[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.