[Zetice]

Maybe I'm a callous bastard, but I genuinely don't get how he feels personally responsible here. It's a YouTube problem, not a M:tG problem or a him problem.

He sounds genuinely distressed, and I feel for him, but I don't get why it causes him pain in this specific way. It's not your fault!

And for what it's worth, it's not really YouTube's "fault" either. Remember, they're victims here too. They didn't invite this, they didn't ask for this, and they're asking for ideas because they don't know themselves what to do.

Computers are sometimes likened to "magic" where we just cast a spell by writing code, and something technically beautiful happens, but where magic can interpret intent and act according to the caster's desire, computers can't, and there's no way to "Wrath of God" the spammers.

I hope this guy can find a way to live with this kind of thing, as I really don't see scammers getting wiped out in any conclusive sense, on YouTube or any platform. It sucks, it's unfair, but it's not realistically possible to deal with conclusively.

[ncallaway]

> Computers are sometimes likened to "magic" where we just cast a spell by writing code, and something technically beautiful happens, but where magic can interpret intent and act according to the caster's desire, computers can't, and there's no way to "Wrath of God" the spammers.

I somewhat agree with this, but I feel like there's some very low-hanging fruit that should be available.

When posting in comments on a video there should be:

- An avatar similarity check. If you have an avatar that is too similar to the channel of the video you're commenting on, your post automatically goes into a moderation queue (or just remove avatars from comments, except from the channel).

- A name similarity check. If you have a name that is too similar to the channel name, your post automatically goes into a moderation queue.

- A huge indication that a comment comes from the channel author. They have some indications of this now, but it should be very prominent, so it's *obvious* when comments don't come from the channel author.

None of these things are going to be trivial to implement for a company like YouTube, but this has been a problem for years at this point. These things could have been done by now.

[jvanderbot]

Formatting author comments to have red background and white text is, like, an intern project.

[haburka]

Abuse is a very difficult problem that Google spends a lot of money and talent on. There’s no silver bullet like avatar/name similarity or other forms of detection because the scammer can trivially iterate until they avoid automated detection.

I think the indicator that a comment comes from the author is pretty noticeable but it could be better. Its a tough trade off to make between UX and fighting abuse.

The reality is that there are criminal groups who spend great resources to scam people online and sometimes they figure out a clever way around enough mitigations so they can completely hose a platform. There’s not a lot a platform can do against this kind of attack except detection and reacting.

I see it as an international crime issue where certain countries are indifferent to americans or even their own citizens being scammed. This is a very different problem if Google could simply pass their info on the scammer over to a competent law enforcement agency. It would be a lot riskier for scammers, and they’d have to put a lot of effort into evading detection. Definitely a pipe dream though.

[danaris]

> There’s no silver bullet like avatar/name similarity or other forms of detection because the scammer can trivially iterate until they avoid automated detection.

That's a cop-out, though.

It's true that they're not going to be able to stop every single scammer, but that doesn't mean they can't raise the barrier to entry enough that a significant percentage of scammers find that it's no longer worth it.

As for the specific measures the GP suggested—those are absolutely things Google has the resources to do. Image and text similarity are things they deal with all the time, and if they can make it effectively impossible (barring occasional random false negatives) for scammers who attempt to impersonate the author using these methods to get through without a human double-checking, that would be a huge blow to their ability to fool people. It's not like if you're clever enough you can, say, have an avatar that shows one thing to the bot-check systems and another thing to users.

[ncallaway]

> There’s no silver bullet like avatar/name similarity or other forms of detection because the scammer can trivially iterate until they avoid automated detection.

I agree that there's no silver bullet, but there need to be a hundred small changes that each increase the amount of work or decrease the scammer conversion rate until their ROI is materially harmed.

Name similarity checks have a few benefits:

- Would be quite easy to implement - Increases the scammers' work which reduces their ROI - Reduces the conversion rate (because instead of a spam message coming from "Tolarian Community Collage" it now comes from "Tulrin Community Collge"; the more the spammer has to iterate on the name, the less believable it becomes)

Bonus points if you add to the moderation queue a "Rejected because this was an impersonation attempt", and now the avatar/name of that commenter goes onto the similarity detection checks for that channel.

[ThunderSizzle]

I agree with you. However, I'd point out a usability issue:

> A huge indication that a comment comes from the channel author.

This pattern requires that users have done something to have seen this before. While many users will see it, the users that are probably falling for this problem probably will not have seen this "huge indication" before, so wouldn't know it exists.

e.g. a user who never checks comments really, but then checks comments one day and sees the scammer might not realize there would be an indicator if it was the video's author.

[ncallaway]

I agree, which is why I would prioritize the other fixes as well. Still, these kinds of things (once broadly learned by the community) can have a significant impact.

Yes, it won't be 100%, but it would reduce the conversion rate of the scammers. That's ultimately the solution. No single measure will ever fix this, and if you wait to implement something until you will solve the entire problem space you'll never get started.

