I want to share some thoughts that I had recently about YouTube spam comments. We all know these early bots in the YouTube comment section, with those “misleading” profile pictures and obvious bot like comments. Those comments are often either random about any topic or copied from other users.
OK, why am I telling you that? Well, I think these bots are there to be recognized as bots. Their job is to be seen as a bot and be deleted and ignored. In that case everyone feels safe, thinking all bots are now deleted. But in reality there are more sophisticated bots under us. So the easy bots job is to get delete and basically mislead us, so we don’t think that any is left, because they are deleted.
What do you think? Sounds plausible, doesn’t it? Or do I have paranoia? :D
Seems like that would be the engineered high effort version that I don’t think spammers would invest.
Is there a need to manipulate moderators? I don’t think so. Unless you have a specific target and don’t mind the effort.
Otherwise, I suspect simple spam works well enough, with lower effort.