youtube has a problem spam from crypto scans to health
supplements to free robux it just keeps getting worse with each passing day and
google clearly has no idea how to fix it all of that changes now the community
restored the dislike counter and the community is coming to the rescue once
again led by the unlikeliest of heroes
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youtube spam takes many forms but there are some patterns with most of them
promoting crypto investment alt health products or perhaps most infamously paid
live campsites which theoretically should make them pretty easy to block
so why doesn't youtube bother the truth is they do and poking around
in our desktop dashboard it appears to be working pretty well
just about everything that is obviously spam is filtered out and very few false
positives get caught up unless they're violating our blocked words list
but there's an inconsistency here that i just can't wrap my head around
on mobile there is perfectly reasonable stuff
that's getting held for review and i just have no idea why and it's actually
led to some really confusing situations with fellow creators like this incident
where the return youtube dislike extension author's post wasn't showing
up even in our held comments list
we've also seen unhappy viewers over the years who have accused us of censoring
them in the comments when we're totally not we just never saw them this
unreliability combined with the lack of a dislike counter on comments means that
as the bots have improved our markers to identify them and root them out have
gotten worse thanks youtube and here's one thing we
need to get out of the way guys don't mock the people who fall for these scams
because shaming people only empowers the scammers more so if youtube's not going
to address this what we need is consistent filtering with a way for
creators to keep on top of it or real people are going to get hurt
now it's time to meet our hero what if i told you that you can actually convert a
dvd to a blu-ray disc take your big stack of cds and get a blue marker of
some kind theojo used to run the tech tips equivalent of how to basic and
those videos instructing people to run their coax cable through a cd for free
cable tv or tape a battery to their Ethernet cable to triple their internet
speed are still up if you want to go back and
watch them but mr joe seeing how many people were
genuinely upset when they wasted their time trying to follow his guides
realized that he had a power and what he really wanted to do was use
that power for good so for years now he's actually been focused on uploading
real tech tips and one of his best to date is an open source app that he
created that will scan and remove spam comments from a youtube video or even an
entire youtube channel how does it work it's dead simple in fact
so dead simple that it is shocking that youtube hasn't bothered to
implement it yet in its original most basic form you would choose what you
want to scan enter the channel id of the spammer and
boom you get a readout of the comments that are about to be deleted
just in case and with another keystroke you wipe your videos clean of that
spammer but mr joe didn't stop there he recently released an update with an auto
smart mode that recognizes and selects comments based on some secret sauce that
waits how spammy a message is based on the username comment text and some other
techniques like how many times that comment has been repeated in fact when
you run the script it'll show you how many of each sample was found by each
spammer you can then delete the messages and ban the accounts all at once now the
exact strings and patterns that the script searches for are obfuscated this
is to prevent spammers from easily developing a way around it so they're
not something that you can tune and tweak on your own but if all else fails
you can always do it manually as before there are options to scan user names
comment text or both for criteria of your choosing so if your comment section
was getting rated by real users for example you could select and remove the
offending comments with theo joe's tool then there's filter modes which filter
special non-ascii characters from user names that are often used to impersonate
content creators this is one that really blows me away that youtube hasn't done
yet as well as nuke mode what this one
does is make it so that only numbers letters and spaces are allowed in
usernames now that's probably going to be a last resort for most people seeing
as emoji are popular and languages other than english exist but it is called nuke
mode and it's colored all red for a reason i like how the little table flip
kimoji uses characters that would actually be filtered out by this option
it's a nice touch in theojo's experience the false positive rate though for the
smart auto mode is roughly zero which is why it's the default mode and the one
that i'm going to use right now okay youtube spammer purge 2.8.0 here we
go boys currently logged in user Linus
tech tips channel id continues this user yes this is all configurable by the way
all you got to do is go in and say hey i don't want to confirm which user i am
every time little things like that scan recent videos for a channel
scanning your own channel just hit enter enter the number of most recent well
let's do two two three two total number of comments to scan 2980.
this mode is a spammer's worst nightmare now theo joe did actually share with us
the logic that it uses and it's pretty smart actually i i have very high hopes
for this oh there they are okay uh spam
comments ready to display also save a log file yes please wow oh boy
oh we got some good ones here ladies and gentlemen love me
says only for fans 18 years old love me
dot uno stormy i know lots of people
real people who post that on my videos this should be self-explanatory do not
go to any of these domains here like no not recommended this is one that drives
me crazy when the spammers wanna
something whatever these other characters are when they just copy uh uh
top up voted comment it makes it actually kind of hard to tell sometimes
mw posted this youtube link 27 times how
do you want to handle the matched comments above to exclude certain
authors type exclude followed by a list of all the numbers in the sample list oh
well that's easy to delete all of them type delete exactly see you later also
ban the spammers yes now this is interesting it's checking to make sure
the comments are gone which is an optional step to save time and API quota
we'll talk about that a bit more later program complete press enter to
exit that is so cool which is a lot more than
i can say for youtube's own mobile filters like i'm stoked but Linus what
does this have to do with me we could use this tool to seriously cut down on
comment spam on youtube site wide and i
don't mean we as in content creators though content creators should get
involved i'm talking about you and me or like right now you can download this app
and after a little bit of setup scan any video you want on youtube now you
obviously can't delete comments from someone else's channel but you can mass
report them so if enough of these comments get reported by enough people
they should be removed and they should give youtube's algorithm some clues as
to how to identify and delete them automatically the idea is that if enough
community members pitch in they can literally clean up the comment sections
of their favorite creators with nothing but their keyboard
and an ice cold beverage in an LTT water bottle from ltteststore.com
so then here's what i'm gonna do i'm gonna set up this script and by i mean
Anthony hey thanks Anthony i'm gonna set up the script to run on a schedule as
often as we can get away with now by default youtube limits each user to 10
000 API requests per day that's
not that much in the grand scheme of things but mr joe actually thought of this we
can take a page from the spammer's book and create an army of dummy accounts
that we then grant moderator status to they can't outright delete comments but
they can hold them for review if we run up against our own API limit this should
help keep our comments section pretty clean that is at least for the first few
days after a video is released making it this easy not to mention open source
means that content creators across the youtube spectrum can spend less time
pulling weeds while being more confident that they're keeping their audience safe
it truly is a win-win and yet another
example of the community coming to the rescue when youtube couldn't or
wouldn't honestly i'm kind of leaning towards wouldn't because while i admire
theojo's gumption here enough to give him this
nft of a certificate of awesomeness here you go he's a self-admitted novice
at this just one dude who wrote a simple
script that happens to be more effective than google's filtering to be clear it's
not perfect it's not going to prevent spam that is at least until it trains
youtube's own filters and it is limited to those 10 000 requests per day
but it could make spam take more effort which could reduce the amount of spam
that's produced the only real reason i can think of that
youtube wouldn't do this themselves is that it's computationally expensive but
we can obviously run it on a desktop pc with no issues and our servers seem no
worse for the wear so
i don't know what to say other than that youtube either can't or won't and
only they can say which one it is speaking of servers by the way get
subscribed because we've got some data recovery to do on one of our servers and
it's going to be a bit of a nail biter for now we'll have both the github page
for this project and dojo's walkthrough on how to set it up linked for you guys
down below thanks theo joe this video is brought to you by manscaped manscaped
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click the link down below for 20 off and free shipping thanks for watching guys
go check out our video on restoring youtube's dislike button for another
case where the community came to the rescue it's a little less straightforward than this one but i'm
doing my part anyway