[luckylion]

> If there is "grind" that is truly not impactful, then why is it being done?

Because it's hard to measure and even harder to predict. E.g. Something that fixes Youtube's scam comment problem where scammers impersonate creators and lure viewers into telegram and whatsapp to scam them.

It won't be working immediately, so someone will have to work on it for a while and iterate against the scammers' countermeasures until it gets too costly for them and most of them give up. Should someone pick it up?

It's not immediately impactful as it won't increase engagement and ads, but it's probably going to prevent a big PR issue when some media company picks up the topic and highlights Google's inaction and their decision to tolerate the scammers and their crimes on their platform.

Fixing it has no direct impact on income, and the problem it mitigates hasn't happened yet, why would anyone work on it? And in the real world we see: they're not working on it (or it's taking them longer than a year, who knows).

[danpalmer]

I think you might underestimate the number of people working on this stuff. There are rarely trade-offs between, as you suggested, working on ad engagement and YouTube scam comments. Both will have teams working on them.

At a very high level you could argue that the number of people being allocated to each may not be right, but it's not that one or the other doesn't have any resources.

From what I've seen, people at Google are very cognizant of these issues, and the only real reason that the public may see progress come and go is that these are hard problems and the work against malicious content is sadly never-ending.

[luckylion]

Thank you for your perspective. It's frustrating from the outside with the lack of progress (or even acknowledgement, really), and it feels like nobody is working on it (or cares). I'm sure they're hard problems, but on the other hand I'm sure Google has lots of smart people, and they have sheer endless resources and own pretty much every part of the user journey and the stack, and the attacks aren't even sophisticated.

Amazon had a similar issue a while back where well-rated seller accounts got hacked (or sold?) and started offering vastly underpriced premium items with text added somewhere to get in contact with the seller, trying to get people off of the platform. But to their credit, they dealt with it pretty swiftly, and I'd consider it a solved problem, I haven't seen it since.