- YouTube has a problem.
Spam.
From crypto scams 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.
Listen up guys, because this is important.
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(upbeat techno music)
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 cam sites,
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 the 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 is 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 I can actually convert a DVD
to a Blu-ray disc, take your big stack of CDs
and get a blue marker of some kind.
- ThioJoe used to run the tech tips equivalent
of how to basic and those videos instructing people
to run their co-ax 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, (Linus snaps)
you get a read out of the comments that are about
to be deleted just in case.
And with another keystroke you'll 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 weights 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 usernames, 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 ThioJoe's tool.
Then there's filter modes,
which filters special non-ASCII characters from usernames
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 gonna 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 Kaomoji uses characters
that would actually be filtered out by this option.
That's a nice touch.
In ThioJoe'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 purged 2.8.0.
Here we go boys.
- [Anthony] Woo.
- Currently logged in user, Linus Tech Tips,
channel ID, continue as 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?
- [Anthony] Two? - Two.
Total number of comments to scan 2,980.
Boop.
This mode is a spammers worst nightmare.
Now ThioJoe did actually share with us the logic
that it uses.
And it's pretty smart, actually.
I have very high hopes for this.
Oh, there they are.
Okay.
Ah, 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.
LoveMe says only for fans 18 years old.
Loveme.uno/stormy.
I know lots of people,
real people who post that on my videos.
- [Anthony] I always do.
- 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 (beep) something,
whatever these other characters are.
When they just copy a top upvoted comment
that 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.
(upbeat music)
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 comments sections
of their favorite creators with nothing
but their keyboard and an ice cold beverage
in an LTT water bottle from LTTstore.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.
(Anthony cries)
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 spammers 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 ThioJoe'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 gonna 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 gonna be a bit of a nail biter.
For now we'll have both the GitHub page for this project
and ThioJoe's walkthrough on how to set it up linked
for you guys down below.
Thanks ThioJoe.
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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.