
YouTube is littered with mass-produced videos made by automated bots - imartin2k
https://hackernoon.com/unethical-growth-hacks-a-look-into-the-growing-youtube-news-bot-epidemic-e1ef8c98b605
======
eksemplar
People still use YouTube for non specific search results?

All that shows up when I try to “explore” is what could be called tabloid
amateur videos, top 5-10 lists and a bunch of other shit that will quite
literally waste your life as it makes you dumber.

Maybe it’s my own fault for having watched the Churchill vs Roosevelt epic rap
battle too many times, but nothing YouTube suggests is anywhere close to
something that I won’t shut off after 5 seconds.

I mean, it’s so bad I actually spent time to turn off auto play on every
device I access YouTube on.

~~~
icebraining
If you remove a recommendation, it has a link saying "tell us why", and you
can say "don't recommend me videos based on video X" (X being the video that
YT used to generate that suggestion).

I find YT's recommendations a bit myopic (too focused on what I've watched in
the past few days), but I literally don't have any clickbait or other crap
videos, it's actually pretty OK.

~~~
solarkraft
Oh no. You mentioned it.

I've used it hundreds of times, but since "clickbait bullshit" isn't an
option, there are 3 and they're pretty dumb it probably won't learn any time
soon. It sometimes comes pretty close to driving me away from the service.

------
mosselman
The writer makes it seem as if society itself is at risk from being ruined
because there are crappy videos on YouTube. I couldn’t care less. It is
YouTube’s image that is at risk if anything and to be honest I find it super
clever to generate videos like this to earn money. Very out of the box.

YouTube is just a service that is out to make money out of bored and media-
addicted people. It isn’t a public service that is being exploited.

~~~
vanderZwan
> _YouTube is just a service that is out to make money out of bored and media-
> addicted people. It isn’t a public service that is being exploited._

You're not a parent, are you?

EDIT: neither am I, for the record. But I think a lot of the replies here are
a bit too quick to lay the blame on the less tech-savvy parents, who may just
be using YouTube in the good faith that an app designed for children will not
auto-queue disturbing content (also, the linked article makes a larger point
about the _" infrastructural violence"_ of the internet that we should not
dismiss to quickly).

[https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-
in...](https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-
internet-c39c471271d2)

~~~
rock_hard
From one parent to another: Parents need to stop asking the world to
accommodate for them!

If you don't think your kids should use YouTube then don't let them...easy as
that! It's like with cookies...if you really want to I'll bet you find a way
to stop you kids from eating them.

~~~
ricardobeat
Except that “online video” is now a synonym for YouTube. Most people are not
aware of this and think “just don’t use YouTube” is as extreme as “then stop
watching TV”.

~~~
21savageaf
No, it's more akin to "don't watch these channels on TV". There is plenty of
content served on sites/apps where preventing children from seeing
inappropriate things is a primary focus. It's like locking down your TV to
only show cartoon Network and Nickelodeon. Besides, putting your child's
productive energy into more productive activities that are not watching either
TV or online videos will serve them better.

~~~
ceejayoz
> No, it's more akin to "don't watch these channels on TV".

Sort of. If I let my kid watch Peppa Pig on the TV, I can be _reasonably_
assured that it won't suddenly take a turn (while I'm in the next room washing
dishes) into Peppa Pig having sex with Barney just before they're both ground
up into sausage.

The same isn't true on YouTube.

~~~
Mononokay
That gives me an idea, actually. Do you have an RSS reader of choice?

------
ajeet_dhaliwal
I find it fascinating how YouTube can afford to keep storing so much data, at
the rate it comes in and especially when most if it is not valuable and may
only be watched a handful of times. A few years ago I looked up their
profitability and came across an article claiming they were about breaking
even bringing with about a billion dollars in revenue with about a billion in
costs to run the service. If anyone has any recent / real insight into this I
would be grateful for a link.

~~~
pizzapill
I can give you a couple insights:

300 hours of video are uploaded to youtube every minute in 2018

A couple of years ago I've seen a Google talk with a youtube admin/engineer.
He said that in the beginning they had huge issues because they could not
order servers fast enough for the demand. Money seems to never have played a
role in those decisions (I can't find the link to the talk anymore).

If a video gets uploaded it will be stored in multiple resolutions and
formats. So a video is probably stored as ~20 files which makes the space
requirements even more mind boggling.

