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YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

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

#151

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?

[flagged]

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

#152

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?

I mean, you can see it that way, or you can realize that paying the mafia protection money actually is a fantastic way to keep both of your legs in working order.

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

#153

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?

> Paying for a product instead of being the product.

You're still the product. You think they aren't still collecting info on what you watch and associating that with your google account for cross-marketing elsewhere on the web?

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

#154
post #92

I love Youtube and consider it a major contribution to the modern world -- however it would have been "invented" within a few months regardless of who built if first and would have grown regardless of who acquired it. It's important to recall that Youtube grew not because of "you" -- there was really not any kind of creator ecosystem for the first phase of massive growth. Youtube grew because of piracy and the postin…

>>Youtube grew because of piracy and the posting/distribution of copyrighted content. The funny thing is, the second you take a step out of the anglosphere it still hosts an absolute tonne of copyrighted content that no one cares about. Just search for "full film" in Polish and you get lots of full films uploaded as-is and no one is taking them down https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=pe%C5%82ny+film

It is really random in the anglosphere. If you type "... full film" you will get the full film sometimes, just not all the time.

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

#157
post #76
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does big Cola advertise on youtube? I haven't seen their ads at all (but since I don't drink soda maybe their profiles worked and coke isn't wasting adds on me?). Most of the big advertising plays elsewhere don't seem to be on youtube.

Not sure about Coca Cola specifically, but we are talking more generally about well-known big advertisers.

Both. You can't listen to traditional radio for more than 20 minutes without hearing a McDonalds ad (at breakfast time). Drinks (both soft and hard), and cars are also big spenders on advertisements.

I have seen a few ads for those things on YouTube, but it isn't as constant as other forms of media.

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

#158
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about growth at different stages, but the reason it took off initially is that Flash added video capabilities and YouTube was built around that ubiquitous plugin. Before that, you needed a video player installed on your computer that then either loaded in-browser or played videos after download. You often needed multiple players installed as none supported every video format.

This is a bit like saying car use grew because of differentials. Cars use differentials but the reason car use grew isn't the differential. If it wasn't the differential it would be some other mechanism that does the same thing. Don't attribute user interest (which is what made YouTube grow) to the technical aspects of the site. That is almost never the case.

Ease of use is not a technical aspect.

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

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I should just give up, have a talk about media habits with my parents and if they don't want to change, just hand YouTube the money? You freely admit that it is designed to be this bad and by giving them money actually just rewards their shitty behavior. I gave an example of a video showing how creators on YouTube can select which ads to show. Get-Rich-Quick is a category, YouTube could just take the decision to n…

Wanted to point out that “Just take the decision to not carry those ads” isn’t as easy when you’re at YT scale. Not excusing them but I think we all understand the challenges of content moderation at scale for organic content — now amplify that for paid content where the incentives get even thornier. Yes YT should invest more in review and policy work — but it’s a forever expanding cost with no silver bullet. I appre…

The scale of paid content is much smaller than the general youtube scale. And they already have a categorization for it. Of course you could lie about the categorization of what you pay to YouTube to show unsuspecting people, but at least you run the risk of giving YouTube money and not getting shown because you violated their advertising policy. It would change the whole economics of running scams through ads.

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

#160
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 “actually, this is okay because we really want the revenue.” It means that whatever ML classifier took a look at it thought it was okay (which is probably bugged, given their typical speed at taking down fake livestreams in this vein).

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