The solution is a hundred different changes that each reduce the scammers' conversion rate by 1-2%.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

There are definitely ways to combat this but I think they're expensive. An avatar comparability check at the scale of YouTube would be immense. Running each comment through some machine learning algo would be immense.

[ncallaway]

> An avatar comparability check at the scale of YouTube would be immense.

I don't think it has to be. For each user you should already have the hash data computed (using something like imagehash this works out to a hash of 8 bytes per image, though you can obviously tune this up depending on storage/performance requirements).

Each time a comment is posted, you would do a distance measure between the commenter's avatar hash and the channel avatar hash. Mixed in with the network latency and DB I/O operations, I think this additional read/write that only needs to occur when a comment is posted could be done with a pretty minimal additional compute overhead.

That said, if Google doesn't have the compute overhead to do it, I gave an alternative. Simply don't display avatars from commenters other than the channel author.

[swatcoder]

> And for what it's worth, it's not really YouTube's "fault" either. Remember, they're victims here too. They didn't invite this, they didn't ask for this

“Let’s see if we can host all the world’s video content and all its commentary only using automated tools!”

That was the idea behind the social media boom and it was a foolhardy one. The moderation problems that social media platforms are having now are 100% of their own invitation. They just managed to hold them off for a while.

[s1artibartfast]

He isn't the one causing the harm, but people are being harmed that would not if his business did not exist- it seems like this weighs on him.

If every time you had a party, one of your guests would be hit by lightning and die, you might feel guilty about hosting parties. Would you feel comfortable inviting your friends and family over?

[prepend]

> He sounds genuinely distressed, and I feel for him, but I don't get why it causes him pain in this specific way. It's not your fault!

I’m familiar with this personality and his brand is being distressed about many other things. I think he’s just expressing feelings for his audience or something. He’s also apologized for lots of other things that aren’t his fault- rude magic fans, sexists, racists, people who spend too much money, people who don’t spend enough, etc.

He tends to spend a lot of time apologizing for things that aren’t his fault or that he has no control over. It’s not unique to him, and seems kind of common. I’m not sure what to call these over-empathizers.

[dbg31415]

> Maybe I'm a callous bastard...

He is upset that his posts are acting like bait, that his likeness is getting used to scam people who wanted nothing more than to connect with someone they admire.

For a lot of people, it would be impossible not to take this personally.

[debacle]

His brand is being damaged by this. For anyone who has never had a brand with value, I could see why that seems dumb, but for some people brand becomes everything.

[krisoft]

> Maybe I'm a callous bastard, but I genuinely don't get how he feels personally responsible here.

The bit where it gets complicated is that the scammers are using his name and likeness. The way these scams work is by convincing people that the youtuber in question wants to connect with them and then they steal money from them.

How would you feel if I would go around on HN tell people that I'm Zetice and steal money from them? How would you feel if the way you would hear about this is by confused people messaging you and demanding very angrily that you pay them back? You Zetice worked hard to be a person with integrity, and someone is squandering away your accumulated goodwill, hurting the very people who look up to you and you can't do anything about that.

I think I would feel terrible, and I would try to use my platform to shine a light to this problem. Worst case a few of my followers would wisen up and develop resistance to this kind of scam. Best case some manager at youtube shovels more money into solving the problem.

[ALittleLight]

Imagine talking with multiple people who think you scammed them. Someone with your name (almost) and avatar picture convinced them to send a hundred dollars for a PlayStation, and they only did so because they believed it was you. A month goes by and the PlayStation didn't show up - now they're trying to contact you to figure out what happened.

I think the creator has clearly spent a lot of time and effort building his community, and he is witnessing members of that community being hurt, but also his reputation is being directly attacked by the scammers to hurt his image with the very people of his community.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> Maybe I'm a callous bastard, but I genuinely don't get how he feels personally responsible here.

Probably because he's not a callous bastard.

Don't worry, I'm not saying you're one, either. I suspect you just don't have his responsibilities. Like, hundreds of people who somehow hold you up in great esteem because of the stuff you create. That's a heavy burden and most people who aren't assholes will take it seriously.

Guy just shot up in my esteem five hundred levels.

(yeah yeah, I know M:tG doesn't have levels... :P)

[xracy]

He doesn't feel personally "responsible". He is emotionally invested in his followers well-being. Which is something that comes through in a lot of his videos. He wants the best for the people that follow him, and so he feels like he's failing in his inability to help them on this. Which is why he's also pleading Youtube (that should absolutely be staying abridged of this race).

[_ph_]

If you have any kind of venue, lets say a restaurant or a shop, you don't want your customers be targetted by any kind of illicit activity even if it is not on your grounds, e.g. in front of your store. Even less you want anyone use your identity in committing fraud. It would't matter if you are not in any direct reponsibility for that. So I can very much understand his concerns.

[platz]

Maybe you are—people are taking advantage of his reputation and brand and harming his viewers.

If you insist on seeing it through a lens of self-interested sociopathy, he could loose his most ardent fans & contributors and suffer damage to his brand and/or reputation, via bad interactions with those scammers.

[etchalon]

Empathy and concern for people isn't a novel concept.