Addendum comment! If you're about to comment with "who would be foolish enough to fall for these scams?" STOP! What you're doing is judgemental and I'm not here for it. The reason scammers do this is because it works, even if it's a small percentage of the time. If you can't have compassion for the innocent folks getting scammed out of money, then I don't want your engagement on this video. Second, beyond "compassion for other human beings", a good reason to want RU-vid to do something about these scams is that they make the comments feel horrible, both as a user and moderator. If they want to *keep* engagement, they should do something. Third, I don't accept that RU-vid just won't solve the problem because "they're a big company". Am I skeptical? Sure. But my skepticism doesn't mean I can't imagine they'll make a change if it'll increase their profits. If genuine human engagement drops due to this problem running unchecked, I can imagine some conversations will happen around it. The least we can do is raise awareness.
Advanced comment filter idea is good, but they could have a weighted probability or words/combos and you could set a threshold above which to auto ban.
I am also a RU-vidr...I also hate scam and spam. And I hate scamming and spamming someone. And I would not spam and scam someone. Those are scammers are from China or India. That is why I also held some of my comment for review. So we RU-vidr should help each other to make RU-vid the best place for us user to hang on to... Let's do our part to stop the scammers and spammers from destroying those RU-vid channels by scamming and spamming.
100% agree!! Sadly Google doesn't seem to be interested in the QUALITY of their users' interactions on the platform, but rather the QUANTITY. Whether its clickbait, polarizing, negative, toxic etc or otherwise doesn't matter to them, so long as people are clicking/watching.
Unfortunately, scammers artificially increase RU-vid's engagement metrics (and so their estimated ad revenue), so it's not in their best interest to get rid of them.
You hit the nail right on the head. Given Google's image recognition capabilities, there's no reason they couldn't auto block a comment using your avatar. And using their natural language processing skills they could clearly have much better comment filters. (As much as I love regex, that would be hard for most creators!)
Glad you mentioned thiojoe's 3rd party tool, but I 100% agree that these tools would be trivial for RU-vid themselves to implement and it's sad that they haven't!
Desperately trying to prevent myself from writing a comment that would just be a Telegram about much a new Veronica says video feels like winning free money... Just me? Thanks for the content Veronica, sorry it's such a hassle to deal with the related crud.
Many times, I've seen fake SpaceX videos recommended on the RU-vid home screen. The name is "Space X" (with an extra space) or sometimes is actually looks like SpaceX but doesn't have the check mark. When I see it, I report it. When I get scam replies to my comments, I report those too. Thanks for making this video.
Bot threads are a big issue too. Those are accounts that look real but aren’t and it usually is kicked off (original comment) with the bot referring to someone or something that helped them make a lot of money or was good “financial” advice and then 30 unique bot replies of seemingly “real” accounts saying the same thing in different ways. You find those on financial channels more often than any other for obvious reasons. And sadly, I’ve seen people reply in those threads that obviously aren’t bots and are asking the bot commenters what their talking about and what their comment has to do with the video, but at the same time don’t realize their participating in a bot thread.
Agreed. It’s frustrating that things like this get ignored by tech companies. I do realize that they have plenty of other things going on but this is truly something that can’t be ignored.
Very well said. It's a no-brainer from a creator and viewer perspective. I did engage one scammer, until it quickly became obvious what they were doing. There are many things which social media could do, and I have also wondered why they would remove the dislike button. We need that feature on all social media/content provider platforms.
Old Network/System Admin here.... I think it's past time for RU-vid to not-allow anonymous accounts. It's time to bring the scammers and trolls into the light! LOL! I like the Avatar Check idea. It should definitely be put into practice when users setup/modify their accounts. I also think its time for RU-vid to setup a User Level System. This system would grant privileges over time depending on the user's actions. For example.... New Users can't make more than 100 comments a day, not allowed to post links or use certain words. If after 3 months no-one reports them, their privileges get boosted.
I've seen this before, but I didn't know it was an extended problem (I don't usually comment on videos, so that in a sense is a hard filter). It's an interesting topic to reflect on, so thank you for the video
Imagine those scam actors to be the Google’s side hustle. Also I believe they intentionally made it very hard to find where is the report button for [scam] ads, so “you can’t just” do the right thing. All means are good for a bit (“billions” misspelled) of extra profit 😒
this is what blockchains should/could be used for. providing message integrity from originating users to their end recipient that can not be changed or altered.. "don't take financial advice from comments" -this is known & is amazing that anybody watching your videos should have to be told.
I know what you are saying. I get a lot youtube replies 'that I have a prize waiting for me' on some instagram account. I just ignore them. It is not a good situation for sure.
