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Magic the Gathering content creator pleas YouTube to stop scammer bot deluge

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Re: Magic the Gathering content creator pleas YouTube to stop scammer bot deluge

#41

Post by haburka »

ncallaway wrote: post #20
Zetice wrote: post #4

Maybe I'm a callous bastard, but I genuinely don't get how he feels personally responsible here. It's a YouTube problem, not a M:tG problem or a him problem. He sounds genuinely distressed, and I feel for him, but I don't get why it causes him pain in this specific way. It's not your fault! And for what it's worth, it's not really YouTube's "fault" either. Remember, they're victims here too. They didn't invite this,…

> Computers are sometimes likened to "magic" where we just cast a spell by writing code, and something technically beautiful happens, but where magic can interpret intent and act according to the caster's desire, computers can't, and there's no way to "Wrath of God" the spammers. I somewhat agree with this, but I feel like there's some very low-hanging fruit that should be available. When posting in comments on a vid…

Abuse is a very difficult problem that Google spends a lot of money and talent on. There’s no silver bullet like avatar/name similarity or other forms of detection because the scammer can trivially iterate until they avoid automated detection.

I think the indicator that a comment comes from the author is pretty noticeable but it could be better. Its a tough trade off to make between UX and fighting abuse.

The reality is that there are criminal groups who spend great resources to scam people online and sometimes they figure out a clever way around enough mitigations so they can completely hose a platform. There’s not a lot a platform can do against this kind of attack except detection and reacting.

I see it as an international crime issue where certain countries are indifferent to americans or even their own citizens being scammed. This is a very different problem if Google could simply pass their info on the scammer over to a competent law enforcement agency. It would be a lot riskier for scammers, and they’d have to put a lot of effort into evading detection. Definitely a pipe dream though.

Re: Magic the Gathering content creator pleas YouTube to stop scammer bot deluge

#42

Post by kjrose »

The only thing I can see that could possibly be done is to either remove commenting altogether, and remove that as a method for determining engagement with the video. Or to make it so that to comment requires full validation (either by restricting to individuals with Youtube Premium, or some cost to be able to comment) of the individual who is commenting so that automation of it is no longer feasible from a monetary perspective. In theory, they could still allow users to post "Anonymously" but they would have to be posting from an account which has been paid for, or for which some monetary or time cost was necessary to prevent a spammer from simply spinning up more accounts.

There is no way to automate this because you have too much money on the side of the scammer should they break through it since if they only catch 1 out of 10,000 people, it immediately pays their bills. This is the big issue with email spam, we can fight and fight, but at the end of the say, there is no monetary cost really to sending out a stupidly absurd number of emails.

Re: Magic the Gathering content creator pleas YouTube to stop scammer bot deluge

#43

Post by kjrose »

kjrose wrote: post #42

The only thing I can see that could possibly be done is to either remove commenting altogether, and remove that as a method for determining engagement with the video. Or to make it so that to comment requires full validation (either by restricting to individuals with Youtube Premium, or some cost to be able to comment) of the individual who is commenting so that automation of it is no longer feasible from a monetary…

To continue a bit more, I have really tried to figure out if there is any way to deal with email spam that doesn't either ban anyone but incredibly trusted servers (And even then it fails horribly), or doesn't put some sort of cost on people sending emails (either time, effort or monetary.)

I would rather have email be free and open, but I see the issues that arise from bad actors in that environment who have no real cost to abusing it and have major potential for gain if they are successful.

That being said, the easiest answer, in my head, would be to make it so that sending email to people in an unsolicited fashion has some cost. Yet, even that is problematic, because I want some people to send me unsolicited email from time to time....

Re: Magic the Gathering content creator pleas YouTube to stop scammer bot deluge

#45

Post by ncallaway »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #38
ncallaway wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Computers are sometimes likened to "magic" where we just cast a spell by writing code, and something technically beautiful happens, but where magic can interpret intent and act according to the caster's desire, computers can't, and there's no way to "Wrath of God" the spammers. I somewhat agree with this, but I feel like there's some very low-hanging fruit that should be available. When posting in comments on a vid…

There are definitely ways to combat this but I think they're expensive. An avatar comparability check at the scale of YouTube would be immense. Running each comment through some machine learning algo would be immense.

> An avatar comparability check at the scale of YouTube would be immense.

I don't think it has to be. For each user you should already have the hash data computed (using something like imagehash this works out to a hash of 8 bytes per image, though you can obviously tune this up depending on storage/performance requirements).

Each time a comment is posted, you would do a distance measure between the commenter's avatar hash and the channel avatar hash. Mixed in with the network latency and DB I/O operations, I think this additional read/write that only needs to occur when a comment is posted could be done with a pretty minimal additional compute overhead.

That said, if Google doesn't have the compute overhead to do it, I gave an alternative. Simply don't display avatars from commenters other than the channel author.

Re: Magic the Gathering content creator pleas YouTube to stop scammer bot deluge

#46

Post by LegitShady »

tarotuser wrote: post #2

This is the "Tolarian Community College" (a play on words from the MtG card game). Without having to watch the video, this Youtuber does a lot of reviews and content on the game. During the course of reviews, he gets a lot of free merchandise. To that end, he then gives it freely to his subscribers. The problem: there's a deluge of bots that nearly-instantly post on comments and threads in Youtube that redirect unsus…

I've seen this sort of telegram bot attack on dozens of channels. It's not targeting him so much as its across all of youtube for channels with enough subscribers. Youtube is completely failing to keep the bots out of the comments.