~~~
jacquesm
> He said that in the beginning they had huge issues because they could not
> order servers fast enough for the demand.

We had the exact same problems in the beginning of Camarades.com, before the
wankers found out about it. It's amazing how for nearly 6 months it was just
'nice people' and after that it went downhill rapidly.

We found out that hard way that 3 weeks lead time on a batch of servers only
looks good if you don't double in size every two weeks or so :)

One Dell server we ordered didn't even make it to production, it was way too
small by the time it arrived so they took it back and shipped us a much larger
one. That's also roughly around the time that we figured out that it is much
cheaper to have one large server to do all the writes and a bunch of slaves
that do all the reads from local copies.

Of course a modern day server would laugh at serving up dynamic pages to a few
hundred thousand people per day but in the late 90's that was quite a
challenge.

~~~
digi_owl
And these days i think Google builds their storage solutions from the board
up. And i seem to recall reading about Facebook doing something similar
(including experimenting with cold storage on burned blu-ray).

------
teddyh
I’ve yet to see something called a “ _growth hack_ ” that _wasn’t_ unethical.

~~~
jasonlotito
What's funny is this article seems to have been written and promoted by a
Snapzu, which literally promotes "growth hacks" on its front page.

~~~
apotheothesomai
Just because common usage allows us to call two practices "growth hacks,"
doesn't mean they are the same in most or even many respects.

One is an automated, content stealing scheme for making easy money. The other
involves techniques by which you can promote your brand through your own
content.

Just because you can predicate something with the same term, doesn't mean they
are not very different.

~~~
jasonlotito
I was replying to a comment that said: "I’ve yet to see something called a
“growth hack” that wasn’t unethical."

I wasn't equating anything.

------
sago
YT earnings up to $20 per 1k views, with $7 average?

Who is earning that kind of money? The pros I know bank $1/1k (excluding
sponsorships, referrals, Patreon, random demonetisations, and so on).

------
pizzapill
I've seen those videos around for a few years now. Altough the one linked in
the article is of a high quality (relatively speaking). Does anybody know how
to create those? I tried it with FFmpeg and espeak but never actually got
anywhere fast.

~~~
zootam
1\. set up scrapers to get the filler content- text and video/audio

2\. read text using text to speech, produce audio file

3\. use a library like
[https://pypi.python.org/pypi/moviepy](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/moviepy)
to combine them

4\. auto upload to youtube

5\. profit!

~~~
laythea
Its more like:

1\. hope and dream of success

2\. set up scrapers to get the filler content- text and video/audio

3\. read text using text to speech, produce audio file

4\. use a library like
[https://pypi.python.org/pypi/moviepy](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/moviepy)
to combine them

5\. auto upload to youtube

6\. get depressed when you realise nobody wants to listen to a computer speak.

7\. go back to day job

:)

------
JonnyNova
A video analysis of the related phenomenon:

"Weird Kids' Videos and Gaming the Algorithm"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKp2gikIkD8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKp2gikIkD8)

It talks about possibly using machine learning to create many videos targeted
at toddlers and using techniques to ensure the next autoplay item doesn't
change to another channel.

------
option_greek
This could be a preview to the future where content is generated on the fly by
bots that gather events on their own (and hence no content ripping). At
present, most of the financial content of day to day events like stock price
movements is already auto generated.

------
jgalt212
Demand Media, 2.0

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaf_Group](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaf_Group)

------
petercooper
An article about a growth hack which is, itself, a growth hack for an email
list building service :-D

------
squozzer
I found most of them too cheesy to watch for very long.

What makes them fun is trying to figure out if (or where) the voice is a robot
- usually child's play because robots frequently places the em-PHAS-is on the
wrong syl-LAB-le.

But the British butler voice isn't too shabby.

------
lifeisstillgood
It took me a while to realise that what everyone is talking about (peppa pig /
r/elsagate) and these are not AI produced videos but script kiddie stuff. The
peppa pig stuff i have seen looks more like someone with one tool has been
trying to make something "funny" but i suppose the point being made here is
that if you can make a video for effectively free, and youtube pays you 10
bucks, you can scale that forever.

surely the solution here is in how youtube pays people? Does it not have to
have a bank account? Isn't it a bit weird to find thousands of channels with
robo videos on it with the one bank account?

i may of course be simplifying fraud detection

~~~
Dibbles
There's an upload limit for Youtube, although it's 50-100 a day. You won't be
guaranteed views and YT doesn't pay out that much.