Great video! I wonder if the scammer issue is related to the youtube search issue in that youtube search doesn't let you use symbols to exclude search queries? By that I mean that maybe youtube doesn't have a proper search in place and thus can't easily search comments and such? Which is hopefully not the case but the fact that their search seems to be often broken makes me lean in that direction. On an unrelated note, do you have a T568A t-shirt as well?
Good question about the search- that'd be interesting to learn about from Google directly. Not sure if that would stop them from implementing something like regex search on the user side though (AFAIK third party tools can get pretty thorough results using the API). As far as the T568A shirt- I'm tempted to make one. I was also thinking of doing a crossover shirt with both sides. :P
Thank You Veronica, RU-vid can and should smarten up their game and deal with the scammers...or are they just complicit with them? BTW love all your content
I agree 100%, except for Wikipedia... I am bilingual and it happens often definitions vary widely, to the point of one of them has to be wrong, at least partially. For one, many post links to non https sites, where they can easily implant malware on our devices. That would be very easy to fix/filter for youtube. Anyhow, set your browser to "https mode only" in your browser security/privacy settings.
Couldn't they bypass keyword regex via unicode lookalikes? I realize that you can create a lookalike-table, but it's probably going to be a case of playing whack-a-mole? Right?
Yup! But that's where shared regex lists come in. We employ the same principle for blocklisting bad domains in sysadmin world now, seems like we could collaborate on it on the "creator" level. It's always whack-a-mole, but giving us better tools to whack the moles- that's the fix IMO!
Sometimes these scammers will respond to a pinned or ♥comments and they have this whole chain of bot comments responding to try and make it look legit. It's annoying when you just leave a comment and because people liked it it's now a target for spam, which spams your alerts. YT/Google need to do something about it because you're right there is no technical reason for that tooling not to be in place. Also regex comment filtering is a brilliant idea.
If only youtube implemented gnupg support in their comments, then people could be sure that the commenter is the channel owner..... ha ha ha ha.... I laugh till I cry. I kinda wish people would go back to using e-mail, IRC and USENET. (cries in Gen-X midwestern voice). Keep up your advocacy and very informative videos. Linux is Awesome, and so are you.
removing dislikes opened up an opportunity for people to fall for scams because before scam videos would have a ton of dislikes ad now you can no longer see all the dislikes, only the likes. Not to mention all the blatant scams or even malware they allow people to advertise on their platforms, its safe to assume they don't care
It's an ongoing battle where the scammers are always going to come up with another method or another way to bypass filters and checks. That's not to say that RU-vid shouldn't always be making it harder and harder to do it. I work for a large adult tube site and we are constantly tweaking things to reduce comment spam and scams.
Not much to add here but I like to talk so... ;-) I report on average maybe 5-6 per week of these scams. So, it's not just a load of work for the content creator, but those of us who work to keep it cleaned up also. Your ideas are a lot of what I was thinking - content matching, behavioral patterns and such would go a long way to cleaning it up. IMO RU-vid doesn't do anything lately that doesn't directly impact revenue or have legal issues. Quality of life tools are thin on the floor.
when I see one of these I click on the link check the (about) and when I see that the Chanel is only one day old I then report it as a scam or phishing site. I also contact the IPs that I get robo calls from and let them know that if I keep getting them I will report them to the fed's that licence them.
I don't think automatically blocking channels with the same profile picture would work. Scammers would find a way around it by mirroring the image, changing some pixels, or applying a color filter. There's also a bunch of legitimate reasons to have duplicate channel images. I have multiple channels for instance and never bothered to change their pictures. There's also the case of young fans of youtubers who set their profile picture to their favourite youtuber. More controls for creators sounds useful, though care will have to be taken when implenting wildcards or even regex, since the vast majority of users have no idea what a regex even is.
I don’t think it should be a “*block* everyone with my profile picture”, it should be “if someone is using my profile picture, or something close to it, hold the comment for review”. Sending it to a review hold would have stopped 90% of the scammers on my last video.
@@VeronicaExplains Ah yes that could work, I guess it could also just be a bunch of factors that add up to a single 'scammyness score'. I can't say I'm particularly fond of Googles mysterious black boxes, but I guess that's kind of inevitable if you don't want scammers to find ways to work around your filters.
The thing I've been seeing recently at an alarming rate is sex bots copying comments made by real people and getting hundreds or even thousands of likes
Yeah, moderation tools and regex-based filtering should be built in, all of this stuff should be like, table stakes and yet and yet and yet here we are
Automatic filtering won't work (too easy to subvert). It costs serious money to have the moderating people on payroll (especially in smaller language areas) and obviously the scams aren't visible on their bottom line. They will push for 10USD verified accounts in a few weeks, though.
