> You can't tell me that they're too difficult to distinguish from legitimate content. Any human being or half-decent algorithm would be able to catch these with no trouble at all (heck, I could write a couple of regular expressions that would do the trick and have 0 false positives),
Of course I can tell you that! :)
Abuse is an adversarial and dynamic problem. A simple regex will never solve the problem for more than a very short time period. Sometimes such short term fixes are called for, since they'll buy you the time for something more principled. But they cannot be the solution forever, because the abusers will adapt. The more different variants you end up blocking, the more likely it is that they somehow interact and produce serious FPs.
And then you've got a PR mess on your hands with people complaining about how "Jeff Bezos is being censored by YouTube". Abuse is pretty thankless that way: nobody ever sees your successes, only your failures, and it's all a job of balancing the two.
What you actually want for fighting bulk spam (rather than other forms of abuse) is robust signals that are broadly useful rather than specific to one campaign.
As for your actual question, I haven't actually been seeing this in my recommendations (but then again, I don't have anything related to cryptocurrency or Elon Musk in my recommendations). Maybe this isn't actually as widespread a problem as you're suggesting? To put it bluntly, perhaps cryptocurrency is an area where the legit content is basically indistinguishable from scams.
Of course I can tell you that! :)
Abuse is an adversarial and dynamic problem. A simple regex will never solve the problem for more than a very short time period. Sometimes such short term fixes are called for, since they'll buy you the time for something more principled. But they cannot be the solution forever, because the abusers will adapt. The more different variants you end up blocking, the more likely it is that they somehow interact and produce serious FPs.
And then you've got a PR mess on your hands with people complaining about how "Jeff Bezos is being censored by YouTube". Abuse is pretty thankless that way: nobody ever sees your successes, only your failures, and it's all a job of balancing the two.
What you actually want for fighting bulk spam (rather than other forms of abuse) is robust signals that are broadly useful rather than specific to one campaign.
As for your actual question, I haven't actually been seeing this in my recommendations (but then again, I don't have anything related to cryptocurrency or Elon Musk in my recommendations). Maybe this isn't actually as widespread a problem as you're suggesting? To put it bluntly, perhaps cryptocurrency is an area where the legit content is basically indistinguishable from scams.