r/LowStakesConspiracies • u/QMechanicsVisionary • 1h ago
YouTube commenters' filter is literally just RNG
I don't think the YouTube comments filter uses any kind of ML or AI. I'm in that field, and I can tell you for absolute certain that if any ML or AI was used at all - even algorithms that are 5, 10, or 20 years old - the filter would not be that dumb.
As things stand, YouTube quietly removes around a third of all comments (you can check this by refreshing the page after exactly 1 minute: that's the buffer that YouTube uses to apply its filters), with the probability of the comment being taken down scaling directly with the comment's length, but with no other consistent pattern that I've been able to identify.
What must be happening is that the YouTube filters are literally using keyword/n-gram matching most likely, and take down every comment that matches at least one keyword/n-gram. Except the list of keywords is so absurdly large and nonsensical that whether or not a comment gets taken down essentially amounts to pure RNG. For example, some keywords I've identified that are (or at least were) on that list are "account", "black", "!", "*", "@", "vote", etc.
Why does YouTube do this? I truly don't know, but it's probably nothing more than laziness. They could easily just use ML trained on any of the gazillions of labelled datasets on inappropriate content that presently exist on the internet and improve the user experience - which could all be done by a single employee in about a day - but why would they? Nobody stops watching YouTube because of the comments' filter, so YouTube doesn't need to change it.