Use of special characters in usernames on YouTube has been limited
support.google.com
support.google.com
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.
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.
Searching "lego stop motion" I get a non-checkmark channel in the 4th result: 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.
I believe he was referring to politics-linked searched on YouTube.
> 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.
YouTube's solution consists of two things: upranking an entire class of videos/channels (mainstream media channels) and additionally deranking other channels/videos (I've had the experience of looking up a politician by full name and never finding his high-views Youtube channel unless I click Filters -> Channel). All of that, with zero transparency (giving us the lists of all artificially-reranked channels, and the new rank weights) nor government or at least independent oversight. At Google's scale, when they promote certain views over others, that poses problems of interference with elections and with the public mind (see Manufacturing Consent). The political-interference problem existed before (when the rabbit-hole effect ended up promoting Stefan Molyneux), but has simply been inverted in the other direction, basically promoting US ideological interests.
What YouTube is doing violates Popper's 'open society' principles.
Nothing but respect for the engineers at Youtube working on fighting back against it. Seems like a very difficult classification problem.
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.
* 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.
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.
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.
I'll explain too; Money. YouTube make money from the spam accounts, As twitter does, Reddit too. Spam is a very profitable market.
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.
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.
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.
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
Incidentally LTT just commented on the announced changes and rants about the prior situation at 15:20, for some insight from a Creator's perspective.
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.
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.
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.
something Minsky vision something (I know it's an urban legend but still, it figures.)
I'm betting it's probably not hard the spammers and scammers to switch templates if old ones get caught.
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.
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.
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.
How would one write an ideographic language 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.
Because of course this band from "part of the world" has the same name as "other band from a different part of the world" or even from the same country and they have nothing to do with each other (because why google before naming your band - but I digress)
Every spamfilter I've ever used that's worth a damn does that. Sometimes you get slightly odd syntax (I once configured one that replaces A with a 4 so it could detect common fake uses), but this is a solvable issue.
and use the secure subset of UTS 31.
you can eg use my libu8ident, and please dont use the broken confusables list.
The majority of the above sentence is not valid Latin characters for example.
>Mole is too close to Moie, please select another user name. Your bank account has already been charged.
for i in users:
for j in users:
if same_as(i,j):
reject(i)
else:
accept(i)
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...
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¥").
How reliable is this?
— https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
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!
To be fair to the person a lot of people open things in a tab and look at them later.
This is a pretty serious misfeature, IMO. But it is what it is.