Hacker News Reader

Comment by elmerfud | Hacker News Reader

Looking at this stuff I'm not sure how it's YouTube's responsibility to protect people from their own stupidity. I intentionally chose that word instead of ignorance because sometimes it's useful to educate the ignorant among us so they are no longer ignorant.

Something like this is simply people who are unscrupulous leveraging a communications platform that's position is it is open for people to post their own content. I for one don't want communications platforms, that bill themselves as open places to post content, to police people's speech as a matter of general course. There are exceptions but the general rule should be people should be allowed to communicate even if their communication is pyramid schemes, trying to sell you the Brooklyn bridge, get rich quick schemes, etc....

Some people need to learn the hard lesson and we need to stop bailing them out.

View on HN

If YouTube cannot police or moderate their own platform, then that's a problem they created for themselves.

'Sorry, moderating this content is something we cannot manage' is not an acceptable response, they are a trillion dollar company with access to tools which can be run at scale. Scam prevention is a cost center, which is presumably why they don't care, and that attitude needs regulation (as they'll never change on their own).

> Some people need to learn the hard lesson and we need to stop bailing them out.

I think the same can be said for large tech companies.

> If YouTube cannot police or moderate their own platform, then that's a problem they created for themselves

If we had social consensus that crypto, or at least these sorts of crypto schemes, are a scam, sure. We don't. If YouTube is targeting teens with meth-making ads, that's a problem. This seems more ambiguous.

So youtube can throw their hands up in the air and say 'its legally ambiguous, therefore we'll take their money' and that's okay?

If it pleases the stock market, it’s okay.

>If we had social consensus that crypto, or at least these sorts of crypto schemes, are a scam, sure. We don't.

Per the description in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41920331, "these sorts of crypto schemes" are nakedly fraudulent. We're not talking about a pump-and-dump being achieved by vague allusions. We're talking about too-good-to-be-true representations of arbitrage (i.e. essentially risk-free return resulting from a market inefficiency, which naturally disappears from any market as it's exploited) that are a cover for unauthorized transfer of funds caused by deceptive computer code. I'm pretty sure there's more than enough legal precedent to cover every aspect of that and make an open-and-shut case. (This is not legal advice, of course.)

This is malware, plain and simple. It's not ambiguous.

Would you feel the same way about, for example, Gmail deciding to just drop all its spam-detection heuristics? Ads on Youtube are bad enough already when they're offering legitimate products that Google thinks I want (in reality, I want barely anything beyond the essentials). Even as someone who can easily recognize this sort of scam, it's incredibly obnoxious that I should even be exposed to it.

I'm not the author of parent comment, but yes. Make it optional, make it a separate product, let someone else make and provide this service.

YouTube literally allows trading scams into their ad program, which they force onto users through their terms of service. This is far worse, as naive users may think that YouTube has vetted those ads.

Times are hard, people are desperate. That money is going to bad actors most likely (China/Russia/North Korea hacker sponsored groups). So they are financing those..

What I mean is that it is always the same pattern, I could make a ML model to detect in a few hours... So if YT can't do it, that means they allow it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com