New top story on Hacker News: YouTube has a spam problem, and it's getting worse

YouTube has a spam problem, and it's getting worse
27 by curiousgeorgio | 14 comments on Hacker News.
I've noticed a ton of crypto scams on YouTube recently, many of which are using the names of legitimate channels (like SpaceX), re-posting content from those channels and promoting scams – usually in the form of "send me [Elon Musk, Jeff Bezoz, etc] BTC, and I'll send you 2x back". It seems reasonable to expect one or two of these to slip through the cracks now and then, but over the past few months, I've had YouTube "recommend" these to me, again and again, multiple times per day. I've often reported them as spam, only to have YouTube recommend the exact same video to me a few minutes later . I don't know anyone who would fall for the scams in the videos, but they've become so common now that it's getting really annoying. You can't tell me that they're too difficult to distinguish from legitimate content. Any human being or half-decent algorithm would be able to catch these with no trouble at all (heck, I could write a couple of regular expressions that would do the trick and have 0 false positives), which leads me to wonder: why is YouTube promoting these videos? At this point, it feels like they must have some incentive not to shut them down, because it would require deliberate effort to have any form of spam control while also somehow letting these through. Am I the only one noticing this?