Ask HN: Why isn't YouTube taking action against Roel Van de Paar? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why isn't YouTube taking action against Roel Van de Paar?

8 pointsKomoD5 comments

Some context: Roel Van de Paar is a YouTube user who has been spamming the platform with videos for years. His channel has over 2 million videos, all of which are low-quality clips that are designed to appear in search results for technical terms, essentially just taking Stack Overflow questions and answers, all the videos start with the same pre-recorded clip of him talking for a bit and then it transitions into just the question text, and then to each answer.

Here's an example video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wyyzi6l7n1U

His spamming has had a negative impact on YouTube and it's search function.

So my question is then, why hasn't YouTube taken any action against him or his channel?

YouTube will generally demonetise low effort content. But the bar is very very low. He talks to camera, has a script etc. He’s already a step above most video producers.

Demonetisation is the worst that YouTube will do to a channel - no money = no incentive to post.

But they very rarely ban a channel from posting.

Also, the people who review channels are just human. They can be arbitrary, random and unfair.

At the end of the day, if no one watches his videos then they won’t show up in the search results.

> He talks to camera, has a script etc. He’s already a step above most video producers.

No, it's the same video clip every time, and then just text on a white background showing the question and answer, ripped straight from Stack(Overflow)

> negative impact on YouTube and it's search function.

Maybe, but no rules are broken, so no reason to act.

How is it not? It's technically spam right?

How is it spam? While not a high quality video, it is a video (which is YouTube’s medium) that supplies the answer the video purports to offer. And it’s not riddled with any advertising, or otherwise superfluous components.

If it’s not valuable, it should get down ranked by its lack of value. But that’s not happening.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com