Re: Magic the Gathering content creator pleas YouTube to stop scammer bot deluge

#47

Post by ncallaway »

ThunderSizzle wrote: post #35
ncallaway wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Computers are sometimes likened to "magic" where we just cast a spell by writing code, and something technically beautiful happens, but where magic can interpret intent and act according to the caster's desire, computers can't, and there's no way to "Wrath of God" the spammers. I somewhat agree with this, but I feel like there's some very low-hanging fruit that should be available. When posting in comments on a vid…

I agree with you. However, I'd point out a usability issue: > A huge indication that a comment comes from the channel author. This pattern requires that users have done something to have seen this before. While many users will see it, the users that are probably falling for this problem probably will not have seen this "huge indication" before, so wouldn't know it exists. e.g. a user who never checks comments really,…

I agree, which is why I would prioritize the other fixes as well. Still, these kinds of things (once broadly learned by the community) can have a significant impact.

Yes, it won't be 100%, but it would reduce the conversion rate of the scammers. That's ultimately the solution. No single measure will ever fix this, and if you wait to implement something until you will solve the entire problem space you'll never get started.

The solution is a hundred different changes that each reduce the scammers' conversion rate by 1-2%.

Re: Magic the Gathering content creator pleas YouTube to stop scammer bot deluge

#48

Post by danaris »

haburka wrote: post #41
ncallaway wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Computers are sometimes likened to "magic" where we just cast a spell by writing code, and something technically beautiful happens, but where magic can interpret intent and act according to the caster's desire, computers can't, and there's no way to "Wrath of God" the spammers. I somewhat agree with this, but I feel like there's some very low-hanging fruit that should be available. When posting in comments on a vid…

Abuse is a very difficult problem that Google spends a lot of money and talent on. There’s no silver bullet like avatar/name similarity or other forms of detection because the scammer can trivially iterate until they avoid automated detection. I think the indicator that a comment comes from the author is pretty noticeable but it could be better. Its a tough trade off to make between UX and fighting abuse. The reality…

> There’s no silver bullet like avatar/name similarity or other forms of detection because the scammer can trivially iterate until they avoid automated detection.

That's a cop-out, though.

It's true that they're not going to be able to stop every single scammer, but that doesn't mean they can't raise the barrier to entry enough that a significant percentage of scammers find that it's no longer worth it.

As for the specific measures the GP suggested—those are absolutely things Google has the resources to do. Image and text similarity are things they deal with all the time, and if they can make it effectively impossible (barring occasional random false negatives) for scammers who attempt to impersonate the author using these methods to get through without a human double-checking, that would be a huge blow to their ability to fool people. It's not like if you're clever enough you can, say, have an avatar that shows one thing to the bot-check systems and another thing to users.

Re: Magic the Gathering content creator pleas YouTube to stop scammer bot deluge

#49

Post by ncallaway »

haburka wrote: post #41
ncallaway wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Computers are sometimes likened to "magic" where we just cast a spell by writing code, and something technically beautiful happens, but where magic can interpret intent and act according to the caster's desire, computers can't, and there's no way to "Wrath of God" the spammers. I somewhat agree with this, but I feel like there's some very low-hanging fruit that should be available. When posting in comments on a vid…

Abuse is a very difficult problem that Google spends a lot of money and talent on. There’s no silver bullet like avatar/name similarity or other forms of detection because the scammer can trivially iterate until they avoid automated detection. I think the indicator that a comment comes from the author is pretty noticeable but it could be better. Its a tough trade off to make between UX and fighting abuse. The reality…

> There’s no silver bullet like avatar/name similarity or other forms of detection because the scammer can trivially iterate until they avoid automated detection.

I agree that there's no silver bullet, but there need to be a hundred small changes that each increase the amount of work or decrease the scammer conversion rate until their ROI is materially harmed.

Name similarity checks have a few benefits:

- Would be quite easy to implement - Increases the scammers' work which reduces their ROI - Reduces the conversion rate (because instead of a spam message coming from "Tolarian Community Collage" it now comes from "Tulrin Community Collge"; the more the spammer has to iterate on the name, the less believable it becomes)

Bonus points if you add to the moderation queue a "Rejected because this was an impersonation attempt", and now the avatar/name of that commenter goes onto the similarity detection checks for that channel.

Re: Magic the Gathering content creator pleas YouTube to stop scammer bot deluge

#50

Post by Pyrodogg »

Someone (YouTube) should just run a recurring ad campaign. Instead of traditional ads it's "Congratulations, you're one of today's lucky 10,000 and you're going to learn about bots and boundaries you should establish while on this platform." [0]

The number could be scaled up. They could select out populations that seem 'with it' and bias it toward anyone who interacts with bot comments other than to report them. I'm sure there are other useful signals.

Without getting into the 'how to block bots' side of the problem, this is one way YouTube could help with the user education without individual creators having to make videos like this or recurring community posts. As noted in other comments, a purely technical solution to ban bots probably isn't going to work.

[0] https://xkcd.com/1053

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