I'm not sure RU-vid cares though. As long as money comes rolling in, they're happy. I mean, they COULD do something about content farms that just post meme-like non-content and repost it on multiple channels, but those videos bring in lots of ad revenue, so they obviously won't. RU-vid is a money printer for Google, not a platform focused on real creators. Unfortunately :(
You didn't mention the most obvious action. Make it less of a breeze to make fake account. But i guess that would expose their real engagement numbers.
You can tell Veronica is from Minnesota because she wears finger gloves *all* *the* *time* - Brrr... it's really cold there! 4:15 - no, not Meatloaf again!
Awesome video Veronica. I only have 50 subs and have not had this issue yet but I have seen it a lot on other YTubers channels. If you don't mind, I would like to make a video and link to and use your video. If that is ok. I tried to get you on the Communicator on your desk, I guess were our of range... 🤣 LLAP 🖖
What's the deal with Bitchute and Odysee and other RU-vid competitors? Sometimes it seems like they're deliberately sabotaging themselves to make Ewetube look better.
By watching this video and reading this comment, you are a winner! You won a prize from Veronica. That prize is a video. Click play on all of Veronica's videos to be an even bigger winner! You may have already won, which makes you almost as much of a winner as Veronica. Seriously... She's a Cobol programmer. That screams "winner" louder than any prize anyone won. But I still think Veronica's viewers should be called "Prize Winners". (Prize winners should watch another video.) Will this get banned, blocked, or shadowed? I don't know. Probably. Worth it for my own chuckle.
I'm extremely smaller than you as a channel and I've had these scammers pop up in my channel to. I don't know if I've ever publicly said it in my videos, BUT I WILL NEVER TRY TO SCAM YOU OR MESSAGE YOU ON WHATSAPP OR CONTACT YOU ON ANYTHING OTHER THAN THEN MY OFFICIAL SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS AND ONLY AFTER YOU CONTACT ME FIRST (I'm going to add that to every video description form here on out). But Google can and should make these changes to RU-vid so that we can better control our comment section!
Hello, thank you for your videos and sorry to learn that you too suffer from this pleague. Some youtubers systematically place an initial comment on all their videos Remembering that they don't scam. This may be a useful caution for you too
Yup, I'm imagining I'm going to have to start doing some kind of disclaimer. My Debian video got hit by this quite a bit and it was really disheartening.
Another annoying comment spam, that is showing a lot on popular channels is where one person comments how they have made money trading with such and such a person and there are about 20 different spam comments saying how they also made them money. I always make a point to comment that they lost all my money and scammed me but it is a battle I cannot win and needs to be done algorithmically by some AI spam buster.
@@VeronicaExplains _"dislike button was about dislike bombing"_ That's the official explanation. Reality is that it was embarrassing for mainstream sources of information (large corporations with mega advertising budgets) to have on their content a constant reminder of exactly how unpopular their fare was with the general public.
@@VeronicaExplains It's probably worth noting that RU-vid's own "Rewind" videos for 2018 and 2019 are both on Wikipedia's list of most disliked videos of all time.
I disagree- I think the scams do harm the advertisers. If humans aren't engaging with the platform (due to scammers scaring them out of the comments) there'll be fewer folks watching video after video. And that hurts the advertisers. There's also negative association. If RU-vid increasingly becomes "that place with all of the fintech/crypto/phishing scammers", advertisers will look to avoid that association. Putting a stop to it with simple tools is good advertiser retention strategy IMO.
@@VeronicaExplains I agree! Sadly, as far as I can retell YT usually only acts after they hear complains from the advertisers themselves. Ironically most ads I get from RU-vid are actual scams. Fake-Mr Beast-give-aways or get-rich-quick-gurus are the most common for me.
RU-vid only gets more shit, on purpose. Why would they fix this? I watch as many channels as I can on other platforms and I hope more creators continue to upload elsewhere.
I am going to take it to my creator for the channel I am a admin on. I know he will sign up to the no spam promise. BTW , above your C64 is that an Amiga 500 or a C128?
@@VeronicaExplains I just lost serious nerd points , didn't I. Btw the RU-vidr I am going to tell is Shawn Powers. He is a great guy, I'm sure he will sign. Is it ok if I tell other RU-vid creator friends?
At this point if you need to be told you shouldn't take financial advice or give your banking info to randos in the comments .... you probably shouldn't be touching a computer until a bit more competent/savy. There's a TON of scams out there. The internet is built around them. If you are not comfortable with spotting the basics you should first do some learning and avoid such scenarios.
