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by vdaniuk 4590 days ago
Slashdot providing Google with algos to detect spam? Thats adorable. I respect slashdot but claiming that they may have better NLP algorithms than Google is absolutely unbelievable.
2 comments

> claiming that they may have better NLP algorithms than Google is absolutely unbelievable.

That's why I did not make that claim. The NLP talent at Google is likely better than that at any other company or university. My claim is that their expertise is not used for filtering Youtube comments.

Care to provide ANY facts beyond anecdotes that their expertise is not used for filtering Youtube comments?

BTW you did make a claim that Slashdot would give filters to Google so there is that.

Sure, I found some examples in this very comment thread! These show that filtering is effectively not being done. And it's not anecdotes based on single/rare comments.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6748803

All these examples are anecdotal evidence provided by a biased party.
I've seen that same spam, and I rarely look at youtube comments. Unless I'm extremely lucky to have seen the exact same comments, this is a widespread problem and proves that even trivial filtering is not being used to block rampant spam.
So, more anecdotal evidence. If you really trying to say that your personal experience and experience of few other people proves that even trivial filtering is not being used, my arguments won't change anything, you already know everything, it seems.
Apparently said "expertise" failed to tag 80 or so repetitions of the word "Nigger" as spam. Color me not impressed -- an undergrad could do better.
Reducing spam isn't just about having a better algorithm (short of strong AI, and even then two people can reasonably come to a disagreement about whether something is spam or not). It helps a lot to have the co-operation of the users. Something YouTube used to have, but doesn't anymore.

You have been arguing that pissing off the user base doesn't matter, but there is a real cost. Fighting your users means things like people not reporting spam anymore, or deliberately misreporting things that aren't spam.

You have zero proof that this all matters to any significant portion of the userbase. And I was arguing that pissing off the small part of the user base that wasn't happy with Google in the first place doesn't matter. And I stand by my argument. The majority wont care and will enjoy seeing relevant comments from their G+ friends under YT videos.