As somebody who quite often scrolls down to the comments section on YouTube (for my sins), I’m often faced with the innovative tactics that spammers use to get their comments through Google’s automated filtering and detection systems.
One method that’s somehow persisted for a few years is the linking non-link. YouTube doesn’t like comments with links in them and will often silently hide or sometimes outright refuse them. But the link-detection algorithm used in spam filtering isn’t the same one that’s used in the frontend to convert textual links into clickable hyperlinks!
So spammers craft their comments with unusual TLDs and mixed into normal-looking text. They aren’t detected as links by the filter, but their marks can still click on them as normal! This has been going on for quite a while with different iterations of TLDs and filters, but somehow Google hasn’t managed to stamp it out quite yet.
Here’s an example (Spanish language) spam comment, where the .uno domain is the bait:
I often wonder if there’s any real development effort put into spam filtering from the comment side; my guess is that as a centralised platform YouTube puts a lot more emphasis on filtering out spammy accounts. Some of my creator friends often complain about the lack of moderation tools to keep their comment sections clean - beyond deleting comments individually and the “naughty words list” that automatically hides comments there’s not really that much a creator can do.
Comments
No comments yet!
To leave a comment, please send it via email here. Comments are licensed CC-BY as with the rest of the site. Your sender name and email address will be published along with the comment, unless you tell me not to.
Articles from other blogs I follow
Giant mud doughnut lands at the Barbican — and yes, it’s art
A giant muddy doughnut has arrived in the middle of the Barbican, and of course, it’s art.Read more ›
via ianVisits May 15, 2026UK Government Kicks Out Palantir
The UK Government, for all its faults, is pretty good at publishing contracts it has awarded. That's why I get depressed when I see rage-bait nonsense about how companies have been award "Top Secret" deals. Right now you can go to https://www…
via Terence Eden’s Blog May 15, 2026banning all Anthropic employees
Per my policies, I need to ban every employee and contractor of Anthropic Inc from ever contributing code to any of my projects. Anyone have a list? Any project that requires a Developer Certificate of Origin or similar should be doing this, because Anthropic…
via see shy jo April 1, 2026Generated by openring