14 DAY TRIAL // Google was hoping that the new comment section on YouTube will fend off trolls and spammers, but it seems there’s actually been an increase in comment spam.
The company admitted that they had received a lot of feedback over the past couple of weeks and that while the new system was meant to deal with spam issues, it had also introduced new opportunities for abuse.
Regardless, the company has now rolled out a bunch of new updates to combat the increase in spam. Among the implemented updates, YouTube now better recognizes bad links and impersonation attempts, comes with improved ASCII art detection and there’s also been a change about how long comments are displayed.
“We know the spam issues made it hard to use the new system at first, and we’re excited to see more of you getting involved as we’ve fixed issues. New features like threaded conversations and formatted comments are coming to life, thanks to you and your fans,” YouTube comments.
For the future, YouTube plans more improvements to help content creators manage comments on the videos. “Bulk moderation has been a long standing creator request and we’ll be releasing tools for that soon. At the same time, we’re also working on improving content ranking and moderation of old-style comments,” said YouTube’s comments team in a blog post.
And while YouTube has been keeping track of what content creators are saying, they’ve been completely ignoring the backlash from the regular users, those who actually use the service for watching countless hours of videos each day.
The fact that they’ve been forced to connect their profiles with a Google+ account in order to continue commenting has gotten on a lot of people’s nerves and many have even gotten around to creating an online petition asking for the update to be removed. There are currently some 214,700 people that have signed the petition in just a few weeks.