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Comment by thamer | Hacker News Reader

> We change the product constantly — we’re talking over 1,700 updates per year!

Good job, the new red is a huge improvement.

Meanwhile the YouTube comment sections are still getting pummeled by bots, trying to scam viewers with fake crypto offerings (90%+ involving an "Elon Musk giveaway") or writing entire threads praising the great investment returns from a genius trader named "Mr Definitely A. RealName" who operates only on WhatsApp.

Take a look at the comments under this video for example, all the references to AMZ6OP are for a scam crypto token that they pretend is being launched by Amazon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRd_wNHJG4o.

I'm having doubts even reposting this link… please do not believe for a second that any of these claims are real.

I guess changing red to red-ish magenta was apparently more important than addressing the widespread issues that have been plaguing YouTube for years.

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>I guess changing red to red-ish magenta was apparently more important than addressing the widespread issues that have been plaguing YouTube for years.

I have a suspicion that the color and design folks are not the same people in charge of comment section spam/bots.

Google laid off over 1000 people (100 in YT) last year. So at some point they did make a conscious decision that the 6 people making the red slightly more purple were more important than 1000 other roles.

Were those 100 people working in anti-spam/bot detection?

Apparently most were working on content creator relations, a lack of which is probably #1 in "widespread issues that have been plaguing YouTube for years" if you surveyed the people who make platform what it is. You also can't convince me 0 out of 1000 google employees are capable of taking on a spam prevention role. On a long enough time scale headcount is fungible.

>You also can't convince me 0 out of 1000 google employees are capable of taking on a spam prevention role.

Similarly, you can't convince me that laying off 6 people would make any difference (let alone solve) any of the spam, bot, or content creator relations issues. So I guess we're at an impasse.

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRd_wNHJG4o

It's somehow substantially less surprising to me that a video deep dive on cryptocurrency has these comments. Youtube should address it, but to a degree it's very much expected/comes with the territory.

I don't follow cryptocurrency on YouTube (and in fact I made sure to "not interested" the link you posted, no offense). Anyway, I don't follow crypto and as such haven't had the issue you described.

YouTube comments have been and always will be a cesspool. You should consider yourself luck that they actually improved quite a lot (at least in terms of toxicity and "stupidity") when the thumbs down button was nerfed.

Seems off topic. Do you actually think these designers have anything to do with spam detection?

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