Comment by monkeyelite

8 days ago

Google discovered the only way to ultimately resolve spam is to raise the cost to create it.

For web spam this was HTTPS. For account spam this is phone # 2fa. I think requiring a form of id or payment card is the next step.

10 comments

monkeyelite

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wslh  8 days ago

Twitter, LinkedIn, and others are following the credit card and id (KYC) way but the issue remains when people start automating interactions, not spam per se but it creates a waste of time since users cannot cope with the triggering of zillions of interactions that cannot be followed by human-time.

wiether  8 days ago

So they are going to allow only YT premium subs to post comments?

Because if there's one place where Google didn't solve spam, it's on YT's comments

  • aleph_minus_one  8 days ago

    > Because if there's one place where Google didn't solve spam, it's on YT's comments

    I do believe that this problem is very self-inflicted (and perhaps even desired) by YouTube:

    - The way the comments on YouTube are structured and ordered makes it very hard to make deep discussions on YouTube

    - I think there is also a limit on the comment length on YouTube, which again makes it hard to write longer, sophisticated arguments.

    - Videos for which a lot of comments a generated tend to become promoted by YouTube's algorithm. Thus YouTubers encourage viewers to write lots of comments (thus also a lot of low-quality comments), i.e. YouTube incentivizes that videos are "spammed" with comments. The correct solution would be to incentivize few, but high-quality comments (i.e. de-incentivize comments that contribute nothing valuable (i.e. worth your time to read)). This makes it much easier to detect and remove the (real) spam among them.

eastbound  8 days ago

If you make people pay to comment, content farms will gladly pay.

  • JimDabell  8 days ago

    This doesn’t work in perpetuity. One of the reason why spam is so persistent is that when you ban a spammer, they can just create a new identity and go again. If payment is required then not only do they have to repeatedly pay every time they get banned, they need a new payment card too because you aren’t limited to banning their account – you can ban the payment mechanism they used.

    • intended  8 days ago

      This is only to the point that it’s not profitable to spam further.

      At some point your cost to dissuade spammers becomes a huge risk for humans to make mistakes of any sort.

      At this point users mutiny.

      1 reply →

  • monkeyelite  8 days ago

    Yes… but there will be less spam and it will be more intelligent because the creator must break even.