Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 375 posts

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#291

Post by michaelteter »

There's one ad that sounds like Donald Trump (it's an AI voice gen) promoting Donald Trump gold bars. It's not a short ad; I've seen it several times, so one of the times I recorded it. At the end, there's a brief display which says:

"Disclaimer. This ad and it's entirety is independent and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Donald Trump or any political party associated with him. The content and views expressed on this ad are solely those of the website owner and contributors, and they do not represent the opinions or official positions of Donald Trump or his party. Any references to individuals, organizations, or political figures are used for informational purposes only and do not imply endorsement or association. This ad also has no affiliation with Donald Trump and his party in any way. Additionally, this ad is not endorsed by Donald Trump and his party in any capacity. Lastly, the audio used in this ad was computer generated. Thank you and enjoy!"

The link goes to "Free Trump Gold -> wewillbegreatagain dot co". I didn't bother clicking the link, but I searched and found that this scam ad has been in existence for over a year.

I'm no lawyer, but I would be really surprised if this obvious attempt to ride on someone's name/(in)fame was legal. Surely Trump could sue this person for what they are doing. Surely normal people have flagged this ad to YouTube, but it's still up.

When searching for details about this particular ad, I read about general frustation people have with the vast number of scam ads on Truth Social. But that's a whole other topic...

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#292

Post by crowcroft »

kidsil wrote: post #199

It's striking how history repeats itself. Just like TV and newspapers eventually faced regulations to prevent scam ads, the internet has been in a similar bind for at least a decade. The principles of law should extend to all mediums, yet it seems we're at a stalemate with federal regulations adapting to the digital age. This should've been handled back in 2012.

It baffles me how often behaviour that any 'traditional' media company would get slapped down for is just common practice in 'digital' media.

'Digital' isn't new anymore, but somehow it avoids growing up.

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#293

Post by bluGill »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #235
TremendousJudge wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPs argument is the opposite of this: it's not about the scammers, but about the legit brands. The same way Pepsi doesn't want to get their ads shown over somebody discussing STDs or something of the sort, they probably also don't want to get their ads shown next to scams, since it makes the product kinda seem like a scam by association.

It also increases the cost of the ad, though, by introducing more buyer competition for the available slot. And a higher cost per available slot is good for the seller AND for the middlemen involved in the transaction.

Does it increase the cost of the ad? Or does it decrease the cost of ads because the larger number of legitimate products don't want to be there and so are not buying ads at all.

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#294

Post by bluGill »

staunton wrote: post #213
bluGill wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is incentive, but they don't realize it. I know that online ads are often enough scams, so I won't buy anything from those ads. I do have to take effort to ensure that they don't effect me anyway (hint from basic psychology: they do, but I can make that effect less). If they did some work to ensure ads were not scams - I've seen ads for a number of interesting things that I intentionally did not buy because odd…

Most people believe they themselves cannot be influenced by ads "at all". If they were right, nobody would bother making ads.

which is why I said I take steps to avoid the influence, but not that I'm not influenced.

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#295

Post by michaelteter »

verdverm wrote: post #126
JanneVee wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So basically I'm supposed to pay protection money? Yeah, I don't give into extortion...

You can see it as extortion or... Paying for a product instead of being the product. Huge quality of life improvement. How is it different from paying for Netflix and similar?

The difference here is that the ads are not just neutral revenue generators, but they are actively harmful revenue generators.

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#296

Post by youcantcook »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #264
sonicanatidae wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't call sarcasm normalization of shitty practices, but ok.

Sarcasm is just a way of phrasing things. Sarcastic comments can make almost all the same arguments that non-sarcastic comments can. If sarcasm makes fun of not expecting something, then it's normalizing that thing.

[dead]

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#298

Post by TheCaptain4815 »

IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #82
GaryNumanVevo wrote: post #64

Twitter actually has some of the best ad oversight, almost entirely by accident too. Community Notes (formerly Birdwatch) lets users flag tweets that are misleading. Since Ads on Twitter are just normal tweets, they can be fact checked. Twitter's average ad quality has plummeted recently, but most of the scam ads I see have a massive user-added disclaimer outlining how it's a scam. I wonder how this affects the click…

I've been thinking about this for a while. I've seen many of these community notes - how exactly do these work ? Is a community note borne out of "most upvoted" replies to a particular tweet ? If so, how does it go from a simple upvoted reply, to a "community note" ?

If twitter survives, community notes could usher in a golden era of truth on the internet imo. On a recent podcast w/ lex friedman, Elon explained how Community Notes works and it's pretty ingenious.

In short, from what I understand, each community notes contributor is vector mapped based on their biases/contributions. Now, the only way for a community note to appear is for contributors who typically disagree with each other (based on their vector mapping) to both sign off on that note. I'd imagine in the future (or maybe it's enabled now), these contributors would be "power ranked" so a newbie contributor couldn't community note a member of congress or something.

As Elon said, this will lead to hoardes of people leaving twitter because they cannot handle community notes.

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#299

Post by JanneVee »

caskstrength wrote: post #258
JanneVee wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So basically I'm supposed to pay protection money? Yeah, I don't give into extortion...

You are not a shopkeeper being extorted for protection money, you are a (unwelcome) shop customer demanding things you don't want to pay for while being free to go to another place.

You haven't followed my argument, so I'll break it down for you. There are ads on YouTube that prey on vulnerable people as per the original post. I came with a small clip in a larger video that YouTube has these categorized so creators can opt-out of these most likely predatory ads. And on that I had an anecdote of my elderly father having ones these predatory ads presented to him, after he was asked a while ago to turn off ad-blocking by YouTube. I'm not the shop customer here, my elderly father is which he has done what was asked of him. I'm simply unwilling to pay for a service so I can opt-out predatory ads on behalf of my father. YouTube does business with organized criminals and is demanding money not to present to the predatory lies of organized criminals. I refuse to pay and demand that YouTube stops taking the criminals money and presenting them as ads.

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#300

Post by bluGill »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #282
tremon wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you can prove this, how? If the people making ads can be influenced by ads, why would they ever stop making them? It works for them, doesn't it?

Supposedly all these metrics like "conversions" measure the amount of people convinced by ads. But there's also the rumor floating around that all of these metrics are just hugely inflated, that these modern ads have in truth rates so miserable that a plain old billboard in the middle of nowhere would serve advertisers better, and that therefore the "modern WWW" is built on a foundation of lies, exagerations, and fak…

Conversion is a great metric if an immediate purchase your goal, but that is only rarely the correct goal. When something else is the goal it is much harder to measure.

Most ads are about a future purchase. They need to measure not did you buy now from this ad, but did all the ads you saw across all platforms (YouTube, Facebook, radio, tv, billboards) make enough of a difference in your buying habits when you finally buy. This is hard to measure, but it is more important. Most people are not buying now from an ad, they are buying in the future.

Sometimes ads are about an image. Even if you cannot afford some luxury good, they may want to advertise so that you recognize it on someone else and think "that is a rich person".

Post reply on HN