351–360 of 375 posts
there were a few scam SpaceX live streams on YouTube where they would play footage of Elon on stage at night from when starship was first unveiled.
The scammers would overlay an AI deep fake of Elon’s voice and push a crypto currency scam!
Those channels were called SpaceXUS or SpaceXLive etc. with legit looking SpaceX logo.
Somehow they managed to gain 1k live followers to boost it in the YouTube algo.
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Being addictive doesn't mean that that literally everyone who uses it will become addicted. Most people who use alcohol, or pain killers, or gamble can stop without much trouble; that doesn't mean that there aren't a subset of users who get dangerously addicted. It's great that you're in the majority of people who aren't addicted to Youtube, but that doesn't mean everyone has the same experience that you do.
> Being addictive doesn't mean that that literally everyone who uses it will become addicted Not everyone, sure, but a majority. People can get addicted to anything; yet we don't just call any activity addictive -- only those where most people have a hard time controlling their behavior. I don't think watching youtube qualifies (not just being on your phone, or watching tv).
As it turns out there is a whole category in YouTubes ad system for Get-Rich-Quick schemes, as detailed out in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkhGJUTW3ag&t=1031s (timestamped at the relevant time). Just today I saw my elderly father click on a YouTube ad link for a crypto scam copying Swedish televisions web layout he was reading it and I saw it at the corner of my eye. He has adblock installed, he disabl…
> What is he supposed to do, create a google account and get premium instead? I just put my parents on my family plan, you should consider it, it's a very low price for the peace of mind, plus they love not having ads
YouTube does not have the scale to manually review every time someone flags an ad. HN community believes that “oh, but MY report is high signal” which may be true, but user reports as a whole are not high signal. So instead it’s going through some ML classifier first. An automatic answer saying “this doesn’t go against policy” does not mean that it escalated to YT staff who carefully considered the ad and said “actua…
When you are an ad company then why would you reject the source of revenue?
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True, and it's so ironic when the situation reverses... Of the ads that recently slipped through my adblockers, one was a xenophobic piece of Hungarian propaganda against illegal immigrants. It was shown in the middle of a Minecraft video (a game without binary gender); that was made by a disabled person; to people living in a city where ~50% of the population was born elsewhere. Google does have all of that context,…
Google doesn't care about the context, they care about who pays the most for the ad. Hungarian fascists have deep pockets[0] and are willing to spend shittons of money to make you watch lies about immigrants[1]. Most of that money is wasted, but if they can radicalize even one out of a million viewers, they won. So they pay loads for it. Yes, this is the same math that scammers run on - because fascism is a scam cate…
Facism or not, those heavy ad campaigns come from the most extreme ends of the spectrum. And the new age will adapt to new tech faster. It's no suprise this is the result of it all, especially when platforms can claim article 243 to prevent any litigation against them.
>For the same reasons as above, the creator of Minecraft went from "I don't want gender in my game" to "all women are evil", because he isolated himself in an LA mansion and read nothing but Twitter.
ehh, who knows. 10 years is a long time and the first statement was made some 8 years prior to the 2nd. Could be bad experiences IRL or on the net, or both. Could be wounds much much older than Minecraft coming up.
>You are perfectly in the right to block ads. I pay for YouTube Premium but I won't yell at anyone who uses uBlock Origin.
Google has plenty of money and adtech as a concept is the antithesis to how I operate (let's COMPLETELY TANK the performance of your web browsing because people will pay us to be hostile t the user. And then tank it more so we have proof that the user actually got successfully harassed).
But from a purely logical perspective, I don't like the argument of "google has bad ads, therefore I block all ads". That just doesn't track well.
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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.
Yeah except the real situation is that you have the "choice" of going to the one and only shop that sells and you are given the "choice" of paying extra, or be forced to sit through a timeshare pitch before you can even pick the thing off the shelf. Except the timeshare pitch is hyper-personalized specifically for you based on your entire internet history everywhere and is designed to yield the maximum chance of mani…
I reported about 5 such ads just this moth, all clear financial scams impersonating well known people and companies in Czech republic (where I live), only to be told that youtube checked my claim and that the add in question doesn't break any youtube policy. Obviously nothing is forcing Google to deal with this in any way. But I wonder how could that work out for Google in the long run.
The same thing happened to me. Ads from Kazakhstan impersonating a Czech state-owned energy company etc. And almost every day there is an article in the news about how older people have been caught and lost their savings.
I reported about 5 such ads just this moth, all clear financial scams impersonating well known people and companies in Czech republic (where I live), only to be told that youtube checked my claim and that the add in question doesn't break any youtube policy. Obviously nothing is forcing Google to deal with this in any way. But I wonder how could that work out for Google in the long run.
> Obviously nothing is forcing Google to deal with this in any way Really? I mean, they're getting paid by a scammer who uses provably fake and deceptive content to prey on its victims; they have been alerted to the situation, they claim they reviewed it, and that they think it's fine. What could go wrong?
That said, there seems to be no legal way for a big Czech company to go neither against Google or the scammers, otherwise this would have been already resolved. CEZ (one of the companies being impersonated by the scammers here) made a press release about this almost 2 years ago (references are in Czech):
https://www.cez.cz/cs/pro-media/tiskove-zpravy/klamave-rekla... https://www.cez.cz/cs/podvodna-reklama