positive value.

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.

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.

> 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.

How does YouTube make money from spam comments?

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.

Spammers contribute to user & engagement numbers and might even drive real engagement behind themselves as (angry) real users respond to them.

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

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

> 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

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?

I wonder if the problem is sheer technological difficulty or if it's similar to antibiotic controls to prevent resistance development.

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