~~~
duskwuff
And the upload limit only applies if you're using a single account. The big
algorithmic content generators all use multiple accounts.

~~~
Dibbles
Then how do they get enough views and subscribers for monetization? More bots?

~~~
lifeisstillgood
this is what fascinates me - how do people actually monetise this stuff

I was amazed to discover the Nigerian scam was a means to get money out the
Western banking system - find a fool who will transfer 900,000 of a million
bucks to a number somewhere and you get your stolen credit card money out the
country.

(see also gangs who walk down high street taking out 1000 in cash at each ATM)

But this one - YouTube is paying these people. what about fraud prevention are
we missing here?

~~~
Dibbles
Personally, I think Youtubes recommendation algorithm is to blame. It's
probably to easy to fool; have a nice clickbaity title, some clickbaity
thumbnails, and you're much more likely to get hits. YT should eliminate those
factors, as it only lowers the bar, but they don't.

------
KhanMahGretsch
There are also innumerable CG videos on YouTube, targeting children, which
appear to be algorithmically generated. Using a combination of popular kids
characters (Elsa, Spider-man, etc.) and ostensibly canned animations, the
results are often strange, bizarre, and even entirely inappropriate for the
intended audience.

The phenomenon is referred to as "Elsagate"[0]; be forewarned, it's pure
nightmare-fuel.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate)

~~~
krapp
There is also an entire genre of children's nursery rhyme videos and toy
videos which are not so obviously inappropriate, but which also have an
uncanny algorithmic quality to them - I remember seeing those before I even
heard of Elsagate.

~~~
krapp
Sorry for self-replying, but I remember what I was referring to now, the
"Finger Family" type videos[0] particularly Toys in Japan[1] who is apparently
now streaming Fortnite.

[0][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NceTdz8KlYU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NceTdz8KlYU)

[1][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_oSI23s8qw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_oSI23s8qw)

------
ryanmarsh
Meh. Human performance follows a power law. I would only expect an ocean of
garbage at the bottom and a few at the top with 80% of the total views.

------
Dibbles
Haha, I made my own bot a while back (
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvZs4sXbeaQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvZs4sXbeaQ)
). It makes videos out of wikipedia pages, so I figure it's not terrible. If
you're thinking about doing such a thing, take note from me, and make sure the
voice sounds okay from the beginning.

------
archi42
Had something like this with a whitepaper: Someone took the PDF from our
website and generated a video from it - crappy music included. That was 9
month ago. While we had some laughs, I'm a bit afraid potential customers find
it and mistake it for one of ours :/

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John_KZ
This is the first time he came across one of these? People have been spamming
them for years and nobody watches them.

------
nerdponx
Who actually watches these?

~~~
mrweasel
I watched a video just last night, regarding the F35 vs. the SAAB Gripen, it
was junk, so naively I clicked on a promising title in the recommendations.
The voice-over read the EXACT same script, line by line.

------
0x006A
that page is littered with automated popups and nonsense

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nopressure
What's unethical about that? It looks very clever to me. In fact I'm kinda
envious because I didn't come up with that...

~~~
gpvos
I can't think of any kind of ethics that would see these as a positive thing.
What's possible and makes money for you isn't necessarily good.

Can you explain how littering Youtube with low-quality copyright-infringing
videos contributes anything to society?

~~~
damon_c
Whoa hold on... We have to contribute to society now?!

~~~
solotronics
It is not so easy to correlate income with contribution in the modern economic
system. I am really good at making more datacenters and populating them with
servers but it gets kinda nebulous when you try and relate that with direct
benefit to society. Yes large corporations can get their compute and storage
cheaper than if they had their own servers, but does this actually net benefit
humanity? Not sure.

It's easier to realize you make money because its making other people money (
nothing to do with benefit though ).

------
sbhn
YouTube is more famous than Jesus. I tried automated videos on YouTube twice.
Nobody watched them. It’s not as easy as it sounds to be successful on
YouTube. Politicians using you as an example of society falling apart
certainly helps to make you famous though.

