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Re:Tell HN: YouTube is banning accounts that support Ukraine by TheKarateKid on Friday February 25, 2022 @12:26PM (#30469681)
I don't believe this argument for a second. Google almost single-handedly solved the problem of email spam a decade ago. And yet, robot accounts are a problem?

For the company that loves encouraging obnoxious Captcha's to self-fund their AI/ML research and data harvest the web, they surely don't seem to like using it on their own platforms.

Re:Tell HN: YouTube is banning accounts that support Ukraine by ChrisLomont on Friday February 25, 2022 @01:16PM (#30470308)
>Google almost single-handedly solved the problem of email spam a decade ago

Google still has to routinely invent new techniques to stop spam. This problem is not solved - it's an ongoing arms race.

It is also a vastly easier problem - spam filters at google scale work because they see the same spam across zillions of accounts. This is not the case for youtube, where a spammer provides them with far fewer samples, and those are across a much wider space.

These problems are barely related.

Re:Tell HN: YouTube is banning accounts that support Ukraine by Tijdreiziger on Friday February 25, 2022 @01:22PM (#30470390)
Recently, comment sections of popular YT videos are littered with bots spamming links accompanied by phrases like 'hot girls' and '18+ only'. They're everywhere, and this really doesn't strike me as an inherently hard problem to solve.

(In fact, I wonder who these spammers are targeting. Surely the average YT user is smart enough to recognize blatant spam?)

Re:Tell HN: YouTube is banning accounts that support Ukraine by mrguyorama on Friday February 25, 2022 @02:31PM (#30471246)
Check this video by linus tech tips https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zo_uoFI1WXM

Some random dude built an anti youtube comment spam tool. Youtube could absolutely fix this problem, they just don't care

Re:Tell HN: YouTube is banning accounts that support Ukraine by c-cube on Friday February 25, 2022 @01:36PM (#30470549)
Google single-handledly solved the problem of how to send legitimate emails from other providers into the spam box. In effect, non gmail emails are second class.
Re:Tell HN: YouTube is banning accounts that support Ukraine by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK on Friday February 25, 2022 @01:55PM (#30470756)
Yup, they nailed it! Where before I had to check one Inbox folder, I now need to check two - Inbox and Spam. Because half of legit emails end up in spam now. And no, I am not researching internet daily about manhood enlargement.
Re:Tell HN: YouTube is banning accounts that support Ukraine by labster on Friday February 25, 2022 @06:06PM (#30473466)
With a score of 13.7, the parent comment has been automatically flagged as spam.

    5.7 - restricted terms
    8.0 - username looks like base64
Maximum score is 10.0
Re:Tell HN: YouTube is banning accounts that support Ukraine by marcosdumay on Friday February 25, 2022 @02:15PM (#30470997)
You mean they decided to use advanced spam filters that were already used by small sites before other large sites decided to care about the problem? On some cases, a couple of weeks before.

Gmail has the worst spam filter of any email provider I use today, excluding the one email server I have running on my domain that gets almost no email and has no filter. Or, well, spam filtering is a lesser problem on my server too because it doesn't block nearly all the email that I care about.

Re:Tell HN: YouTube is banning accounts that support Ukraine by andrewflnr on Friday February 25, 2022 @12:34PM (#30469768)
Google's spam blocking is showing cracks, too.
Re:Tell HN: YouTube is banning accounts that support Ukraine by boring_twenties on Friday February 25, 2022 @02:24PM (#30471105)
I am unsure how to take the assertion that Google has "solved" spam.

80-90% of the emails in my "Spam" folder are not spam.

It's worse than no filtering at all, since I still get exposed to the spam, but now I have to check two inboxes instead of just one, and then jump through annoying hoops to view images or access links in the second one.

Re:Tell HN: YouTube is banning accounts that support Ukraine by 1_player on Saturday February 26, 2022 @05:14AM (#30476493)
On my Fastmail I have the opposite problem. Spam gets filtered correctly, but 90% of the spam I receive is from gmail.com accounts.
Re:Tell HN: YouTube is banning accounts that support Ukraine by kaba0 on Friday February 25, 2022 @01:47PM (#30470663)
Just an anecdote but quite recently it seems to be much less reliable at catching spam.