YouTube comment deletion is out of control, can't say anything anymore even when completely sensible. Is there a text format (alternate characters) that allows you to bypass detection?

PlogLod@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – -43 points –
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It's not one comment like I said. It's at least 50% of the comments I make, completely harmless.

Sometimes I might say things like "This is really messed up" and it gets deleted. Or often it's not even that, like just random sentences. I literally can't think of examples because it happens so often. As many other people can attest to, their account often seems to be unable to comment completely innocuous things while other accounts are able to. If you have supreme faith in AI and YouTube auto-moderation, then you might say "Whatever is happening, you deserve it." Which seems to be the prevailing view here, sadly.

But I just ask you to think a bit more compassionately and not assume the worst of people. There are many cases of similar situations that prove that there are completely innocent people having their comments removed for no reason. I'm thinking I might have to find one and post it here so people believe me.

See what I mean? I provide examples and no one cares. Just more downvotes. Just really toxic behaviour here. You are probably the ones who deserve to have your comments deleted more than me.

First, it's the responsibility of channel owners to delete comments. They can use an automod from Youtube itself, which is quite bad and often doesn't delete comments that should be deleted.

So many channel owners use open source tools that are more capable and/or do manual moderation. And they do use banlists that automatically delete all comments by users on the banlist. Considering that you admitted that 50% of your comments are problematic and worth being deleted, you probably already are on many of these banlists.

Second, you didn't provide examples (plural), but only one example: "That's really messed up". You didn't provide any context. And depending on the context, this comment could be totally not ok. E.g.: "Poor people have a right to live" - "That's totally messed up".

And third: By your own admission, 50% of your comments are bad and deserve to be banned. Looking at your comment history, that's a very favourable estimate. That is toxic behaviour and you don't get any pitty points for being sad that you get blocked.

If you don't want to be blocked, try to keep your toxic shitposting closer to 0% and not at 50%.

Why do you choose to assume the worst and not believe people? I didn't say 50% of my comments are problematic and worth deleting. I said 50% GET deleted unfairly. You are putting supreme faith in the YouTube moderation system and assuming that it doesn't make mistakes when it clearly does. Unlike other people's comments which deserve to be removed but aren't, nothing I'm saying is problematic at all.

Sounds like your account's just being shadow bannned

I don't know why that would be but it only happens on certain, random comments. Sometimes it's if I mention a brand or company or institution of some kind, without any criticism or anything, a mainstream company, other times just completely random stuff that's not even referencing anything in particular. Shadow deletion I guess, but I have no idea why.

As other people have said, you have to show us your posting history. Not summarizations of it, not characterizations of it, we have to see the literal literal text that's causing the issue. Otherwise we can't help you

You can, you just don't want to. What is stopping you from helping me? At least be honest. If you had a solution for an alternative text script that worked, you could just provide it. I did my best to give examples already

None of your examples were direct text quotes so we could see what was triggering the algorithm.

I suspect what you consider common sense, and normal, is being flagged as offensive and off topic in the discussion. Because you refused to provide direct quotes That's the most reasonable deduction for your readers to take away.

But sure I'll give you good advice:

Use a large language model, like chat GPT, and have it form a comment, that is both helpful, supportive, thoughtful, engaging. Based on the thesis you want to convey.

That is, no matter what I say, you wouldn't consider alternate text scripts regardless and would just try to find other ways to avoid comments getting deleted, which I know won't work because it's just like every few comments gets deleted for no reason and they're all different kinds of comments. They can be helpful, supportive, thoughtful and engaging, and still get removed.

I appreciate if you're genuinely trying to help. But it seems like you're just trying focus on other things to avoid actually answering what I'm asking, which is about alternate scripts, which I know is the only solution to my particular problem.

Chat GPT is generating alternative scripts for you.

If you already know the solution, just implement your idea. If you ask for help you're going to get a diverse set of ideas to help you.

Sorry, I meant an alternative text format. I don't think ChatGPT is capable of doing those. Like, variant text characters.

You're trying to do homoglyph attacks. That is the wrong way to solve the problem. If you're trying to dodge the automation which is removing your comments by just changing the characters, then you're just perpetuating the problem.

Either stop using YouTube, or start making comments that don't get removed.

Anything else will just get your account flagged even faster and harder as a spammer. Substituting a Spanish n for Latin n is a massive red flag to the algorithm. You will find other creative uses of Unicode making your account spam weight very high.

Interesting, so you're saying if I use alternate homoglyphs as you describe them, the system will detect those and flag my account or something? Seems unfair of the algorithm to do that considering I'm already unable to make normal comments in a lot of cases, but of course the whole problem is the algorithm not working properly.

But I'm just wondering if it's possible it wouldn't detect those alternate characters and I could comment normally (using homoglyphs), since I'm already unable to, it might be worth a try. I guess the definition of spam can vary, but it's not like I would be posting a lot of comments, just a regular amount, or even a low amount.

Every time one of your comments is removed, that score is being kept track of. Every time you try to subvert the removal system, that's also being tracked. When the weight is too high you just become shadow band completely, possibly your IP address, or you're logged in account. Etc

Most people, when they hear that YouTube is removing their comments, either try to adhere to the YouTube guidelines, or stop commenting on YouTube. Those are the usual decisions.

Given how hard you're working to try to say something on a YouTube comment, I think you're saying some pretty evil things. I don't have data for that, but your behavior here, your focus on trying to defeat an algorithm which is trying to create a safe comment space... Well I'm of mixed minds, either evil or spammy. Either is bad.

Anyway, I'm going to block you now, best of luck. Please start being a better member of society

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I don't know what alternate text format works because the ones I've tried haven't.

So for example, one that visually looks like the Latin/English alphabet, but which wouldn't be detected as English characters because it's in a different enough format.

Please see my other comment. To anybody who's reading this conversation this is called homoglyph attack. If you use this on public forums, the algorithms will flag your account as a spammer, correctly.

But in this case I wouldn't be spamming if I was just posting innocuous comments that happened to be formed with homoglyphs, right?

I understand you're saying the bots/algorithm might still delete it or flag me for it, but it would still be helpful to try it anyway since that's already happening for me so it can't really make it any worse than it already is. If you happen to know some of these "homoglyph" alternatives, that may be really helpful.

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So you have no intention of helping me find a text script that would work under any situation, even when random comments are getting deleted? I'm just trying to understand what you're saying.

ChatGPT wouldn't work because random comments get deleted all the time, there's no reason to think that auto generated ones wouldn't either. There seems to be no identifiable pattern to why certain comments get deleted.

I'm genuinely giving you the best help to get your text to stay online.

If chat GPT generating a comment, with the helpful parameters I've provided you, would get deleted, then your account is already flagged. Make a new account.

Okay thanks, I'm sorry if I misinterpreted your comments. It's hard to tell in this thread with a lot of people being mean to me and not wanting to help and just trying to find out what they've already decided that I'm saying something problematic when I'm really not. I might confuse someone who is actually trying to help so I apologise if that's the case.

I don't understand why if my account is flagged (which I don't know why it would be), I can still make some comments but not others, and if I change the wording or separate them into different comments, they can sometimes work. And for completely innocuous stuff.

But to be clear, you don't know of an alternate text script that might work? That would be really helpful.

Chatgpt can rewrite your comment, generating your alternative text

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